One of my interests in developing a competitor to Roll20 is making a system just as compatible with wargames like Warhammer and Warmachines as it is with roleplaying games like Pathfinder and the like. WebGL makes that very possible.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
I've been cheating on that one a little bit, myself. Tabletop Simulator gives me most of the tools that I need to do tabletop wargaming.
What it doesn't do is make my life easy when it comes to importing my own assets. Tokens and chits are really easy, don't get me wrong. Models, on the other hand – it utterly objects to fairly standard object models with image textures which have no good reason to fail. Their documented workflow goes through Unity, which I have absolutely no use for it all.
Emulate some of that environment with the flexibility of easy asset integration, and may be a somewhat better scripting language to connect objects up with and you very well may have a killer app.
I'm still very much in the planning and prototyping phase, but what you're describing is very close to what I intend. A 3D "table" with a grid drawn on it, easy importing of OBJ, 3DS, MMT and other modelling files, a scripting language that distills easily to a macro language (probably a Scheme derivative), and a vertical sidebar for chat, simplified character sheets, etc.
If you take a look at some of my previous posts about Two Hour Dungeon Crawl and 5150, you can see how I've been using TS as a digital gaming table.
I don't necessarily need a table with a grid drawn on it as long as I can specify a grid or no grid, or have the ability to overlay my own layers on top of the table. Sometimes you need hexes, sometimes squares, and sometimes you just don't want any distraction at all. Especially if you're working with 3D terrain.
I am all about using Scheme, as an old school Common Lisp and Scheme programmer, but you might get more traction with the mainstream user if you go with Python or Lua.
(If you want extra points with me, you'll support an Erlang node which can be taught to from any machine on the network – but I'm a weirdo and my suggestions should not be taken seriously.)
Some kind of system which would support my tabletop gaming both wargaming and really ridiculously-indie role-playing games would be great. I've been struggling and making do with TS for quite a while because there's really just nothing out there to compete with it.