Announcing 4k General, my entry for the 2012 Java4k competition.

http://java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=400 

 

 I never tried to make a game in 4096 bytes before (compressed zip size including all data and graphics) . I didn't think I would manage to…

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Some new features have been added to the Inkscape countersheet and hexmaps effects since the 1.0 release last year, as I have written about in the thread on bgg. I don't want to make another official release (with a link from the project homepage until the new features have been a bit better tested, but 1.1 and 1.2 can be downloaded from links in that bgg… Continue

I decided to upload version 1.0 of the boardgame Inkscape extensions now. Changes since last release are too many for me to remember (most things are just fixing bugs for the countersheet and hexmap generator effects). The biggest change is the ability to specify colors and other SVG attribute values in the spreadsheet file (for advanced users only, and nothing you really ever have to use).



There is… Continue

Finally I believe the problems with gradients in created countersheets have been fixed, and the resulting boardgame extensions 0.99 uploaded. They also include some more small improvements and bugfixes, and a first version of documentation for the file format used to describe countersheets (mostly kindly contributed by a Eric Hanuise).

I'm adding the following paragraph to the readme.html file of the next release of Inkscape Boardgame Extensions:



For advanced users, if you want to use these scripts from the command-line,

there's little to stop you. You need to have the

lxml python module

and inkex.py (from the Inkscape extensions directory) in your python

module… Continue

I finally got around to implement proper countersheet layout configuration to my Inkscape effects. It is now possible to create a layer (that must be called countersheet_layout) containing rectangles that describe how to layout the countersheet, ie to match a die for diecutting, or if you for some other reason don't want the counters to… Continue

The Inkscape Boardgames Extensions are now at version 0.89. The new version adds better support for specifying exact size of the hexgrid hexagons. I found it a bit too tricky with the old version to create symmetric hexagons, but using one of the new "hex size" or "symmetric hexes" options will make sure all hexagons are of the dimensions you want. That should probably have been the default since the first version, yes... There are… Continue

I decided to add some more features to my Inkscape Boardgames Extensions , mostly to make it easier to write the CSV data for countersheets. I also added a few new examples to show off various features, and simplified the old ones. Many bugs in the hexmap effect have been fixed. There is also a few improved error messages. I'm quite happy with how easy it is to make countersheets using this latest version, and mostly happy with the… Continue

Earlier today I noticed that my Inkscape Boardgame Extensions (as mentioned in my earlier blog posts here at consimworld) did not work at all with Inkscape 0.46 (currently only available as pre-release). The API for making extensions has been alomst completely rewritten since 0.45.1 that I were using. To fix this I did a major rewrite of the… Continue

My collection of Inkscape extensions for boardgame (read: wargame) design has now expanded from one effect (the Countersheet Generator mentioned in my two previous blog posts) to two effects. The new one is a Hexmap Generator. It… Continue

I added PNG bitmap export to my Inkscape Countersheets Extension, now with verion 0.5 available. Now I will not have to worry again that the counter graphics/values in my VASSAL playtest module will not be the same as on the printable countersheet for the same game.…



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A while ago I started thinking that it would be useful to generate wargame countersheets (or sheets of game cards etc) some templates and data in a textfile. After some thinking and a few nights of coding I think I may soon have created something that does this, implemented as an extension for Inkscape.



Some ugly examples below. The results will be no prettier (or uglier) than the templates used...



With some simple templates like these;…

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