u/PlayfulInterview984

I've been encoding classic hex-and-counter games so they play as the real game, not a digital tabletop where you push counters and look up the rules yourself, but the game itself, enforced. The map becomes grid geometry and per-hex terrain, every counter is data with its factors and art, every rule cites its rulebook section, and every combat table is transcribed cell by cell and rolled by the engine on seeded dice. The point is that neither side can cheat: every action, yours or the AI's, goes through one deterministic legality gate, every die is rolled by the gate from a seeded stream, and the whole game is written to an append-only log that anyone can independently re-verify. A separate verifier replays it, re-checks every ruling, re-rolls every die from the logged seed, and re-derives every state hash, so an illegal move or a fudged die breaks the replay. It reads and writes VASSAL's own .vsav saves byte-perfectly (real VASSAL opens our saves and vice-versa) but contains zero lines of VASSAL code: an independent engine built on the module ecosystem, not a fork of it.

Four complete games ship playable out of the box: Afrika Korps (Avalon Hill, the full strategic campaign), Blue & Gray: Chickamauga (SPI 1975), Westwall: Arnhem (SPI 1976, Market-Garden with airborne drops, bridge demolition and engineers), and Tobruk (Avalon Hill, a tactical tank firefight). Each has an AI opponent you can watch play step-by-step or auto-paced, plus an in-game rules panel with full credits and a source-defect register, the actual editing errors and contradictions in the printed rules that encoding surfaced, each with quoted evidence and the resolution enforced. Free and open source (MIT); bring-your-own-module for anything beyond the four bundled games.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afomvk0LjU8

Windows download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FuJlt54Mb2FIAunbKrEXBKCpHCOngCpH/view

Repo: https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/vsav-engine

One thing I'm looking for: the current AI is a solid rules-legal opponent, but I want it to play like an expert. I'm after an AI/ML collaborator who can attach a stronger model, a RAG setup over the rulebooks and strategy material and/or a fine-tuned model that plays as an expert game modeler and opponent. The engine is an ideal substrate for it: the gate already gives a clean legal-move space, a scored outcome, and fully replayable games to train and evaluate against. It would mean helping coordinate the training resources (game logs, rulebooks, annotated expert play) and standing the model up as the move-proposer. If that's your thing, comment or DM me, or open an issue on the repo.

Video: https://youtu.be/PonvG2whtkc

Project site (playable tech demo): https://midwinter-remaster.titanium-helix.com

Follow-up to my UE5 remaster posts: the original MIDWINTR.EXE is now fully mapped — every reachable function decoded or labeled, with an evidence ledger tying each claim back to the bytes.

Some favorite finds for this crowd:

• The island terrain is generated from a 10KB seed file (ZBUFFER.BIN, big-endian — Atari heritage) by a diamond-square variant with ZERO RNG — roughness scales with altitude, so flat sea and craggy peaks come from one term. Replicated in Python; output matches the in-game map bit-for-bit.

• Tree placement is a pure function of the terrain heightfield: every-other-cell lattice, 1-in-32 hash, tree line at a fixed height. The whole 25-mile-patch forest reproduces exactly.

• Full vehicle physics laws recovered: ski acceleration, buggy rollover, glider lift/stall equilibrium — all small integer formulas driven by the character's performance stat.

• The .SND files turn out to be code overlays loaded into a fixed vector block — 24 slots, all mapped.

• Two load-bearing negative results: there is NO companion auto-travel and NO time-of-day code. Useful when deciding what's faithful in a remaster.

Honest disclosure: this was AI-assisted (Anthropic's new Fable 5 model running parallel analysis agents over the disassembly) — the difference from earlier tools is that it did in one overnight run what had taken me six months of piecemeal work. Static analysis tier; ~20 items still flagged for runtime verification in DOSBox.

Six months back I shared my Midwinter (Mike Singleton, 1989) fan remaster being built in Rust/Bevy. Big update: I've migrated the whole thing to Unreal Engine 5.

Bevy got the concept proven — terrain, world, core systems — but I kept hitting its limits for a project this size. UE5 has been a major step up; I'm porting the groundwork across and developing natively in Unreal now.

The other half of the story: I'm building solo, using AI (Claude Code) to write and drive the Unreal side — C++, Blueprints, the editor itself. The tech demo shows that workflow plus early gameplay (terrain, vehicles, HUD).

Tech demo: https://youtu.be/c8c8bttZJ1E

Playable Windows build: https://midwinter-remaster.titanium-helix.com/download

Pre-alpha and rough, but moving fast. Still after help — Unreal devs, testers, artists. Happy to get into the Bevy→Unreal migration or the AI workflow if anyone's curious.