Project Sigil Sigil, WotC 3D vtt game automation no more?

[UngainlyTitan]

Is there much of a VTT pie, though? It seems very much like a niche market. I think it'd be a nice feature to have, but how much will folk pay for it, compared to how much you have to pay to build and maintain it? I'm wondering if it is more of a cottage industry thing, much more suited to smaller businesses like Foundry, the same way that Dwarven Forge handled physical terrain for the more hardcore among us.

That is assuming that the VTT is the end goal. I think that this is more of a Hasbro project than a purely WoTC one.

It is a job that is complex enough to get a good dev team out of it, if they can make it work.
Once it is working, they can leverage that experience and some of the code base to do other stuff.

The VTT is basically a presentation layer that displays a map (3D/2D) and allows interaction of tokens and dice mechanics with that map.
Change that map and one could play Lords of Waterdeep, a D&D Gloomhaven style game, or Magic or Transformers, etc..

Let AI mature a bit and perhaps it could run a VR or AR telepresence setup where you could play Magic or D&D in a VR/AR environment.
Procedurally generated dungeons for solo or coop play. Add AI and some story templates and you get some procedurally generated D&D mods with some bite to them. Give a DM the tools to direct the AI responses and now you are really cooking with gas.

This is all idle speculation on my part but historically WoTC have been very bad at software because they knew nothing about software development and seemed to hire cheap and abandon it when the going got rough.

To get software development experience they need to develop software. A 3D VTT is a good choice. They can get a alpha stage quickly enough and they have. Now they need to iterate on that until they get it right.

 

[AlViking]

Is there much of a VTT pie, though? It seems very much like a niche market. I think it'd be a nice feature to have, but how much will folk pay for it, compared to how much you have to pay to build and maintain it? I'm wondering if it is more of a cottage industry thing, much more suited to smaller businesses like Foundry, the same way that Dwarven Forge handled physical terrain for the more hardcore among us.

I don't know what they're thinking because I think Maps is actually a pretty good tool that would satisfy most online needs for a lot of people. But they have talked about using the VTT for other game systems as well and if I remember correctly even showed of a transformer fig. So maybe there's long term plans to support other games and other systems or perhaps they want to use some of the code to act as a base for their game development. But your guess is as good as mine I don't know what the C-Suite execs are thinking by funding this.

 

[Hermes_Alexandria]

I just got a key for Project Sigil.

It is definately an Alpha, more proof-of-concept than anything else and all features are visible in the previous demos.