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This is a project I've been working on for several months by myself. Please try it out :]
Download Size: Approx 6.33 MB w/ Sample Game (Ivalice Tactics)
Resolution: Depends on the Game
Version 0.1
Version 0.2
Version 0.3 (2/24/08)
Version 0.4 (2/27/08)
Version 0.5 (3/2/08)
Version0.6 NEW! (5/17/8)
Screens:
Virtual Tabletop is exactly a virtual tabletop.
With it you can play user-created board games and pen/pencil RPGs. You can easily port your favorite board games or make your own! It's as simple making a few text files and coming up with images to use. Inside the .zip folder is a Readme containing details on how to use the program and a How To Make You Own Games tutorial as well a sample game called Ivalice Tactics (inspired by the Final Fantasy Tactics series). All images, names, etc. used in the game are Copyright Square Enix.
Features:
Features range from having cards in decks, to spawning counters and custom dice, then manipulating them all on across different playing boards. You can rotate, move, spawn, destroy, change depth, and make notes on game objects. Decks can be shuffled, viewed, and arranged. You pretty much have everything you need to create and play almost any boardgame. Games can also be saved and loaded through Setups.
Features to come:
All I have left to add is networked gameplay (probably using 39dll). If you have any suggestions, ideas, or features you would like to see, please let me know. I strongly encourage you to ask for new features and gameplay aspects you would like to see added :]
Making custom games:
It's really not that complicated. Just examine the sample game folder and its files as they are pretty straight forward. All of the weird files like .vtt, .index, etc can be edited with any text editor such as Notepad. All images should be in .PNG format, and the bottom left most pixel will determine the transparent color.
Please try it out and report any bugs. Feel free to share any games you make. I highly recommend this for making cards and objects, just resize the images as needed. You can download other card templates in their forums as well. Special thanks to Hobble for the Windows API .dll :]
I'm currently working on a full port of Fantasy Flight Games' Arkham Horror and the Dunwich Horror expansion set. I'm about 10% done, and it will probably be released in month or 2. There are seriously thousands of cards and pieces, so it will take a while to type all of them up. Scanning didn't work so well :.[
Edit: I don't know if this is the kind of place to post my project, but I feel like the community here would benefit from it more than the common computer gamer. I don't think I have broken any of the BoardGame Geek Rules, but if I have please let me know.
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Furiously spurious
United States
Lincoln
Nebraska
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don't worry, you're fine. Pretty much the only thing that'll get you in trouble around here is violating the sanctity of the Hot Deals forum
Seems pretty cool, a computerized AH+DH sounds just about perfect for scratching that solo gaming itch. Good luck!
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Thanks :] The multiplayer should be done in about a month as well, so you can do more than solo. I'm working on up to 10 player sessions and the ability to set game pieces private to a specific player. The purpose of privacy is so players can have 'hands' of cards or whatever that the other players can't see.
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Christian Sinclair
United States
Shawnee
Kansas
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Looks pretty cool. I wish I had enough spare time to explore it. I have two card games that I am working on, but work has me so bogged down I cna't get to playtesting them.
Does it support scripting for playtesting? Like given a computer player a strategy and run through several game simulations? Or do you have to play each person to simulate a playtest?
If anyone does try this out, I would be interested in hearing comments about how easy it is to use.
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Richard Hutnik
United States
Poughkeepsie
New York
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Several questions:
1. Does it support rules enforcement of games?
2. Will you provide a way for a game to interface AIs with it?
3. You going to get a Yahoo group or website up, with information on this?
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Ethan McKinney
United States
El Segundo
California
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What are the advantages of this over VASSAL or Cyberboard?
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Well, to be honest I haven't used either of those before until now, but after a run through of both, I'd say the main advantage so far, is that VTT is much easier and more intuitive. I'm still missing a lot of features I never even realized before. I'm going to try to incorporate a flexible grid system along with a few other minor features like piece cloning and card backs. And I still haven't finished network play yet, so that is one major disadvantage for me.
As far as AI goes, I really have no idea how to go about that :/ If I were to come up with an AI scripting language, it would probably either not be flexible enough, or as hard to use as making your own game from the ground up. Maybe, I can come up with a system for defining custom, automated actions where the computer can perform calculations and react accordingly, but that won't be a full AI player. Just an action by action kind of thing.
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J C Lawrence
United States
Campbell
California
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Hmm, Windows-only. Oh well, next.
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clearclaw wrote: Hmm, Windows-only. Oh well, next.
For now yes, but I definitely plan on porting to mac. I doubt it will ever make its way to linux or anything else though.
EDIT: Okay, so after playing around with Vassal and Cyberboard, I've realized I've missed a few features necessary to play some games. So I plan on adding 2-sided cards, window scaling/resizing, piece attributes (stats, properties, etc), ownership, cloning pieces, and tiles, and "hotspots." Hotspots are maker-defined (x,y) sets that the game stores as a special location. If a piece collides with the spot, it will snap there. The hotspots and attributes will make the pseudo-AI actions more functional.
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J C Lawrence
United States
Campbell
California
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lumiereclair wrote: clearclaw wrote: Hmm, Windows-only. Oh well, next. For now yes, but I definitely plan on porting to mac.
It has been near 20 years since I last used Windows, and I've never used OS X. I exclusively use platform-portable (even platform agnostic) software.
