Old School Hack Annotated Screenshot #2: Hand-Drawn Map and Tokens
April 27, 2011
This is the second post in a series of annotated screenshots from an Old School Hack campaign I’m involved in. Brennen is the GM, Bryan and Brian, are the players. If you missed the first post in this series…um..well, that was the link, so I guess I’ll just get on with it.
Hand-Drawn Map and Tokens
Brennen drew a quick map and scanned it in. As much as I give Brennen a hard time about hassling me for ad-hoc drawing tools, he’s right—they’re necessary, and I want them too. I “drew” a river with blue stones in a session, which is something I don’t want to ever repeat. Over the Easter holiday, I prototyped some drawing support…. Ah, but until then…Brennen draws maps and scans them in. He then sets them as his background on a tabletop or a map. (There’s really no difference except a map can have a grid, and will be able to support vision later—actually supports it now, but it’s turned off in the beta thus far, because vision opens up a whole new can of worms.)
The tokens here are an accidental variety. We have a couple of square ones, which is the result of a couple of us setting the same image for portrait and token. (One of us should have known better. One of us wrote the code that creates a pog-style token from the portrait, if you don’t supply a token.) The wolf token is an example of EpicTable creating a token automatically from a portrait. The other small round token was a separate token image supplied by Brian for his character, and the red stones are game pieces that are in the EpicTable game piece gallery. Brennen’s using them here for enemy minions, rather than digging up images.
Interactive Flash version • Open Image
Old School Hack Annotated Screenshot #1 – Game Intro Tab
April 21, 2011
Recently, the online gaming group I’m part of has been playing Old School Hack. I really like the system, but instead of going on about OSH, I’ll point you to Matt Jackson’s posts about Old School Hack.
Brennen actually ran this game, so all I have are screenshots. He and I will do a screencast of a walk-through in a future session and focus on using various EpicTable bits to create something like a character sheet. In the meantime, I’ll post a series of annotated screenshots from our session.
You have a couple options for using the screenshots here. If you have Flash, you can just load the Flash version and hover over each of the bubbles to get more info. If you’re morally opposed to Flash, you can read the same timeless prose right here and correlate it to the bubbles the old fashioned way.
Game Intro Tab
Brennen put together this nice intro to his game to set the stage for us. It has an overland map of the area, some adventure background material, and even a set of suggestions for setting-appropriate names. This is a great, creative use of EpicTable tabletops.
Interactive Flash version • Open Image
Screen Maximizing View
You can maximize your screen real estate in EpicTable in a number of ways. You can minimize the ribbon from a right-click menu or a double-click on any of the tabs at the top (Main, Characters, etc.).
You can set the various panels, like Chat, Dice Tray, and Portrait Bar to "Hide" or "Auto-Hide", or you can detach them and drag them to a secondary display.
In this screenshot, I have the Dice Tray and Portrait Bar hidden, and I’ve dragged the Chat window to my second monitor.
Overland Map
Brennen drew this overland map and scanned it in for use with EpicTable. Drawing tools aren’t integrated into EpicTable (yet). Those of you wanting ad-hoc drawing tools in EpicTable will have Brennen’s relentless campaign for them to thank when they arrive.
The map is, I think, part of the background he used. Alternatively, he could have used an “image object”. The adventure text and name list are “rich text objects”.
Like any other surface in EpicTable, you can use game pieces or character tokens on this map. What I’ve found helpful is using stones or map pins (from the gallery on the Tabletops tab) to mark the group’s position or important landmarks.
Adventure Background
Brennen used a rich text note (from the Tabletops tab) to provide a brief set of adventure notes to get us all on the same page (so to speak).
He could have used a plain old notecard, but those are plain text and he’s way too into typography for that. <g>
Sample Character Names
Brennen included a couple lists of setting-appropriate character names right here on the game intro tab. That’s a great idea. Not only did it help guide the naming of our own characters, but it gave us a set to draw from for NPC names.
In EpicTable, this is a "rich text note" (accessible under the Tabletops tab) placed on the tabletop.
Hybrid virtual tabletop / face-to-face D&D using EpicTable
February 17, 2011
Sunday afternoon was the first session of my hybrid face-to-face / virtual tabletop D&D game using EpicTable. We’re using beta-2 (EpicTable is still in closed beta, but watch the site for an open beta in coming months). I resisted the urge to run anything in development–instead using only the beta that the rest of the testers have.
My EpicBasement
- Big screen TV connected to my laptop.
- Fairly ordinary, moderately priced webcam on top of the TV, which also functioned as the mic. (This worked surprisingly well.)
