Quote from: Gold Roger;815594I'm far more interested in the singleplayer mode. If that can reach the quality of Baldurs Gate or at least Icewind Dale I will lose a lot of time.


As for the promise of enabling the real D&D experince in a computer game, well, we've heard that before. At the tabletop I can create a unique NPC with a few sentences. A few sentences more, and I created a fantastical city. I don't see a digital representation beating that.

Well in theory they might. If you could say ... add a fantastical city and the game engine generated one on the fly that adhered to the dozen or so game world parameters you set for your campaign, just by clicking on "Add City".

Quote from: jibbajibba;815608What I really want is a collection of a thousand or so location templates so I can just stick a temple in round the next corner, then I want a set of about a dozen textures and settings I can apply on the fly. So I can select temple, dress it with "eldrictch horror", "desolate ruin" or "sacred goodness".

The current state of Roll20, RPGNow, and Fantasy Ground is getting close to that ideal. It not programmable but there such a wealth of choices that it winds up effectively being the same situation.

However it is for 2D maps.

Are the visuals of 3D that compelling? Does 3D Graphics appealling to you the same way Dwarven Forge would on the tabletop?

My personal opinion after using what I bought through both kickstarters is that for face to face Dwarven Forge is worth it but just barely. The guys making the stuff thought things through on the layout of the individual pieces and that tips the balance.

On-line however I don't feel 3D is worth the overhead. There is one program on Steam that is a general purpose 3D game client called Tabletop Simulator. One of the modes it comes with has DF styles dungeon pieces that you can use exactly like dwarven forge.

But after playing with it, I feel that using Roll20 with photo realistic or full color art looks just as good in its own way. And has advantages that would be a pain in the ass to replicate in a 3D Client.

I am interested in your take on the tradeoffs.

Quote from: Will;815610Didn't that Vampire computer game also do something like this?

One of my players played that to death, undeath, and I think they mentioned something like that.

QuoteThe game features a Storyteller mode in which on player can act like a dungeon master. A software development kit has also been released allowing players to make their own adventures.

Seems a yes then.

I wish someone had made a multiplayer version of Eye of the Beholder.
Closest was the FPS mode in the AOL NWN Online.

Quote from: jibbajibba;815543Trouble withe NWN was you had to build it all up front.

I had a view of a game where you could just drag in prefabed objects from a library and monsters off a list, add in a prebuilt trap or whatever.

Effectively you could tie all of that to a digital version of the random dungeon generators. If I have that then I could DM a great game but I always found in NWN as I was running it that I wanted to add a thing I I couldn't as it was all done up front, and that was after spending weeks building a city

Not sure what you mean by "Up Front" I had no problem adding in new monsters, buildings, objects, scripts, music, items, and importing others.

But you had to hack the master index list of items to do it, basically extending the schema and adding new ID numbers.  That was the problem with mods, if the game had 100 armors, everyone's custom armor started with 101+ so if you wanted to do both, you had to change the numbers.  A huge chunk of the mods were just aggregates of other's stuff, with all the right schemas.

Hasn't Second Life (and Minecraft) already filled that content creation void? People did some amazing projects on there already. Why compete in a saturated market?

I know they mean well, but come out with useful GM tools at least. Something to collate spells, draft custom encounter/item tables, easy PC/NPC chargen, etc.
The fans are already doing all that work.

The easiest solution is a 'blessing from the pope' and select from the already existing fan-made projects. Give 'em a fraction & recognition, slap on corporate logo, widely disseminate, and move on. Then they can do their favorite thing, fire underperforming depts.

Yeah, I think the really important thing to stand out are good player and GM tools, tools intelligently designed around the needs of a gaming group.

I was going to get that Vampire game, way back when, SPECIFICALLY for the opportunity to virtually GM... until I started reading about all the coding-level stuff I'd need to do and how clunky the overall design would be. Meh

Quote from: Opaopajr;815690Hasn't Second Life (and Minecraft) already filled that content creation void? People did some amazing projects on there already. Why compete in a saturated market?

SL and MC are too limited. Without money and some coding and/or modelling skills, SL is pretty bland really. That is before even getting to the endless harassment problems. Theres ben some great projects there. But someone inevitibly comes in to try and ruin it. MC has simmilar issues. Only much more limited in scope.

Still. Building to-scale Keep on the Borderland was a fun, if immensely arduous task. That is a LONG run from the keep to the caves!

Havent been on SL in years.

