You will have to redo your squad logfiles if you have some prepared in order to gain advantage of the new features. One of the useful one (thanks to Theorist) is the CTRL-G toggle which allows you to see under a ship, facilitating collision placement.

Is this required to play? Do I have to remake all squads in order to properly use the new firing arcs, etc. Or do I just lose some of the new features? Specifically, will I be violating any of the rules for Theorist's latest HiLo vassal tourney if I use squads made with the old module?

You will have to redo your squad logfiles if you have some prepared in order to gain advantage of the new features. One of the useful one (thanks to Theorist) is the CTRL-G toggle which allows you to see under a ship, facilitating collision placement.

Is this required to play? Do I have to remake all squads in order to properly use the new firing arcs, etc. Or do I just lose some of the new features? Specifically, will I be violating any of the rules for Theorist's latest HiLo vassal tourney if I use squads made with the old module?

Yes, pretty much required to play, both for your point of view and for your opponent's point of view.

Here is the difference between 4.5.1 and 4.6.0 ship templates:

Old ship template version:

-Uses white font for stats (except hull which is gray to augment contrast) because it relies on colored backgrounds

-both ship ID and name are at the top

-no ctrl-G feature to see underneath

-slightly transparent basic gray color in general so you can see a bit underneath - plays badly with some of the maps that are busy in terms of gray tones

New ship template version:

-Uses colored numbers for stats, are positioned elsewhere

-ship ID is at the top, name tag is at the same place as the real tabletop vesrion

-ctrl-G feature works

-no transparency at all, helps a lot with the contrast against all map background; the stark white line contour helps

If you get 4.6.0 but don't update your squad files, both you and your opponent will see the old style features on top of the new graphic for the ship. You won't be able to use CTRL-G and basically the stats will be misplaced and very hard to read at a quick glance. The new arcs are completely separate from all this. You don't have to do a thing to use them. All I did is edit the contents of the png file for it.

All you have to do to easily update your squad file is to:

1) load up the squad file normally, despite the warning message from vassal (ignore it)

2) delete ONLY the ship templates

3) replace them with new versions from 4.6.0

4) resave and overwrite your squad file

a 3 minute process, tops.

Pilot cards, upgrade cards, dials, target lock tokens can stay the same as ever, they were not upgraded with new features.

The only remaining thing that's left to possibly update is the new shield token - the new version goes up to 6 shields instead of the old 5. You only need to mess with it if you happen to fly a Yt-1300 or a shuttle with a shield upgrade ;-)

Thanks for everything Mu0n. I finally got it all working today. Everything looks great and updating squads is pretty painless. Again thanks for all the hard work.

woohoo!!! go fans!