Remaking the vassal mod to actually be useful

[brunoreturns]

I appreciate your concern for the amount of work I might be doing. However, I am attempting to make the module useful, while not violating FFP's copyrights so much that they will force us to get rid of it.

I am not attempting to restore the current module exactly. Thus, I will need to edit a majority of the elements by hand in some way. Since I will be touching the elements individually anyways, uploading an image at the same time is no additional work.

Simply recreating the images to use the same names that the module is using would be easy, but it would not be "making the module actually useful".

[aprillo]

@bruno

I can definitely get the other in game tokens no problem.

Just an update on progress: The hero tokens are done already, and templates for the 3 coloured zombies and the zombie heroes are done as well. I've begun the work on the zombification of the heroes, once I'm done I'll get started on the images for the normal zombies.

As for the board pieces, I can easily do the board pieces for the base game and growing hunger, again though I can't do more than that as I have no other expansions yet. But it wouldn't be difficult to do it in 2 scan per board piece and put them together in Photoshop. I'll make sure they look clean question though: it was my understanding that with regard to board pieces we couldn't use the actual boards as they are copyrighted. Is that not the case? And if it is I have a suggestion to solving that, I have my own board piece template for an expansion I made for the game. I could use it to help me recreate the boards instead. I imagine if none of FFP's artwork for them is used that would almost certain avoid copyright infringement.




I'd also like to make a comment on our project. I could be way off on this statement, but I feel as though the last few comments from Bruno and Knight were somewhat passive aggressive. And while again I admit I may be way off, it is important to note that we aren't speaking in person. Online or through text messaging, peoples words often become misinterpreted by readers as being hostile even if there isn't any malicious intent.

So my comment is that if nothing has been intended as hostile than I'm very happy to hear that but just try to be careful because things like insinuating Bruno may be crazy is easily seen as an attack. And suggesting that you are being replaced by knight is also easily viewed as passive aggressive. So I'm just trying to politely state just to be a little aware of how things may be read. With that in mind I'd like to underline that I mean no offends to either of you.

If any of either of your statements were meant with any malice, I'd like to remind everyone, that we're all here because we share something in common. We share an affinity towards zombie themes, an appreciation for FFP's games and more specifically, LNOE. We also are all on this specific thread because the 3 of us have a fourth thing in common which is this idea. This project, which as I understand it, Bruno suggested and Knight helped get us organized. What I'm trying to say is that we want the same thing, and that we're a team. And it's great that we have people helping us with this goal as I certainly couldn't do it on my own. I believe maybe 1 or both of you could in theory do it on your own but it would be far less motivating and take much longer. So again if and only if there was any hostility, I think we should avoid that in the future. As there is a lot of work, and we need each other. And as we've learnt from LNOE, "Bickering" makes the Heroes more susceptible to failure! :P



Anyways that's my spiel. I'll let you all know when I have more work done. Good luck on your parts!

[knight0fdragon]

As long as we do not share the assets publicly, they cant cant us stop, we are allowed to duplicate images we own for personal use. I would figure the best step is to rebuild the vassal mod to original state, then improve, apparently you want to start all over?

@apollo, there is no malice going on, just 2 guys trying to understand each others thought process

[aprillo]

Oh I see cool then. I don't necessarily want to. I personally would prefer not to. I just wasn't sure on the legal issues involved. So great as I said if desired I can do the board pieces I have available to me.

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Also I'm glad to hear that Knight, I hoped that was all, I just wanted to be sure.

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General question, just popped into my head. Would it be desirable for me to add attachments as I finish different sections? Or should I just wait to have all the tokens done and upload itall together in a zip folder for example?

[brunoreturns]

(06-02-2014 12:20 PM)aprillo Wrote:  Just an update on progress: The hero tokens are done already, and templates for the 3 coloured zombies and the zombie heroes are done as well. I've begun the work on the zombification of the heroes, once I'm done I'll get started on the images for the normal zombies.

