> I'm confident these goals can best be accomplished by subclassing the deck > class, but what I need is a good shove in the right direction.
There are a few classes you'll need to touch. There's the Deck component that you add to a MapWindow in the editor. There's the Deck gamepiece class, and there's the BasicCommandEncoder extension that saves/loads your custom decks from savefiles. Do I need a specific verion of the JDK for doing this? Version 1.4+ is required. 5.0 works too. Do I need to checkout all the sourcecode, or do I simply need the JAR > files from the VASSAL distribution? All you need are the jar files, but having the source is pretty essential for seeing how the classes should be written. What's the implication of creating my own decks, particularly with what > needs to happen when VASSAL is updated? We try to keep modifications to the core engine backward compatible, so updates shouldn't affect your custom classes in the module. If an update isn't backward compatible, you need to either continue to run the old version or update your code. Instead of writing your own custom Deck class, you should consider modifying the existing Deck class. Make the spacing a configurable property and the change will go into the next VASSAL version. rk [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