Unfortunately when did drop in. Discovered that a really well made space horror map was gone. And that is the other drawback of SL. You stop paying rent and ta-ta all that work.

Quote from: CRKrueger;815662Not sure what you mean by "Up Front" I had no problem adding in new monsters, buildings, objects, scripts, music, items, and importing others.

But you had to hack the master index list of items to do it, basically extending the schema and adding new ID numbers.  That was the problem with mods, if the game had 100 armors, everyone's custom armor started with 101+ so if you wanted to do both, you had to change the numbers.  A huge chunk of the mods were just aggregates of other's stuff, with all the right schemas.

I don't want to have to prep it on the system before I start, at all.
I want to say to the guys " okay ets start ... you are guarding a caravan train as it moves along the kings road, you are currently crossing farmland... Load a simple farmland area, I sketch out a map on a tablet on my PC and the game engine takes that base map and generates a terrain of rolling farmland scatters across it farm houses, adds trees etc ... all drawn from a string that looks like "generate farmland : apply setting parameters " (setting parameters are things like population density, cultural styling, technology etc etc...)  Then on my map view I sketch out a rough area and mark it forest apply the "spooky, dark" adjective. The system then generates a forest and the PCs see it in their view point moving towards it.  I can jump to dialogue and do some role play stuff with them as I add a tower to the forest and set up a road block on the Kings road with a dozen bandits.

Basically the way I usually run a game.

Anything you can generate through random tables you can generate through a PC with much more depth. Anything you can generate through random tables you can pick off a menu.
So that is what I want...

To Estar's point yes I want 3d. The benefit of using a computer interface, aside from location and scheduling, if that I can use a rendered 3D environment with fog of war and sound effects and torchlight and all that stuff. In my perfect world its all Virtual reality POV stuff.
If I don't get that then I will just wait and play face to face.
I always thought the dwarven forge stuff looked great but aside from the expense and the time didn;t really see what it brought to the game.

Theres been a few tries at that over the years. But cant think of any that have gotten past the basic stages.

The one idea I saw at a convention was like what you described. You had a drawing program that plugged into the generator. So you drew the locale with some basic elements and the program took that and produced a map. What they showed was just a terrain generator, you drew elevation lines in different colours. They had a road layer half done, basically plot a line from A to B and it worked it out.

The idea was that this would all be used for a FPx adventure.

But like alot of ambitious programs. Never saw completion. Like the Champions and Werewolf PC games. Still have the ad for the first and the poster for the second. Coming Soon!

Yeah, that's how I imagine a well designed, versatile, robust Virtual Tabletop. I'm learning C-Sharp and playing with the Unreal 4 Engine to see what I can pull off with that. Allowing simple sketches to turn into procedural generated content is high on the priority list. Also, presenting encounters in different styles for different purposes. For example, yes, we could have a hex-grid, tactical set piece battle for the random encounter in the woods, OR I could just load up a "woods" background, place the PCs on one side of the screen, and the dire wolves on the other (like the earlier Final Fantasy games), and let the GM and players freely Narrate the encounter details, using the Virtual Tabletop more as a tracking device than a playing surface. Then shift back to tactical-map view when you get to the dungeon, or whatever. Let the GM choose which view to present based on existing prepared areas or the need for bare-bones Init and HP tracking.

If I don't get that then I will just wait and play face to face.

Quote from: jibbajibba;815744I always thought the dwarven forge stuff looked great but aside from the expense and the time didn;t really see what it brought to the game.

Well it is "3D" on the tabletop. A visually appealing way to bring the adventure locale to life.

Quote from: jibbajibba;815744To Estar's point yes I want 3d. The benefit of using a computer interface, aside from location and scheduling, if that I can use a rendered 3D environment with fog of war and sound effects and torchlight and all that stuff. In my perfect world its all Virtual reality POV stuff.

Well Roll20 has much of that working for 2D. Load a map and draw over it in a hidden layer so that it knows where the walls are and placing lighting. It has sound effects on tap.

The problem with 3D is the same problem with Dwarven Forge in the real world. To use it is easy to make it well... it as what other posters said it requires too much programming.

The reason it was easy to place doors "wrong" in NWN is that doors needed to be handle a variety of conditions. The same with the other objects in the toolkit. If you look NWN vault you will find not thousands but certainly hundreds of user made add-ons, parts, and modules for NWN.

They made a lot of advances in procedural content. The gaming and programming version of random tables. However it is still hard to use as a general purpose tool the way we use in tabletop RPGs.