That sounds awesome. I have loaded all of the scenario and hero sheet images, as well as removing pieces from Growing Hunger. I am working on the Hero and Zombie deck now, which might take a day or two, since I will need to enter the titles for each card by hand.

(06-02-2014 12:20 PM)aprillo Wrote:  As for the board pieces, I can easily do the board pieces for the base game and growing hunger, again though I can't do more than that as I have no other expansions yet. But it wouldn't be difficult to do it in 2 scan per board piece and put them together in Photoshop.

That sounds good. I hadn't thought of doing a 2 scan process. Then again, my photo editing skills are poor (as I mentioned before). We'll see how this turns out. If we have to break the work up so that I scan the images for other expansions and you put them together, that is OK by me.

(06-02-2014 12:20 PM)aprillo Wrote:  it was my understanding that with regard to board pieces we couldn't use the actual boards as they are copyrighted.

Generally, with games like this, the publisher is OK with it as long as important pieces in the game don't have any text on them. In this case, the Hero Deck and Zombie Deck. Doing so requires that each user has their own copy of the game.
Now, FFP never responded to my questions, so we don't have an official answer, but that is the case with most other games that I play by forum (Twilight Imperium, Arkham Horror, Battlestar Galactica) so it should hold true here.

So, use actual images for the board images, please.

(06-02-2014 12:20 PM)aprillo Wrote:  Online or through text messaging, peoples words often become misinterpreted by readers as being hostile even if there isn't any malicious intent.

Very true, and I have been taking special care to try to use language that should not be interpreted as hostile. I have never been the greatest communicator, but there is nothing other than the normal irritation that comes from working with any other group people involved.

Also, as an aside, this was not my "idea", I just latched onto an idea that was in an existing post when I joined the site and started running with it. I don't want to take credit for something someone else started.

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(06-02-2014 12:22 PM)knight0fdragon Wrote:  As long as we do not share the assets publicly, they cant cant us stop, we are allowed to duplicate images we own for personal use. I would figure the best step is to rebuild the vassal mod to original state, then improve, apparently you want to start all over?

If we were only going to use this module for live game sessions, and we were not going to share the module on the forum, I would agree with you.

However, I would like to create something that could be used for both Play By Forum sessions and Live games. By definition, Play By Forum games would be in public space. Also, it was always my intent to upload the module at least to this forum and likely to the Vassal site as well.

For those reasons, I am trying to keep it "safe".

Additionally, one of the ideas that was mentioned earlier was to keep the expansions separated into different extensions. This module has both the base game and Growing Hunger included, so some modifications are required from the beginning, even if we did include all of the images.

@aprillo When you have any "group" of images ready, it would be a good idea to upload the images at that time.

For instance, once the hero tokens are ready, go ahead and upload those images. That way, I can work on adding that entire group of images and testing them out to make sure everything looks right in the module.

[aprillo]

No I can definitely put the board pieces together for me if given the parts. And as for uploading. I will be sure to upload all the hero tokens this later this afternoon them.

PS

Where you guys from. I'm in Montreal, Canada so the Eastern Standard time. So by afternoon I mean around 3 ES time :P set I won't have access to my computer before then. Messaging from my iPod.


Last comment on the subject:

Perfect I'm really glad to hear it. And trust me I can totally sympathize. Probably close to 50% of the fights I've had with my gf are due to just simply forgetting that phones can do more than text. Because I mean often things are meant totally innocently and would even be hard to misinterpret, but if the other person is a a bad mood they may just assume the worst.

Haha as I was typing that I imagined all the potential for reading into that comment as being full of sarcasm and mockery! But I assure you it is not.

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Oh another question on groups. What are your preferences for the files I.E.

- one image with all tokens or separate images
- extension type (like .bmp or .jpeg for flattened images or would you prefer .psd or other formats that allow for "transparent spaces" allowing an otherwise square image to become a issuable circle.)