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Sebastian Sohn
United States
culver city
CA
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is this easier to create games on than cyberboard, Zuntsu, or Vassal?
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Adam D.
United States
Suquamish
Washington
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Don't sweat your platform needs. One snobby comment should not deter you from concentrating on your best effort.
As far as AI and so on, one possibility is to expose your objects (if this is object oriented of course  to a script control (Microsoft has one but don't say that too loud) which would allow people to write VBScript or something similar against your internal objects.
Keep plugging away. You are much further along than most efforts of this sort!
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chaosbreaker wrote: is this easier to create games on than cyberboard, Zuntsu, or Vassal?
In my opinion, yes it's much easier than Cyberboard and Vassal, but I've never tried Zuntsu, I'll have to look it up.
@TheCollector: Actually I was already planning on porting it to Mac purely because OS X is my primary operating system. But since most people I know only have Windows and because it's significantly easier to program for Windows in my opinion.
As far as AI goes, I think I've come up with a pretty decent idea. It's kinda similar to what you were already saying. Using will be able to define their own function through writing scripts is GML. I'll be restricting a lot of unnecessary functions so no one tries to dump my source code or anything, but I will allow makers to control objects and compare/change values.
Here is a sort of teaser script with terrible for monster movement in Arkham Horror if there were only one dimension sign on each mythos card (one color, one sign) and 2 on each monster (one per color). This would only work assuming all monsters moved normally. The script would need to be elaborated to support flying/stalking/etc monsters.
http://64digits.com/users/brighteyes/example.txt
In the example global.currentMoveSign is the dimension sign on the active mythos card, ii.attr[1] is ii's (the current object's) attribute assigned to its card type (Monster in this case), ii.attr[2] is the card's moving dimension for white, and ii.attr[3] is the card's moving dimension for black. I realize know that I did this backwards and each monster should have one dimension and each card has one per color, but it's just an example script anyways :/
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Hernan Ruiz Camauer
Argentina
Buenos Aires
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lumiereclair wrote: Well, to be honest I haven't used either of those before until now, but after a run through of both, I'd say the main advantage so far, is that VTT is much easier and more intuitive. I'm still missing a lot of features I never even realized before.
It sounds like you may not be aware of all the other virtual tabletops out there, in which case you might want to take a look at the following:
Battlegrounds: RPG Edition (my own VT, which might give you some more feature ideas, especially since it's also suitable for boardgames)
Comprehensive list of Virtual Tabletops for RPGs
Good luck with your project.
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Thanks for the list heruca :] I actually own Battlegrounds, but I personally prefer Fantasy Grounds for RPG campaigns. It's just more visually appealing to me I guess. I'll check all of these other programs out though, thanks :]
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Hi,
What application & art sources did you use to create the isometric strategy-rpg maps/'boards'?
I've been looking for quite some time and have yet to find a good mapping application or source of tiles for that sort of thing.
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Omnidon wrote:
Hi,
What application & art sources did you use to create the isometric strategy-rpg maps/'boards'?
I've been looking for quite some time and have yet to find a good mapping application or source of tiles for that sort of thing.
The maps are ripped exactly as is from Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, sorry :[ That would be awesome if there were some resource of high quality isometric tiles though. Someone should get to working on that.
EDIT: So I've pretty much finished everything I listed in the previous post. I decided not to add tiles though. I simply don't have enough mathematical skills to add hex cell grids and such. It would probably be easier to just use an external map editor as all maps are custom anyways. You can always use Locations anyways if you need to lock pieces to specific places anyways. Location are new feature as well. You define a each location and a global gravity. The gravity is the distance in pixels to pull a piece to lock-on to a specific x,y set. Locations are created in another index file in the board folder. You should also be happy to know that I have added support for GML scripting, which certainly can be used for customizable AI. You can have scripts that activate whenever a user activates them, scripts that always run in the background, scripts within events for each specific card, counter and die (spawn event, mouse click event, etc). These scripts work hand-in-hand with the new attributes system which are simply dynamic variables that may be assigned to specifically to each game piece. For example, let say you had a script that calculates battle damage between two piece. You can have an attribute on both pieces call Attack that stores an integer value. You can then compare the values, change an HP attribute or something, send the dead piece to location X, play the Final Fantasy victory theme (located in X folder), and finally output the results to the game log. This isn't all you could do of course. With decent knowledge of GML, you can control EVERY aspect of the program. You could even dump my entire source code if you really know what you're doing >_< As long as you credit me for my work, I don't really mind. I will release a list of important variables and functions I defined so coders can get the most out of the scripting system.
I'm holding off on the release until the new maker is finished. It's just a little program I'm writing to aid in the creation of games. Nothing fancy, but a little more convenient I think. It should be done very soon. Just finishing the the counter and die editor.
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heruca wrote:
Hi there...
I am looking for a virtual table top to play some of my fav board games online with mates as I will soon be moving to a new state... There are so mant option in your list... I was wondering if you could recommend me one to try that is more focused on board games.
Thansk in advance
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Hernan Ruiz Camauer
Argentina
Buenos Aires
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For boardgaming, I recommend Battlegrounds Gaming Engine (aka BGE).
Full disclosure: I am the developer.
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Posted Sat May 17, 2008 11:24 pm
