Re: [vassalengine-devel] Import module

[Michael K. <mk...@da...>]

> Wouldn't it make more sense to have it spit out a VASSAL module, since
> clearly you can read enough of the ADC2 file to do that?

The short answer is that it does that already. What happens is that
you click on "Import", it asks you which zoom level it is that you
want to import (they're totally separate entities in ADC2), and it
opens with the editor with a completely implemented VASSAL module
based on the contents of the ADC2 files. In particular, if you're not
on a Windows computer, it might ask you about the locations of certain
files, but it tries to make educated guesses that should work most of
the time.

Then you can change whatever you want.

> (I'm planning to make something which does exactly that for Cyberboard
> gameboxes as soon as the source is public.)

Since ADC2 will probably never been open source, I went ahead and
reversed the file formats.

That being said, I might have some insight on how to import a module
in general, so I could help out with that if you like.  VASSAL wasn't
well set up for that, but the solution was to emulate the behaviour of
the XML reading routines in many cases. There may have been other
solutions, but I really didn't want to go changing a lot of already
existing code. Also, making the routines platform independent was a
little tricky especially where filenames were concerned. ADC2 expects
certain files to be in very exact paths of the form C:\ADC2\ etc...
I've got a number of kludges to address that.  Works out fine most of
the time.

Right now, the code is huge, ugly, and largely unreadable. In
addition, I'm sure there's many ADC2 modules out there that will make
it throw nasty exceptions. It could probably go in the experimental
branch though (it's only one .java file and does not rely on
modifications to any other code).

- M.