I can also do a zip with multiple formats for both a single image and/or separate images if you'd like, as it may make your life simpler since you'd have plenty of flexibility. I'm willing to do it. But that may mean I won't have it uploaded until 4 or later as saving each file in all formats is a bit of an ordeal :P

[brunoreturns]

(06-02-2014 02:09 PM)aprillo Wrote:  - one image with all tokens or separate images
- extension type (like .bmp or .jpeg for flattened images or would you prefer .psd or other formats that allow for "transparent spaces" allowing an otherwise square image to become a issuable circle.)

Separate images, please.

PNG for anything that needs transparency (basically everything that you are working on). I even ended up using PNG for the hero and scenario sheets, since the corners are rounded.

I think only GIF and PNG support transparency, right?

What is PSD? I'm not sure that Vassal supports that image type.

If an image is a complete square, JPG is better so that we can keep the size of the module down.

BTW: I am outside of Washington, DC (Fairfax, VA) so I am also in the Eastern American time zone

[aprillo]

(06-02-2014 02:29 PM)brunoreturns Wrote:  

(06-02-2014 02:09 PM)aprillo Wrote:  - one image with all tokens or separate images
- extension type (like .bmp or .jpeg for flattened images or would you prefer .psd or other formats that allow for "transparent spaces" allowing an otherwise square image to become a issuable circle.)

Separate images, please.

PNG for anything that needs transparency (basically everything that you are working on). I even ended up using PNG for the hero and scenario sheets, since the corners are rounded.

I think only GIF and PNG support transparency, right?

What is PSD? I'm not sure that Vassal supports that image type.

If an image is a complete square, JPG is better so that we can keep the size of the module down.

BTW: I am outside of Washington, DC (Fairfax, VA) so I am also in the Eastern American time zone

Very cool, do they actually call it eastern American time zone in the states? I guess I just assumed since we shared the same time zone that we had standardized names for them. Neat though if not.

And yes I believe that's accurate when it comes to simple image files.

.psd is the extension used by Photoshop. It stand for photoshop document I believe. So it's a more complex image file as it supports things like layers and effects that can be undone even after saving the file, as well as of course... Transparencies.

But .png shouldn't be a problem. And it's probably not a bad idea to keep all images in that extension, where necessary or not. I've always found when doing large projects standardizing is optimal for simplicities sake. It lowers the likely hood of complications.

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And also I'm sure your right in saying vassal doesn't support it, but I wasn't sure if you didn't have photoshop yourself and might like being able to make edits where needed or even just based on artistic preference.

[brunoreturns]

(06-02-2014 02:45 PM)aprillo Wrote:  do they actually call it eastern American time zone in the states?

No, I simply add that for our international friends who may be reading the thread. I generally say "Eastern US" in threads, but didn't want to exclude you

Talking about time zones on forums always gets a bit confusing. Correctly, I should say EDT, although most people in the Americas just say EST even when it is in DST.

However, that often gets confusing for internationals.

When scheduling something, I usually try to specify (UTC-4) for precision, but then people in the Americas are generally confused, as we have trouble acknowledging that any other time zone exists

So..... yes, we are in the same time zone. (Unless Canada doesn't observe DST, in which case, we aren't...)

(06-02-2014 02:45 PM)aprillo Wrote:  And also I'm sure your right in saying vassal doesn't support it, but I wasn't sure if you didn't have photoshop yourself and might like being able to make edits where needed or even just based on artistic preference.

No, I don't own Photoshop, and the only modifications that I might make would be to make the images smaller.

[aprillo]

Ha! That's hilarious. I see why you say it confuses people, as I personally wasn't familiar with half the names mentioned for my on time zone! In Montreal and most of Canada we do observe the DST unfortunately. And I only say it's unfortunate as I really can stand when the clock "moves" in either direction as it totally throws off sleeping patterns.


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