- My GM’s table, and a players’ table.
- Initially, I was recording Skype and the webcam pointing out from the TV towards the players, and I had a second video camera behind the players, pointed at the big screen showing the player view. Finally, I had Camtasia recording my GM’s screen. Aside from setting myself up for an incredible amount of video editing, this proved too much for my aging laptop to handle.
The Game
We were playing D&D 4th Edition, partially out of gamer curiosity and partly because I feel like I need to know more to support that community of gamers. Wow, was I right. Turns out, running D&D for years and years does not suddenly make you able to run D&D 4E smoothly with a quick read of the rules. I don’t think that’s 4E’s fault–I just underestimated the number of times I’d be left saying, lamely, well…in 3.5 it works like so, but in 4E…hmm…I’m not sure….
How EpicTable Fared
From an EpicTable perspective, I have to say, my feelings on the session are mixed. On the one hand, it’s rather humbling to experience some of the shortcomings that the beta has. It’s one thing to know that they’re there and see them while testing. It’s another to experience first-hand how much they impact a game. On the positive side, though, there were really only a handful of issues that were really painful, and all but one was well-known to me. Clearing those up will make a huge difference, and they really are mostly in the missing feature category, not the “something’s broken” category. So, in the end, once I shake off the despondency, this will be a focusing, energizing experience.
Player Screen
I’d planned to drag encounter maps to a big screen TV. Then, I realized that I’d disabled that just before Gen Con because it was a little fiddly to get maps re-docked, should one choose to do so–and I’d never re-enabled it. So, the feature I planned on using wasn’t actually in version of the software I planned on using. Hmm…. While pondering whether I should try a quick change and run a development build, it struck me that what I wanted for my game was more than just maps. I wanted the chat window too, for dice rolls. Fine–that already supports undocking and dragging to another screen. But there’s just one of them. I couldn’t very well put my one and only chat window on the big screen. What if I needed to whisper? What if I needed a secret roll?
I decided I could solve all these problems by running the session the same way I run my tests–I created a new user, named “Player Screen” and ran EpicTable as that user. This was great! It was just like any other player. No GM info leaking out, and as a side benefit, because all clients go through a central server, what I saw in the “Player Screen” EpicTable would be very true to the experience of my players. Perfect! Except…. Except I was running the game on a laptop with 2 GB of RAM. I had two instances of EpicTable (which honestly could do with a memory diet), Skype, a Skype recording add-in (which was boosting Skype’s memory consumption to half a gig and its CPU utilization to 20-30%), Camtasia for recording my screen, and Chrome with tabs open to various 4E sites and Obsidian Portal. My machine just couldn’t keep up. Since we were trying to actually play, not just test, I killed off everything but the GM’s EpicTable and Skype–no second instance of EpicTable, no Skype recording, no Camtasia. This made everything functional again. This experience pointed out that I really need to consider how to run the player’s view in a face-to-face game without consuming a lot of extra memory and without requiring the user to know how to (or whether to) launch EpicTable as another user.
Priorities
This session really drove home a number of priorities for me. I have quite a few changes queued up and ready for beta-3, but I’d really like to put in a couple of those shown here before I release beta-3, because it was so painful playing without them.
- Gesture support: Really, really need to be able to be able to point at things or make your cursor visible to other participants or something–some way to say things like, “this guy, here” or “over by this rock” and let everyone see what you’re pointing at.
- Map sync: As GM, I know where I want to focus the action. I need to be able to sync players’ view to mine. It was incredibly painful to say things like, “Zoom out to 40% and scroll to the right.”
- More accessible horizontal scrolling: Vertical scrolling via mouse wheel is fine. Horizontal scrolling is a bear. You have to keep toggling between the select cursor and the scroll (“pan” to some of you, I guess) cursor. There are already suggestions on the forum for making this better–I just haven’t implemented them yet.
- Large map handling: The maps I was using were larger than I usually use–3000 pixels or more in each direction. They loaded fine but scrolling was sluggish. This is a known issue, but it’s very painful in a live game. I actually cropped the map to make this easier.
- Dice cups (i.e., dice rolls you define for 1-click access later) need to be saved across sessions. It’s a known issue that they aren’t. In a real game, that’s a real pain.
- Portrait bar needs to sync to all participants. Right now, the GM can use the portrait bar to rearrange characters in initiative order, but that isn’t communicated to the other participants. In a tactical game like D&D, it really needs to be synced.
