SimPlot Openness

[Stefano V]

Hi there,

I just joined this community. I have played Harpoon since early '80s, starting with Version 1 and running the

Resolution 502 campaign when the supplement came out.

I have not been playing for many years and with lockdown I resumed and started a remote play campaign again, which is now

halfway. 

In order to handle the campaign I built a series of scripts to handle movement, radar and sonar searches, aircraft launch and land,

using a simplified ruleset. You may have a look at the attached image.

Now I see this fantastic new edition of Harpoon V and the SimPlot tool, which is vastly superior respect to

my homegrown Python scripts and graphical interface. 

I have a rather technical question now. My tools use a JSON file to handle everything, I am wondering whether it might be possible 

for SimPlot to retain the extra information in the JSON file every time the file is updated.

As a simple example, my units have a "surface_search_range", which I use to handle detections and which should be kept in the JSON file as-is.

SimPlot might modify what it recognises as its own and still keep the extra JSON information.

In this way I may update my scripts to adapt to the SimPlot JSON format and add extra information about units, weapon systems, radar systems,

perform my radar and sonar searches using my scripts and still use SimPlot for movement.

Everything might be available for the community to use freely, if allowed, as an additional set of tools to handle pre-battle, before moving to table

and use the full ruleset.

Many thanks for reading down to this line and hopefully letting me know.

Best Regards,

Stefano

 

Edited July 14, 2020 by Stefano V
new screenshot added

[kmart494]

Stefano,

Although SimPlot does not implement miniature rules of any kind, it does allow for some of the things you are scripting now.  For example, you can set Range Circles for radar ranges, Range Arcs for weapon arcs, and Perceptions for controlling which side can detect what enemy unit (and the extent to which it is detected, such as speed, heading, unit type, etc.).  Also, you can use ES Bearings and Sonar Bearings to represent passive detections.  These graphics are meant to visually show when detection or weapon fire can take place (think of Range Circles as reminder circles).  Detection is simulated by changing unit Perceptions, and combat is simulated by eliminating units.

All of the above mentioned things are retained in JSON files each time you save the scenario.  Four files are automatically created--Referee file for you as referee or single player (contains all unit data), Red and Blue files for distribution to players of a multi-player game (contains their respective unit data plus enemy detections), and the PlayerSetttings file which contains data only relevent to each individual player--range circles, text tags, or other customized graphics (each player has their own file created on their computer).  There is also an automatic Config file that each player has that contains color customization and other stuff.

SimPlot will only read the information that it was programmed to look for.  Any other information will be ignored.  Conversely, SimPlot will only save the data that it was programmed to save, which will completely overwrite the existing files.  I do not think integration with other JSON files is possible.

Kevin