I asked Amidon37 today for an update to Hex that would take a huge amount of repetitive data entry.  If there was some sort of well designed format for a board, he could take a board, export it, I could write a program to add the repetitive stuff, and he could import that again.

Does any sort of export/import facility like that exist?

I was thinking about the same thing, though I haven't contacted A. -- I've been considering making a diced version of Hex. Could we be overlapping?

M57 wrote:

I was thinking about the same thing, though I haven't contacted A. -- I've been considering making a diced version of Hex. Could we be overlapping?

Nope.

My top annoyance with the board is that I forget to end my turn.  I suggested a way to achieve the victory condition with factories and no fortify phase, which would make play smoother.  However it would require making over 2000 continents.

Another way to smooth play out would be to have the game engine automatically skip your fortify phase if no fortifying is possible.  But that seems less generally useful than a board export/import feature.

I know how to export/import board files.  It's the changing them on my own (creating and inserting generated text) that I am short on.

Amidon37 wrote:

I know how to export/import board files.  It's the changing them on my own (creating and inserting generated text) that I am short on.

 

Is the board file in a text format?

If so, if you can upload a board and mark out the territories, and add a couple of factories by hand then export and mail me at [email protected], I may be able to crease/insert generated text.

Yeah, you can import/export from the design page.  You just right-click on the 'actions' arrow.  If it's a scenario you do it from the scenario page & import/export have their own columns.

It's in an XML format. 

If you are interested I have a couple of thousands lines of python code that I use to manipulate the XML, and I would be happy to share. 

I've also built a web front end to a small subset of the python code that I am calling the 'Wargear Advanced Map Editor'.  You can find a sticky link in the map makers forum.

You can also do quite a bit with just copy & paste, and/or sed or emacs or something with regexs.

When I have thousands of lines of board/continents - I use excel.  It's not as slick as ozy's advanced editor, but it gets the job done.

Slick - I love Excel. 

How do you get the Excel data into the xml file?

concatenate - copy/paste into dreamweaver

Not familiar with Dreamweaver - Google search tells me it costs $$.  Anyone got a free alternative?

Ultraedit is where i cut and paste mine into. it's got a neat 'column' mode that helps me keep things lined up (a bit more manual work adding in the spaces so cut and paste works correctly - but worth it).

Word has a pretty flexible search and replace tool that I have been using.