EDIT: You can now hold down the spacebar and move the mouse to scroll. — John
EDIT: This is better–not perfect, but better. — John
EDIT: These are saved now. –John
Update on Beta 1
January 11, 2011
Just a quick update, folks. Beta-1 is in full-swing and has me incredibly busy! Lots of good feedback–suggestions, bugs, none of them genuinely concerning, though one issue was pretty crippling and unique to one user, so it was good to find that now.
Beta-2 is coming up, and once it’s out (this week?), I’ll release the next set of beta invitations. Again, I apologize for the wait–but I was right to roll out slowly–the participation has been great, but a little overwhelming. Between the alpha and beta-1 users, there are a total of 24 people with beta invitations. Had there been 200, I’d never have kept my head above water.
Things I’ve learned.
- I need a couple moderators (this is in the works as we speak)–I can’t keep being the sole organizer of the forum and get any coding done.
- I need a public-facing knowledge base and issue/feature tracker, not just a forum and not just my private bug tracker. This is still a research topic.
- I have to stop putting off fixing the forum breaks that resulted from the last forum software upgrade.
- You guys have tons of good ideas. It’s the right time for the beta.
Stay tuned for beta-2. Those of you with certain treasures obtained at Gen Con, look alive.
In the meantime, here are some video tutorials I’ve started accumulating. Look for these to find their way to a prominent place on the site sometime soon.
http://www.screencast.com/users/EpicTable/playlists/Tutorials
— John
Alpha 15 May Be the Last Alpha
December 19, 2010
Saturday night, my gaming group took Alpha-15 for a spin. There were a couple issues related to…well, related to my coding on Alpha-15 until 10 minutes before game time. Despite that, EpicTable pretty much stayed out of the way and just let us play, which is my heuristic for beta worthiness. I’m addressing those couple issues, and then I have some mapping work to finish. At that point, I’ll transition to beta.
One concession I’m making to time–I’m going to start the beta before the vision-related tools are integrated. I know, for some of you that’s going to be a downer, and I won’t feel bad if you want to wait for the vision support. There’s a lot of functionality that’s in pretty decent shape, though, and starting early with people who aren’t as concerned about vision will give me a gentler beta ramp.
I’m going to start reaching out to folks over the next few days to gauge interest in beta 1. Stay tuned.
Alphas 13 & 14
December 12, 2010
I’ve been hard at work on EpicTable, trying to make good on that prediction of a Fall beta. (Hey, I have until the 21st! )
We tested out Alpha 13 and 14 today/tonight. Alpha 13 fixed the character transfer issue from Alpha 12, and it reintroduced some long locked-down UI customization capabilities like changing the visibility of the chat, character portrait bar, and dice tray, dragging panels to secondary monitors, etc.
Brennen, who’s on a smaller display, has been needing that auto-hide feature for the various EpicTable panels, and immediately noticed that the panels were slow on his machine. That was this morning (um…Saturday morning, that is) on Alpha 13. By this evening, Alpha 14 was born, and its auto-hide panels are considerably snappier.
I have a few things I still want to take care of before the beta, but some of you die-hards are apt to hear from me before I’m officially past my Fall deadline.
For those of you interested in the kinds of things going on in the alpha tests, the release notes for the alphas are actually here on the site: http://www.epictable.com/whats-new/
Alphas 11 and 12
November 21, 2010
Due to a variety of work and family conflicts, my group had a longish break between tests. (And yes, I know, if that happens again, I should pull in some of you folks who have offered to wade into the alpha fray. )
I had my own set of conflicting priorities, though, so the extra time didn’t hurt. I posted Alpha-11 to my group on the 19th in anticipation of testing Friday night. However, Friday night before the test, I fixed some things related to handouts. So, I quick spun up an Alpha-12 while the guys waited patiently, and that’s what we ended up testing.
Here are some highlights of the delta between Alpha-10 and Alpha-12:
- I fixed “Brennen’s Terrible Scrolling Problem” – scrolling stopped prematurely on Brennen’s small(er) laptop screen than on my test screens.
- I eliminated the “Tribble Notes” – notes that cloned every time they moved.
- I fixed an issue with the installer that was causing it to not update an existing installation.
- I fixed some things with character edits and character portrait transfer.
- There are better “wait” screens now than there used to be, for things like waiting for the game organizer to join, retrieving game resources, etc. There’s still not as much feedback as I’d like, but it’s better than it was. For the trivia fans out there, the splash screen is actually the same image used for the EpicTable banner we had in the Gen Con booth this year.
- There’s a nice self-extracting exe for the installer now, so there’s no need to go through the hassle of opening a zip file, wondering if you should extract the files first, and then wondering whether you should run setup.exe or the .msi file. There’s just a single exe. You run it. The product installs. Simple.
