This is the official thread for the War Gear Advanced Map Editor (WGAME).  WGAME is a website that allows you to upload your map's XML file, apply various modifications to it, and receive a new XML file to upload to wargear.  For example, currently WGAME will allow you to create various types of hordes continents, batch create border modifications, and add collector continents.  New features will be added over time.

The WGAME interface is online at:

http://prestopnik.com/wargear/MapEditor/

The older forum thread for the WGAME had gotten cluttered and confusing.  Trying to provide documentation for the WGAME in that thread was getting difficult, so I have moved documentation for WGAME offsite.

The new official documentation for WGAME can be found at:

https://sites.google.com/a/prestopnik.com/wgame

This thread will not be used for documentation, but will be for questions from users, and brief announcements when new features are available.

New Feature - Batch Border Modifications

By request, a border modification tool has been developed. This allows setting attack & defense dice modifications, border type and border directionality.  To choose which borders will be affected, 'To' and 'From' territories are defined by explicitly listing, or giving a pattern to match territory names.

See the complete documentation here:

https://sites.google.com/a/prestopnik.com/wgame/documentation/modify-borders

somewhere I remember reading about this editor having future ability to lift fog on a 'by territory basis'.  Is this still in the works?  ..and how about a similar command for regular borders?

by the way -- I have no clue how to use it, so I would probably just send you the xml file - would that be ok?

M57 wrote:

somewhere I remember reading about this editor having future ability to lift fog on a 'by territory basis'.  Is this still in the works?  ..and how about a similar command for regular borders?

I'm in the middle of adding a new feature to add continents.  Kind of a generalization of hordify, that will allow you to do things like choose how far away to include neighbors in the continent (for normal hordify, it would be 1, but you could set 2 for a broader hordify, or 0, for a continent with only the base territory).  You will also be able to have the continent be a factory.  This will probably be done in the next week or so.

After that the next feature will be some sort of ability to add borders automatically.  I'll have to think out how to do it to make it the most useful.  I do have some code to do this, but I need to add the front end stuff.  I'll post here with my ideas before I start working on it to get feedback and see what would be useful.  Probably in a week or two.

M57 wrote:

by the way -- I have no clue how to use it, so I would probably just send you the xml file - would that be ok?

That would be *ok*, and if you have something you are desperate to get done quickly, I could run it for you, but for several reasons I'd rather you try things out and do it yourself.

1. Once you figure it out, it is pretty simple and then you are more likely to use the advanced editor again.
2. I put a lot of time into the documentation so I like to think it's pretty easy to follow.
3. If the documentation does have confusing sections, I can improve it.
4. If you decide you need to tweak something (add a territory, etc.) you don't need to come back to me to run it again for you.

Ozyman wrote:

M57 wrote:

by the way -- I have no clue how to use it, so I would probably just send you the xml file - would that be ok?

That would be *ok*, and if you have something you are desperate to get done quickly, I could run it for you, but for several reasons I'd rather you try things out and do it yourself.

1. Once you figure it out, it is pretty simple and then you are more likely to use the advanced editor again.
2. I put a lot of time into the documentation so I like to think it's pretty easy to follow.
3. If the documentation does have confusing sections, I can improve it.
4. If you decide you need to tweak something (add a territory, etc.) you don't need to come back to me to run it again for you.

This makes sense -- I'm in no rush, and I'm happy to try to learn how to do it -- but I know nothing about coding- and the way it works looks like you enter in command lines, which require knowledge of programming nomenclature, etc.. 

ah no, there is no programming involved for you.  It's just a website you go to and fill out some forms.  Then you give it your XML file and it gives you back a new one.

need to add a hotlink to the editor from the doc site... :)

weathertop wrote:

need to add a hotlink to the editor from the doc site... :)

Good point.  Added.

 

 the way it works looks like you enter in command lines, which require knowledge of programming nomenclature, etc.. 

Just read this more closely and saw this ^^^ and wanted to address it more directly.  The command line interface is completely optional.  You can do absolutely everything through the GUI (i.e. web forms).

I said: After that the next feature will be some sort of ability to add borders automatically.

Well, it looks like I am actually going to delay this add-border feature a bit, because first I want to add a fairly simple feature for a map I am working on.

Just used it to modify borders.  Took a bit to learn, but not hard. 

Would have saved me time if I looked at it earlier.

Thanks.

I recommend saving the command lines to a text file that you store with your board graphics and xmls somewhere. You never know when you might need to go back and run things from scratch, and it's a lot faster if you've stored everything you did in previous advanced editor sessions!

New Feature - Continents Based Upon Neighboring Territories

A new feature is available.  One way to think of this is a more general form of the hordify tool.  Like hordify, you can define a regex to identify the 'target' or 'base' territories of interest, and you can also use a regex to limit the territories that will count as neighbors.  

