Coolest. Gaming Set-up. Evar.

[pogre]

Ordered a Dell2300MP on your recommendation. Looking forward to using it. Thanks - I've enjoyed this thread a lot.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Ordered a Dell2300MP on your recommendation. Looking forward to using it. Thanks - I've enjoyed this thread a lot.

AWESOME! Glad to be able to help and inspire you and your group.

Please take pics and let me know how it turns out. I look forward to hearing (and seeing) about your experiences.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

Love your set up.

Quick question before I take a nap before working the night shift: How do you do the "fog of war" stuff to hide things from the players.

{Two more years. Just two more years of night shift and then I can call it quits and move to days.... }

 

[The_Universe]

Millionaires?

While this technology is not as cheap as a pair of dice, at $719 USD for a brand new projector, it costs less than the large majority of most of the computers people are using to read this message and less still than most of the laptops kicking around at the gaming session.

Do try to keep the cost in perspective

A recent ENWorld poll had a substantial number of gamers indicating that they spent about $100 a month on gaming stuff.

Especially if a group chips in for a projector, $719 is hardly cost prohibitive. For a group of five gamers, gaming once a week, that's less than a $1 a game session over the course of three years. IF your group is larger - the costs per player only goes down.

Would you RENT one of those for, say, 16 cents per hour to game with? I'm guessing the answer for many if not MOST here is yes.

It is not cheap, admittedly...

But millionaires? No. This is affordable technology.

I was exaggerating, of course.

I'd let them chip in even if they were otherwise destitute. Priorities!

 

[Pbartender]

...(or even if we have a diferent display technology which accomplishes the same thing, like a flexible LCD battlemat you could unroll and plug in)...

Do a Google search for "flexible" "LCD".

Samsung, Toshiba and Philips have been working on it for some time already. The Philips' technology is called 'Paintable LCD'. That's right... Just like in Traveller.

Give it a couple years, and you'll have that LCD Battlemat.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Ordered a Dell2300MP on your recommendation. Looking forward to using it. Thanks - I've enjoyed this thread a lot.

YOU BASSSSSSSSSSSSSTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRD!

You just had to give us all another reason to hate your gaming setup.

Feel free to ship me any Master Maze you decide to mothball.

Wulf

 

[pogre]

YOU BASSSSSSSSSSSSSTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRD!

You just had to give us all another reason to hate your gaming setup.

Feel free to ship me any Master Maze you decide to mothball.

Wulf

Oh no - I'll never mothball my 3d goodies.The projector is definitely for stuff like magma filled chambers and convention games. You're always welcome at my gaming table though

 

[Steel_Wind]

Do a Google search for "flexible" "LCD".

Samsung, Toshiba and Philips have been working on it for some time already. The Philips' technology is called 'Paintable LCD'. That's right... Just like in Traveller.

Give it a couple years, and you'll have that LCD Battlemat.

I know. I've been following flexible TFT R&D for a while for just that reason.

I think 5-10 years plus is a better time frame for these though. The plants required to make large panel LCD's are extremely expensive to tool up for. The current manufacturing process for TFT has a reject rate that begins to soar geometrically the larger you make the panels.

Still - either way: if its cheap ass projection or cheap ass super sized LCD panels - we win

 

[Steel_Wind]

Love your set up.

Quick question before I take a nap before working the night shift: How do you do the "fog of war" stuff to hide things from the players.

We deal with fog of war in several ways. One, in particular, I shall detail here and show you how it looks as you can use this with a laptop to your TV if you don't have a projector.

1 . No See; No Show: Fog of War is easy when it comes to critters. Just don’t place the minis down on the map unless the party can see em.

2. Fudge it with Scrolling: The map visible in the NWN toolset window can be scrolled a little bit at a time. As I tend to use NWN for outside encounters or simple interiors, this is usually not a problem to just scroll your window so that the not visible part is…well…not visible on the tabletop until it needs to be. For something like caves – again – pan and scan scrolling of the visible map seems to work very well in most cases.

