New Virtual Tabletop for Forum-based Games

[AbelCodeMonk]

I'm working on a web-based virtual tabletop designed for forum games. We mentioned it here a month or so ago and got some beta players. We've improved it based on their feedback, and are now opening up the beta.

To work well with your existing forum, we make it easy to embed a snapshot of the current map. Here's one from our recent Scales of War game:



http://www.virtualbattlemat.com is designed to be simple. It provides your game with a shared map and nothing else. We assume that your game also has a forum, blog, chatroom, or wiki where you're logging the running commentary. We try to work with your current game aids, rather than requiring you to change everything over to our tools.

We invite one and all to join our beta. We want a lot of feedback to help make this simpler.

Please feel free to give us feedback on this thread or by sending me a direct message. I want to hear anything you can tell me - good or bad - so that I can make this a more useful tool.

 

[2WS-Steve]

Very nice!

A couple year ago while running a PbP game this is exactly what I wanted.

New feature-wise it'd be nice to be able to scale the map up or down to give bigger maps more screen space and make it easier to match token size to map scale.

Also would be nice to have a fog-of-war function in the engine.

And maybe allow for 2-5 maps open at any one time in a campaign. Could work around this now by making multiple campaigns, but I figure it'll be fairly common to have different characters spread across different maps.

 

[AbelCodeMonk]

Thanks for the ideas. I'll put them into our queue.

By scale up and down, do you mean one-time (get a map from someone then scale it to your token size), or do you mean zoom during play (so that players can zoom out for an overview, then back in to see more detail in the area around their character)?

On fog of war, is manual fog of war enough? The DM would mark areas as unseen, meaning only the DM could see them. Actually incorporating lighting and LoS rules would be a lot more work; we're trying to keep this tool simple.

 

[Hawkwind]

There does not seem to be any thing in the way of a forum or documentation. I have tried with out success posting maps into emails but i have been able to send the web page as a link to another email account. What other options are there for sharing maps? Also what file formats and size restrictions are there to uploading your own maps and counters

 

[AbelCodeMonk]

There does not seem to be any thing in the way of a forum or documentation. I have tried with out success posting maps into emails but i have been able to send the web page as a link to another email account. What other options are there for sharing maps? Also what file formats and size restrictions are there to uploading your own maps and counters

Sorry about the lack of docs or forum. Our intention is to "one day" provide a short into tutorial. Forums are also a good idea, but are also "one day". In the mean time, we're using threads on EnWorld (like this one) as our help forums. Honestly, we're limited in the amount of time we have to put into this. However, please ask me any questions you have.

You should be able to email links to your game:
http://www.virtualbattlemat/game/your_game_name would be a link to the playable version of your game. You can invite players to the game, by putting their username into the form on the right side of the game play page. They, of course, need to register and tell you their username first.
http://www.virtualbattlemat/game/your_game_name/snapshot/ would be a link to the scaled png snapshot of your game (there's a link on the right side of the game play page that you can copy from).

Maps and counters can be in "every image format we could think of". We support png, jpg, tiff, gif, and a couple dozen others. File size limits are currently large; we'll shrink them if it becomes necessary. Maps are 3MB; tokens are 100KB. We chose those sizes because they were larger than all of the WotC maps & Fiery Dragon tokens.

 

[Hawkwind]

Thanks for replying. Another question for you. Can you use the table in real time say if all the players are logged into the game table web page at the same time could the players see live any updates the dm makes or even better could players move their own counters in real time? If your table does all the above you might like to consider a penpal button