Traits for Counters

What are Traits and what have they to do with counters?

The simple answer is that they bring the counter to life and change it from being a simple image to being something interactive.

A Trait is like a behaviour and by assigning traits to a counter the counter can 'do' a lot of things that you would normally do with a counter if you were playing against a real opponent face-to-face.

Probably the best way to explain this is the relatively simple but essential trait called Delete.

When you play a real-life game with physical counter components and a combat result means that the counter is destroyed and removed from play, what do you do? You simply pick it up, remove it from the board, and put it back into the game-box.

Well, how do you do that with a 'virtual' counter? You can't. It isn't physical, there is nothing to pick up! However, you can still 'emulate' what you would do in real-life by assigning the 'Delete Trait' to that counter. This allows you to right-click on the counter and to be given the option to delete the counter from the board. Select the trait and the piece disappears just as if you had picked it up and removed it yourself.

Here is the South Dakota. The counter at the top is in it's normal state. The counter at the bottom has been right-clicked and displays the option to 'Delete'. You can now click on that option or press CTRL+D and the counter will be removed from play.

Similarly, in a game, if you wanted to turn your counter to face in another direction you would simply turn it around but how do you do that with a virtual counter? Again, you give the counter a 'Can Rotate' trait which allows you to right-click on the counter, and then click on the trait menu, and rotate the counter - simple.

Here is the South Dakota again. On the left is the counter in it's ormal state. In the middle, the counter has been right-clicked and is displaying the Traits menu. Depending on which option you click on (or which keyboard combination you press) the South Dakota can now be rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise as well as being deleted. On the right, the South Dakota has been rotated clockwise 1 hex-face.

This is why Vassal is superb for playing games on-line. Traits allow you to manipulate the digital-counter as you would a counter in real-life.

However, that is not all that Vassal can do. For instance, let's say that you are playing a real-life game and your counter takes what is known as a step-loss, you would replace the counter with either a weaker counter or 'flip' the counter over to reveal it's weaker side. Again, by using the 'Layer' trait you can do this to counters on the Vassal map-board.

This is of courswe only a very brief introduction to Traits and I will go into them in more detail in later posts.

Vassal Prototypes

As far as counters of a similar type are concerned many of them will have a certain number of characteristics that are the same under all circumstances.

For instance, taking the ship counter, it would not matter what type of ship we were talking about when it comes to turning to port or turning to starboard since ALL ships that I know of have this feature.

Similarly, nearly all ships move forward bow first. They may have a reverse gear but generally they turn around to go back in the direction they have come from so they are still moving 'forward'.

These are particular traits of the ship counter that are common to all other ship counters and are ideal for grouping together as a 'Prototype'.

Prototypes are VERY useful in Vassal, very useful indeed.

So, instead of having to create a whole list of counter traits again and again each time we create a ship counter, we can group them all together in a single Prototype and simply give each new counter a 'Prototype' trait which already contains all the other traits within it. This saves a LOT of time.

The benefits of using a Prortype are many, but in particular there are two clear benefits. However, I'll explain them after I have gone through the steps of creating a prototype for the ship counters.

OK, I want the ship counters to ALL be able to do the following;

1. Be deleted from the game map
2. To be rotated left or right through 360-degrees in increments of 60-degrees
3. To move forward one-hex by using the keyboard rather than click-and-drag
4. To leave a movement trail behind them showing the path they have travelled
5. To be able to have a visula indicator that the ship has moved this turn

Fortunately all of these requirements can be met by using counter-traits in Vassal. So, the first thing I do is create a new prototype that I will call ship and I will assign to this prototype each of the traits necessary to enable the actions in the above list to be carried out.

The Traits required are as follows;

1. DELETE Trait
2. Can Rotate Trait
3. Mark When Moved Trait
4. Movement Trail Trait
5. Move Fixed Distance Trait

Here is the completed prototype;

The Vassal Prototype called 'ship' that will be applied to all Naval vessals

Next post I'll go through the individual traits of the Prototype as well as look at further Prototypes and traits that will round off the ship counters and make them ready for play-testing.