DDI play and RPGA

[D'karr]

Well, I never played a homegame with terrain tiles and the RPGA events I played were to 95% played on just a plain battlemat with some lines drawn with a marker (and the 5% when the DM did prepare some printed map or brought terrain tiles I didn't get anything from it that I didn't get from the plain mat with some crudely drawn lines), so I don't see any problem with that.

It is not a "problem" in the sense of what you see. It is a "problem" in the sense that either the adventure writer or the DM running the table will have to probably make out the maps before hand on the VGT. This can be time consuming and some times more time consuming than a simple sketch on a battlemat.

If the RPGA then starts having all their writers only use Dungeon Tiles for their maps to promote compatibility with the VGT, this can become limiting.

If the RPGA is going to start using the VGT, it would be nice if a judge that is going to run the adventure would get an already VGT Converted adventure, instead of having to do all the work on that too.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Where did you get the info that the VTT is "Dungeon Tiles" only.

Everything I've seen shows and says freeform grid drawing and .jpg map importation is supported.

 

[D'karr]

Where did you get the info that the VTT is "Dungeon Tiles" only.

Everything I've seen shows and says freeform grid drawing and .jpg map importation is supported.

There is currently no import of .jpg except for the WotC maps into the VGT. That was as of DDXP. So you can take one of the "Fantastic Locations" maps and import it into the VGT. But you can't take a map from another source and import it for use as a 3D tile. This was something that was a "want to have" for the developers but was probably not going to happen at launch. Both Didier Monin and Chris Youngs confirmed this at DDXP. That does not mean that they might have added that functionality already. However, they did not have it then and it did not seem that it was a priority for launch, but possibly an add-on later.

Yes, it does have freeform drawing. It was slow and clunky at best, during the demo.

 

[smerwin29]

There is currently no import of .jpg except for the WotC maps into the VGT. That was as of DDXP. So you can take one of the "Fantastic Locations" maps and import it into the VGT. But you can't take a map from another source and import it for use as a 3D tile.

I may be wrong on this, but you CAN import .jpg maps into the VGT. It just will not render them into 3-D. Yet.

The RPGA is going to support the VGT as much as possible within reason. The best-case scenario will be to have "support packs" available so that a DM who wants to run an RPGA adventure on the VGT can have everything pre-loaded. Whether that happens or not depends on many, many factors, of course.

Shawn

 

[Fobok]

I certainly hope so! I've been wanting to play in RPGA games for a long while now. I've just never been able to get to a convention or to any other event.

I'm a Forgotten Realms fan (and yes I actually like the spellplague), and ever since I've heard about Living Forgotten Realms I knew I wanted in. (At least to give it a try.) So, I'm hoping we'll see something on DDI.

 

[D'karr]

I may be wrong on this, but you CAN import .jpg maps into the VGT. It just will not render them into 3-D. Yet.

Shawn, as of DDXP the import of external maps occured only through the MAP CREATOR Utility. This utility had the Dungeon Tiles and the Fantastic Location maps pre-loaded. So the only import capability was for stuff that WotC had already loaded.

This still allowed some cool things, like using a Fantastic Location map and adding Dungeon Tiles over it to get some cool terrain. However, it still had the limitation of importing anything that was not already a part of the utility and of course no 3D tile rendering.

 

[pedr]

I certainly hope so! I've been wanting to play in RPGA games for a long while now. I've just never been able to get to a convention or to any other event.

I'm a Forgotten Realms fan (and yes I actually like the spellplague), and ever since I've heard about Living Forgotten Realms I knew I wanted in. (At least to give it a try.) So, I'm hoping we'll see something on DDI.

Well, I'm sure there'll be games on DDI, and on other online VTTs. You might like to check out the Living Forgotten Realms Yahoo group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LivingFR/) which is one location for unofficial discussion of the future campaign. Obviously there's not much info at the moment as the campaign doesn't start until August, but if you join now you can be sure that significant information will be discussed there as and when it's released!

 

[keterys]

Shawn, as of DDXP the import of external maps occured only through the MAP CREATOR Utility. This utility had the Dungeon Tiles and the Fantastic Location maps pre-loaded. So the only import capability was for stuff that WotC had already loaded.

This still allowed some cool things, like using a Fantastic Location map and adding Dungeon Tiles over it to get some cool terrain. However, it still had the limitation of importing anything that was not already a part of the utility and of course no 3D tile rendering.

Good news is, that you're wrong, or at least behind the times. You can directly import jpegs. The G4TV Demo they did specifically said you could. Check around 7:20 or so into it.

 

[Kaffis]

I'm actually looking forward to the VTT as a means by which I (a generally convention-starved RPGer) can get my feet wet with the RPGA.