[Note: NWN Game Client: the game client has camera blockers and LOS built-in, so in theory this should work well. Sounds cool right? Sadly, it does not work in practice. The problem is one of scale. Even zoomed out to the max distance, the NWN game and DM client will show too little of the screen all at once on the tabletop, The toolset’s zoom feature is unrestricted so this problem does not arise in the toolset.]

3: Photoshop and layer masks. While I don’t use this approach, Jans Carton (who is a pro photographer in his day job) uses Photoshop and layer masks to add fog of war obscuration to his maps. He prepares his maps ahead of time with Photoshop then erases the black mask layer, a bit at a time, as his players explore. He puts secret doors and traps on a separate layer – and reveals those also when appropriate using the eraser. The effect during game sessions is shown on his LCD projector page here:

4: TableTop Mapper: This is my preferred solution for dungeon interiors where the layout of the complex and corridors and positions of rooms and secret doors is important. Jans computer is a Mac and can’t use Tabletop Mapper. I have a PC. For me – Tabletop Mapper is ideal.

It’s pretty simple. Let me show you an example of how it works.

For this, we will use a recent map from Dungeon #119 The Tomb of Aknar Ratalla. This map is available as a free download off of Paizo’s site – a service they started to provide to readers after Jans Carton wrote Paizo about his need for clean maps to work with for use with tabletop projection.

So you export this pic from your .pdf and save it as a jpg.

Now, fire up tabletop mapper, and Load Picture. You've got this to look at essentially:

http://www.dladventures.com/gallery/public/tomb.jpg
[removed direct link to to login prompt - Kid Charlemagne]

Now Choose Grid>Select Grid

Your mouse now changes to a cross hair. You can draw a box anywhere on the image. Whatever size box you draw will be tiled across the entire map. In this case, there is already a grid on Paizo’s map. We just want ours to match it in size. So make your box the same size as the one on the map. It amounts to digital tracing. My six year old son can do it.

[A further note: if the artist fudged the grid in the map so it is not to scale or is uses a partial grid square next to a wall ….well…let me just say that TableTop Mapper will give you an abiding hatred of such a practice. ENWorlder MerricB carped about this to Dungeon in Prison Mail a few issues back.]

Now – the “hard” part. In order to prepare your map for play, you will want to define your areas. You can number these to correspond to the room numbers on your map if you like or choose whatever scheme suits your fancy. Whatever the case, you do this by looking under the menu Map Preparation and simply using your mouse and left clicking a grid cell to attach it to that defined area. (And yes, a grid cell can be set to be part of more than one area). After you have finished blocking it off that area, you choose “hide area. Poof. That room is done. Since you have hidden it, the image under it now goes black. Wash, rinse & repeat for your entire map.

You end up with this:

http://www.dladventures.com/gallery/public/tomb2.jpg
[removed direct link to to login prompt - Kid Charlemagne]
Time it takes for each map is obviously dependent upon the complexity of the map – but it is not a long process. 10 minutes for the map, if that? Something like that. Not a lot.

When you load your map in a saved state, it will be with all areas hidden and completely black. I tend to keep just the entrance visible so I unhide that portion. You then use your mouse to unhide adjoining areas, one area at a time by clicking on it and choosing “unhide” as the party explores. As the players explores during the game, more of the map is displayed, thusly:

http://www.dladventures.com/gallery/public/tomb1.jpg
[removed direct link to to login prompt - Kid Charlemagne]

TableTop Mapper allows you to save the state of your map, so that if you need to end your session with only some of the map being displayed, it will remember what’s been revealed and what has not. Pretty nifty huh?

Total cost of Tabletop Mapper? Zero dollars and Zero cents. It’s available as a free download right here.

One last thing – there is a spell area of effect tool in Tabletop Mapper which is nifty. So you can use it to highlight the map being projected on the tabletop and it will show you exactly what grid squares will be effected by a spell effect of that radius. For common spells like fireball – this is a very handy little digital tool to use in game on the tabletop.

 

[punkorange]

can it unhide in a radius? like character's using a torch?

It looks nice. I have the projector this weekend, I will have to download this program and work on maps