Contribution: Cyberboard Scenarios to VASSAL module

[cholmcc]

Hi,

This is really only an "issue" to make you aware of a contribution

I've made a Python script for converting a CyberBoard Scenario .gsn to a VASSAL module .vmod. You can find it at

• https://gitlab.com/wargames_tex/pywargame

The script is gsnexport.py and is used like

./gsnexport.py <SCENARIO_FILE> [<OPTIONS>] 

Pass the option --help to see more about the available options. For example, the option --patch allows you to pass the name of a Python script that will patch the generated VASSAL module.

There's also a general Python module (library) for extracting information from a CyberBoard gamebox or scenario: cyberboard.py.

I hope you or others may find this useful.

Yours,

Christian

[DLLarson]

Dang.... A link out to GitLab from GitHub. I'm surprised MSoft didn't squash it! ;)

That's some gritty low level bit twiddling python programming you've done there. If you did this before the source code was released I would call you an extraordinary hacker! If after, that's still some damn good programming since you'd have to grind CB's C++ source code that many python programmers would get lost in.

Kudos!

-Dale

[cholmcc]

Hi Dale,

If you did this before the source code was released I would call you an extraordinary hacker!

I relied on the source code of Cyberboard for some of the decoding, and on M$ docs on MFC Archive class - so a posterori :-)

If after, that's still some damn good programming since you'd have to grind CB's C++ source code that many python programmers would get lost in.

Thanks. However, since Fortran was my "first language", nothing like C++, Python, Java, etc. scares me :-) Neither do I shutter at VHDL or similar, but ASM, SIMULA, and INTERCAL still sends shivers down my spine :-/

BTW, I see you have a thread on using wxWindows - I think that's a a really good idea. wxWindows doesn't have an interface to the MFC Archive objects as far as I can tell, but you may want to use my Python code as a starting point. Perhaps you want to get rid of the somewhat cumbersome format altogether (and maintain an interface for reading only for backward compatibility) and use a ZIP container with XML documents and PNG images instead (sort of similar to VASSAL).

Yours,
Christian

[DLLarson]

Thanks. However, since Fortran was my "first language", nothing like C++, Python, Java, etc. scares me :-)

That makes you an old programming soul...like myself. It was all assembler in the beginning. Kids have it so easy these days. ;)

I see you have a thread on using wxWindows

Yes...although they renamed it to wxWidgets. We (Bill Su and I) already did a port some years ago that stalled. The Windows version of the CB code has been highly amended since then. In terms of file formats Bill Su is investigating reworking that before we flip. Streaming objects into archives makes life pretty easy but the format is pretty brittle.

-Dale