Aaron Riggan
United States
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
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Greetings!
Last year, I wrote a fairly complex VASSAL module for Merchant of Venus. This was a grand undertaking which involved not only making the board and pieces (and my GOODNESS there were a bunch of pieces...) but also involved automating and simplifying most of the tasks involved, such as the chit-pull system and a fast and random setup.
For those not familiar with the VASSAL Engine, it's a toolkit specifically designed for users to create and share board games online. While it was originally designed for simplifying complex wargames such as Advanced Squad Leader for play-by-email, it is currently robust enough to handle almost any modern board game. The best part of this is that it supports most digital methods of game-play; Play-by-email, hotseat and even live play are all supported. More info can be found at www.vassalengine.org
Since playing through a couple of the session reports of Automobile, I've been thinking that an online implementation of this would be not only doable, but also quite pleasant.
However, I wanted to gauge the interest of this player community to see if there was even a demand for an online version of this fine game.
The hope would be to automate almost every process and let the program keep track of all cash, loss cubes and sales for you. All the wonderful decision making with less than half of the bookkeeping.
The downside to all this is that creating a module like this takes many many many long hours putting everything together, creating the scripts, debugging and testing. If the demand isn't there, then I'll find another pet project.
If there is a desire however, then I'd love to know what sorts of things you'd want in such a module.
Thanks!
-Aaron
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Ken Dilloo
United States
Washington
Always bet on Chorizo!
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Re: VASSAL implementation: is there a demand for this?
Heck yeah, there is interest. This game I love, and it doesn't hit the table near enough. Would love to play online. Don't think I could he much help, but if I could I will.
Cheers,
Ken
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Dan Schaeffer
United States
Unspecified
Illinois
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Re: VASSAL implementation: is there a demand for this?
I would play, although I hate having to relearn how to use Vassal every time I go back to it.
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The Kelvis
United States
Washington
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Re: VASSAL implementation: is there a demand for this?
I welcome a VASSAL implementation of Automobiles if it means Ken never ever bringing this bastard of a game to the table ever again. 
bigloo33 wrote: Heck yeah, there is interest. This game I love, and it doesn't hit the table near enough. Would love to play online. Don't think I could he much help, but if I could I will.
Cheers,
Ken
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Christopher Dearlove
United Kingdom
Chelmsford
Essex
SoRCon 5 2-4 Feb 2012 http://www.sorcon.co.uk
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Re: VASSAL implementation: is there a demand for this?
I would check with Martin before putting any effort into it.
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Aae Suzuki
United States
PHILADELPHIA
Pennsylvania
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Re: VASSAL implementation: is there a demand for this?
I would be interested! I just played two games over holiday break and it was an instant hit. Thank you!
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Aaron Riggan
United States
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
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Re: VASSAL implementation: is there a demand for this?
Thank you all for your interest.
I started work on the module a couple days ago now that the holidays are over and I'm finally getting back to a routine.
What I'm hoping to do with this is to have the module itself do most of the bookkeeping. For example, I'm currently working on a process that will automatically sell cars by demand, factoring in discount and advertisement markers, and pay each player accordingly.
I'll post here an occasional update as to progress. Eventually once the module is at a good place, I'll be asking for playtesters for a PBEM game using through VASSAL. If it works well, then I'll make it available to the general public.
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Ken Dilloo
United States
Washington
Always bet on Chorizo!
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Re: VASSAL implementation: is there a demand for this?
Fantastic news, and thanks for all the hard work. I would think that that level of automation, while more difficult to program, would be pretty necessary to make this playable online.
Thanks again.
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Aaron Riggan
United States
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
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New update:
I haven't gotten to work on the module as much over the past few days thanks to the holiday and a busy work-weekend. Though I did get my first play of Dominant Species, which has been at the top of my wishlist for AGES!
As of right now, I'm still working on what I feel will be the most challenging component of this module, which is the automated "Sale via Demand" phase. Presently, I've got most of the actual logic of the processed figured out and diagrammed; I just need to finish debugging the actual implementation of it before I set it up on the whole board.
With that out of the way, I have a question to pose to the BGG Automobile community:
If this is to become a viable way to play this game online/PBEM (or even as a tool to play by forum  then a certain level of automation is necessary.
However, I don't want to make the module too difficult to use (or too difficult to program ) so I need to know: what would you like to see automated and what should be left alone?
For example, I considered trying to make simple button choices out of the 5 possible actions during the action phases, but that might be a bit out of the scope of VASSAL to do.
So instead, I'm looking at having each player control certain things all manually, such as purchasing factories, cars and "Sale via salesmen." That said, my play experience with Automobile is fairly limited, so I figured I'd put it up to y'all.
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Posted Fri Dec 16, 2011 4:18 am
