Thus spake "Tim Byrne":
> I'm relatively new to module creation, and I'm curious how others do it.
> After a bunch of experimentation I have my development environment working
> fairly well. I thought I'd share what I do, and find out if others had
> different suggestions.
>
> First, while the Vassal editor works great, I often find it much more
> efficient to edit the buildFile myself. I usually do this by actually
> editing the file or generating XML programmatically. I find that my time
> editing a module is split three ways, one third in the Vassal editor, one
> third in VIM (text editor), and one third generated by Perl programs.
> (OK, I completely left out the graphics work)
>
> Because I like to work outside of the editor, I needed a good process to
> rebuild modules and extract the data from modules. So I ended up with a
> script called "extract" and a script called "rebuild" which do exactly
> that (create the zip archive and extract the zip archive).
>
> So if I'm in the Vassal editor and I'm finished with some edits, and then
> want to do some manual edits, I save and close. Then run "extract", then
> edit the buildFile, then run "rebuild", then I can test the module.
>
> That brings me to the Vassal starting scripts. I've got one that brings
> up the module in the editor, one that starts Vassal to playtest (without
> the editor), and two more like the first ones but they use the beta
> version of Vassal.
>
> This entire ball of wax is then contained in a Subversion repository.
> Since only the source data (buildFile,images,html files, etc) are held
> within Subversion it doesn't take up tons of space as the module gets
> updated and new versions checked in (if the binary module itself was
> stored, it would grow pretty fast). Of course some other things go into
> subversion, like project notes, and PhotoShop source files, etc.
> Subversion is great! I can simply do a "diff" on the buildFile to see
> exactly what has changed, even if I used the Vassal editor to make the
> changes. You can also branch your development to try out different
> things. And there's always the failsafe, if something gets really messed
> up, you can just "svn revert" to the last version of the project and be
> back in business.
>
> Then on my server I have a Subversion "post-commit" hook which checks out
> the HEAD revision from the repository, builds the module, and posts it on
> my website for my beta testers. So to put out a new module, I simply have
> to check my changes into Subversion.
>
> I guess my big questions are:
> Do folks mainly use the Vassal editor or do others find themselves in
> the buildFile also? If so, how do you manually edit it?
> Am I the only nut that goes though all this trouble? Right now I'm
> working on my sixth module, and I'm not sure I could have as much done
> as I do now without this environment set up.
>
> Cheers
>
> -Tim
You've very accurately described the what I've been doing in building
a module for The Longest Day---right down to using Vim. I wasn't aware
that anyone else was directly editing the buildfiles.
Actual example: I put all of the data from the tokens into a spreadsheet,
which I then save in CSV (comma-separated values) format. Then my Perl
script reads the data and constructs the 2000+ tokens as SVG (which is XML)
and also writes out the XML for the tokens to put in the buildfile--the
most important part of this being that it matches fronts and backs for me
and I don't have to select the image files one at a time from the file
dialog. If I had to do all of this this with an editor, well, I just wouldn't
do it at all.
I have found that the editor is really good at generating XML for me to look
at when I need an example from which to work. But no GUI editor, no matter
how capable, could ever be faster for me than generating the XML for the
tokens programatically using Perl.
--
J.
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