SnapHex (wargame counter maker)

[Whiterook]

I ran across this nifty little program today… a wargame counter maker, called SnapHex. It’s a program where you can actually place the counters on a sheet to print out. It’s a work in progress from a BGGer names Cisco Serret, as far back as Summer 2019, but currently it seems to work pretty good for basic counters. He’s using a database for this Internet app called, IndexedDb.

Now I understand, I haven’t played around with this much yet, but even with no instructions to guide me, I made a very basic Tiger I counter chit!



I’ll be playing around with this!

[mikeh]

Nice looking counter. You will be making and selling your own games pretty quick with this.

[Whiterook]

Okie-dokie… so I’ve been playing around with this a little for the past couple days, which you may have noted in my thread on redesigning the 1976 Avalon Hill game, Panzergruppe Guderian. As I’ve played around, I am having good results with this program… I’m going to call this an “Editor”, because that in essence is what it really is! …I arrive at this because I happen to own Days of Wonder’s, Memoir ‘44 Editor, which I bought a long tome ago and is very similar in idea (if different in application, as it’s a map generator). Now I will say upfront, I think this SnapHex Editor is an awesome resource tool, not only because it is fairly easy and intuitive to learn on your own, but dang man…IT’S FREE!!!    

Learning how to use it though, comes with a learning curve dependent on how familiar you are with using design editors that let you do things like add images, text, colors, sizing, etc. I have experience in a few system which has allowed me to get some ground with this editor fairly quick…and I suspect most reading this would feel a similar level of comfort in using it. However, there is no tutorial provided within the program editor, and the website associated with this editor IS the program itself! Hunh, you say?!? Basically, you go to the site (link in the first post in this thread) and the editor launches in your default Internet browser. Poof, you’re there! Thinking on all this this morning, I thought I should try and write notes down on this system to help me figure it out; and that I should go back to the BGG forum thread I discovered this editor in to begin with! …and then I thought, why not try and write that exploratory “tutorial” in this thread.

The "database" —
The database used, as I just mentioned is the one on your computer, that your browser maintains for you. From what I am reading, Google Chrome is the browser to use (…for those unclear, Google is a search engine, Chrome is an Internet Browser). So in essence, there is no specific server that the developer houses this editor and he had none of your data that you produce…it is all on you browser. I am getting the feeling Firefox or other similar isn’t as effective; and that Internet Explorer was horrible, though now that IE no longer exists and was replaced by Microsoft Edge, perhaps that’s more friendly to the editor. The database that your browser (i.e., Chrome) provides you, lets you store up to a certain capacity of space (I believe it’s around 50M, which is 50 megabytes?) which should be enough for a few full sheets of counters at least (depending on how complicated they are).

Exporting — 
After doing some work in creating your nifty counters, you’ll not want to lose these new little gems and will want to undoubtedly save your hard work! So how does that work? Well, the browser itself does save the data you input (the counters you are making with the editor) while you are using the browser, but that is temporary… Mr. Google is not your personal sandbox that is at your beck and call to keep permanent files of your online escapades   This means you need to Save your work; in an editor, that translates to Export as a file. With this editor, you can save/export your individual counters, or entire sheets to a file; this file therefore being stored at your choice either on your computer, or better yet a usb flash drive. This means they are individual files on your computer or flash drive. Note that wiith Chrome, you can save out to PDF; from the pdf stage. You should then be able to open the pdf in Photoshop/Elements or similar (i.e., GIMP), then exported to png or any other image format.

The editor also appears to do exports to SVG (file format), which as I remember it. Photoshop/Elements uses, and with that you can bring it up to any resolution you need.

Disclosure: I’ve not figured that out yet and will come back and edit this when I figure it out!

The designer of the editor put in a “Save to File” feature, where you can:

• save your counter sheets to files, then
  
• delete all the counter sheets in the browser database
  
• then restore the counter sheets to the database by importing the files back in.
  

He created this "save to file" feature after he found that sometimes, the browser would clear the database…it should be a simple thing to import your files back in.

Disclosure: I’ve not figured that out yet and will come back and edit this when I figure it out!