Finally what is 3D really need for? If is top down (or over the shoulder) then it is a fancy Dwarven Forge. If it is first person view then I think it will come off too much like a CRPGs and really feel odd compared to how we are used to play tabletop with the traditional eagle eye view of the action.

Being a computer programmer for 30 years my feeling on what to happen is the following

Virtual Tabletop like Fantasy Ground and Roll20 will remain for the next decade the way to play tabletop RPGs on-line.

That at some point they will develop a dwarven forge style options to present a "map" in 3D. Tabletop Simulator on Steam is the first baby steps towards this.

Procedural generation will be introduced. The VTTs is organized around the "current" map. Once the rules are automated, character sheets are perfected, and campaigns managment is supported. This is the logical area for the VTTs to advanced. Click a button, tweak some settings and you get a location with a map and content. At first 2D and then 3D.

Quote from: estar;815939If I don't get that then I will just wait and play face to face.





Well it is "3D" on the tabletop. A visually appealing way to bring the adventure locale to life.




Well Roll20 has much of that working for 2D. Load a map and draw over it in a hidden layer so that it knows where the walls are and placing lighting. It has sound effects on tap.

The problem with 3D is the same problem with Dwarven Forge in the real world. To use it is easy to make it well... it as what other posters said it requires too much programming.

The reason it was easy to place doors "wrong" in NWN is that doors needed to be handle a variety of conditions. The same with the other objects in the toolkit. If you look NWN vault you will find not thousands but certainly hundreds of user made add-ons, parts, and modules for NWN.

They made a lot of advances in procedural content. The gaming and programming version of random tables. However it is still hard to use as a general purpose tool the way we use in tabletop RPGs.

Finally what is 3D really need for? If is top down (or over the shoulder) then it is a fancy Dwarven Forge. If it is first person view then I think it will come off too much like a CRPGs and really feel odd compared to how we are used to play tabletop with the traditional eagle eye view of the action.

Being a computer programmer for 30 years my feeling on what to happen is the following

Virtual Tabletop like Fantasy Ground and Roll20 will remain for the next decade the way to play tabletop RPGs on-line.

That at some point they will develop a dwarven forge style options to present a "map" in 3D. Tabletop Simulator on Steam is the first baby steps towards this.

Procedural generation will be introduced. The VTTs is organized around the "current" map. Once the rules are automated, character sheets are perfected, and campaigns managment is supported. This is the logical area for the VTTs to advanced. Click a button, tweak some settings and you get a location with a map and content. At first 2D and then 3D.

Yes I see what you are saying

I don't think of rpgs as eagle eye top down at all its all theatre of the mind first person stuff to me. So I want a computer aided RPG to look like a first person shooter /mmo but play like an RPG.

My aid is not to replicate a tabletop game, my aid is to replicate a role playing game and remove the tabletop interface entirely.

As for modules etc in nwn, yes they are all there but you need to use them at prep you can't add them on the fly

It seems like diminishing returns. So much GM preparation for so little effect. The imagination comes with an unlimited effects budget and any and all camera lens angles. The lack of a tight script demands a flexibility currently unmatched with all our tools.

I guess it could be a nice gateway for the MMORPG set. But I think selling up tabletop RPG's differences is a better attractor to the table product. However, if it is to be a gateway for TTRPGers to migrate to a Hasbro MMORPG with recurring buy-in costs... not a wholly bad idea. Not for me, but it will likely snag a few back into the MMO/MOBA treadmill.

I can already see the pricing lists for new skins.

Quote from: jibbajibba;815947Yes I see what you are saying

I don't think of rpgs as eagle eye top down at all its all theatre of the mind first person stuff to me. So I want a computer aided RPG to look like a first person shooter /mmo but play like an RPG.

My aid is not to replicate a tabletop game, my aid is to replicate a role playing game and remove the tabletop interface entirely.

As for modules etc in nwn, yes they are all there but you need to use them at prep you can't add them on the fly

Reguarding 3d terrain like dungeons. Some players and DMs really dig that and for them it actually enhances immersion. And even there there are varrying levels. Some NEEEEEEED the mini to represent whats there. Others can see the dragon when you place a d6 on the field.

Others dont, or really dont.

Kind of like how music or sound effects can be great for some and an annoyance to others.

As for NWN. My main grouse with it was that there was no first person view.
Probably why I still prefer the original and the SSI games.

Maybee someone can suggest that as an extension to the creators of Legend of Grimrock? Multiplayer and on the fly DM terrain/dungeon gen?