The really good (from a glass half-full perspective) things to come out of tonight’s test:
- There are things wrong with character portrait transfer that just aren’t misbehaving in my lab. (The glass half-full part about that is that I wouldn’t have found this without the alpha testers, and the rest of you would have been hit with it in the beta.) This is curious–since the server is central, it doesn’t really matter much whether two clients are in my house or across the world from each other. So, I don’t yet have a satisfactory explanation for why character portraits work so well for me.
- Something’s not right with the auto-updater. I wonder if my installer “fix” has anything to do with this….
Alpha 10
October 30, 2010
Last Sunday, Brennen and I took Alpha 10 for a spin. We verified that the dire problems of Alpha 9 were fixed, tried out a new self-extracting installer in development.
The self-extracting installer was something I did as a break from other things, and it’s complete in Alpha 11. I only spent on hour or two on it, but it’s really motivating to me to do “finish work” like this. The gist is that the setup.exe and MSI are bundled into a single, self-extracting executable, so there’s no wondering which file to run, unzipping to temporary directories, or anything like that. Not 100% necessary, but consistent with the ease of use goals of EpicTable.
The Dire Problems, as you might recall, were the Ever-Changing Background and some weirdnesses with rich text notes. Both have been eliminated. You still get backgrounds, now you just don’t get them every two seconds. 
Rich text notes no longer cause mysterious “drag and drop registration errors”.
We did find a couple things of interest. Brennen was having scrolling problems that I couldn’t duplicate for the life of me. He uses a laptop with rather less screen real estate than I’d imagined, and runs at a lower resolution than I do, so we spent some time trying to get my secondary monitor setup to mimic his. I still wasn’t able to duplicate the problem that night, but later, I found I could duplicate it on my own laptop, so…something about laptops is more nuanced than just screen size and resolution. That’s what I’m working on now. At least now that I’ve been able to duplicate it, the bug can’t hide for long.
Running at this resolution has really made me thankful that there’s so much ability to customize the layout in EpicTable. (I need to record a video of that….)
Alpha 11, targeted for this week, will have fixes for these two issues from Alpha 10, a fix to character portrait and handout sharing, and the finished self-extracting installer. There are probably some other things I’m forgetting, but I need to leave something for the Alpha 11 post.
Field Report: EpicTable Alpha-9
October 3, 2010
EpicTable Alpha-9 is a good example of why I’m releasing alphas (almost) weekly to my gaming group to stabilize things before giving the rest of you a beta.
I was pretty excited about Alpha-9. It had a lot of improvements and fixes–things you can work around but would never want to release. Everything was working really well in my testing–though granted, the alpha releases get very little–and I was looking forward to wowing my group. Our Monday game night rolled around and BAM! Three really nasty things hit us that didn’t occur in my own lab.
First, rich text notes, when sent over the network, resulted in a scary looking message about “drag and drop registration failure”. Hmm…. Second, Bryan found that he could crash Brennen’s EpicTable by editing a note at the same time Brennen did. Fun. These two were both relatively easy fixes and were due to the same cause. You developers out there are probably guessing that this was caused by simultaneous access to the note by the GUI and the incoming change notification, and you’d be right. It was a little more nuanced than that, but in essence, that’s what happened, and that’s fixed.
The third and final nail in the coffin of this build: The Miraculous, Ever-changing Background. If you changed the background of the tabletop, you kept changing it. Forever. And everyone told everyone else about the background change. Forever. Okay, so I’m not entirely incompetent. I had mechanisms in place that were supposed to prevent that. They…um…just didn’t. (I deleted my long-winded explanation of what was really going on, and instead, put that in my bug database. If you’re interested, let me know.)
So, why am I going on about the tragic Alpha-9 release? It’s to illustrate the distinction I’m making between alpha and beta, and to help explain why the alpha is closed and I’m making the beta contingent on the alpha’s stabilizing. The Alpha-9 problems were difficult to reproduce in my environment but outright killed our Monday gaming session. I know how tough it is to keep a gaming group going, and I don’t want give you a evening-killing bug. I’m sure there will be issues that come up with the beta, and I know you guys will be helpful and gracious as we work through them together, but I’m going to be respectful of your gaming time and do what I can to prevent evening-killers like Alpha-9 getting into the beta.
Alpha 8
September 15, 2010
No, you didn’t miss anything. I haven’t started the beta yet, and the alpha is really just my own gaming group. However, I thought I’d give you an update on how things are going. I don’t want to rub salt into any “give it to me now!” wounds you might have, and that’s part of why I’m just now telling you that I’m on my 8th alpha build, but I know you’re curious, so….
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