New features that 'hordify' didn't have:

• The ability to use comma separated lists of territory names to define the target and neighbor territories.
• Ability to set 'distance' of interest.  Set to '1' for traditional hordes.  Set to '0' for single territory continents.  Set to '2' or more for a more expansive horde-ish continent.
• Factory Settings.  Make the new continents factories.  The factory ID can be the base territory, or can be set to a specific territory.  Set any kind of factory.

There are examples with links to resulting board pages on the page with the complete documentation:

https://sites.google.com/a/prestopnik.com/wgame/documentation/add-continents-based-on-neighbors

Future Work

For this new feature I had originally planned to also allow bonuses to be set as a non-integer, in which case I would take that bonus and multiply it by the # of members in the continent to find the real bonus.  I never got around to that, but if anyone wants it, let me know.  It shouldn't be hard to add.

I'm also not sure what to add next.  I am thinking of two possibilities:

1.  'Elimination Continents' - Basically you give a set of territories and how many of those territories you need to own, and the WG-AME adds factories so that ownership of the required territories autoCaptures the rest of the board for you.  Unfortunately something doesn't seem to be working with this idea.  See this thread: http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/2854
2. Some kind of view-border adder.   In the simplest form this would do 'distance fog' for any defined N with some regex/CSV list to limit the territories it applies to.  But, I'd like to make it more general, so I need to think about how I would do that.  If nothing else, probably allow various types of borders (i.e fortify, artillery, attack & view). 

Please let me know if you have a preference on what I add next.

Ozyman wrote:

1. Some kind of view-border adder.   In the simplest form this would do 'distance fog' for any defined N with some regex/CSV list to limit the territories it applies to.  But, I'd like to make it more general, so I need to think about how I would do that.  If nothing else, probably allow various types of borders (i.e fortify, artillery, attack & view). 

Please let me know if you have a preference on what I add next.

I'm excited about the view-border adder.  It sounds like it's not much different than a hordes maker.

But how would it work?  Would it automatically find borders and then identify the bordering territories, and then identify their borders?  If I have a board with 2000 borders, do I have to identify every territory individually, or could you make it global, such that all adjacent territories are selected, their neighbors and neighbor's neibors are identified, and then borders are applied?

>Would it automatically find borders and then identify the bordering territories, and then identify their borders?

Yes.  You have to already have the 'normal' borders put in for the map, but then it uses those to identify neighbors and neighbors neighbors, etc. 

>  If I have a board with 2000 borders, do I have to identify every territory individually, or could you make it global, such that all adjacent territories are selected, their neighbors and neighbor's neibors are identified, and then borders are applied?

Yes this is how it will work and it is easy to do, but here is a long explanation anyway. 

One thing I have started doing for any WG-AME functionality is having two standard ways of identifying any sets of territories of interest.  One way is to explicitly list all territories by name separated by commas.  The other way is to use a 'regular expression' to define a pattern for their name to match.  I won't get into the details of regular expressions here, but the pattern ".*"  (without the quotes), will match everything.

I put together some more detailed examples and information about regex here:

https://sites.google.com/a/prestopnik.com/wgame/documentation/regexs?pli=1

There is a new feature in Beta.  It is called 'Factory Maker'.   Basically you define two sets of territories: Member territories and Factory Territories. 

You also define type of factory & factory value (and a prefix for your new factory name's)

Then for every factory in the Factory Territories, a new factory is created with all the Member territories as its members.

As before you can define a set of territories in two ways:

* list territories by name by hand (separate with commas)

* use a pattern (regex) to match territory names. 

I've also added a new way to define a set of territories with a GUI interface, by using the Wargear map editor.  Put the territories of interest into a (temporary) continent.  Then give that continent name to the WGAME.  You can see an example of this and the rest of the interface by clicking Factory Maker button on the WGAME:

http://prestopnik.com/wargear/MapEditor/

As always, please let me know if you notice any bugs or have suggestions for improvements.  I plan on updating the older WGAME functions with the new method for defining a set of territories to give everything a more consistent functionality and UI.

Seems to have some problems if there are spaces in the names of anything when using the factory generator.

Thanks for trying it.  I'll get this fixed.  I'll PM you so we can talk details.

I'm working on a update to the WGAME.   This is just to improve the user interface.  It should be more consistent across forms and hopefully better looking.  You can see  a preview here if interested:

http://prestopnik.com/wargear/MapEditor2/

I still need to do a bit of final testing, which I am dreading, so if anyone would like to volunteer to help test, please let me know.  I'll let you know how you can help.

This is also a good time if you have suggestions for changes.   I promised Cram (I think it was Cram), that the next thing I would add is a feature to turn a two-way border into two one-way borders.  After that I'm thinking of a 'add borders based on neighbors', similar to the 'add continents based on neighbors'.