Dice design editor

I have created a small program to design a dice sets to be used in Virtual Mat. It has immediate preview of the color/texture changes, so you can experiment with various settings quite easily.

It is a standalone jar (no webstart for now, sorry), you can download it here dicedesign-0.2.jar and just doubleclick on it after the download. You will need java 6 installed for it to run properly, you can get it from Java site in the case you don't have it.

You will be presented with few windows - attributes, color chooser and preview window. Color chooser is not usable at start - you need to click on any attribute and then color chooser will start controlling that attribute. After that, chose different attribute, play with colors and so on.

To control preview area use following keys - AWSD  to move around, QE to rotate, RF to tilt, ZX to zoom in/out. You can also use mouse to kick dice around, but if you get them too far, you will need to restart the application.

To see the example dice set, download magma.dicedesign and use 'Load...' from dice designer menu. If you manage to create something nice you would like to share, save it and let me know - I might create a repository of best looking dice sets.

Hint - if you want to get rid of glow after enabling it, change glow color to complete black.

Program might be not running on some older graphic cards or integrated Intel chipsets. Anything from Nvidia or ATI/AMD produced in last 10 years should be enough to get it running.

Please make sure you save it to the disk and run from there. When running directly from Firefox download window, there is a problem with unpacking some libraries, which cause the preview window to not appear (you should get 3 windows, one of the showing the dice on the table). When running from windows explorer, there should be no problem.

Virtual Mat blog

I'm starting this blog to have a place where I can post the updates about the state of Virtual Mat project and possibly have some healthy dicussion going on in the future.

Some time ago, I have decided to try writing online rpg table program, similar to MapTool. I actually did consider starting from Maptool, as I used to work on it a bit in the past, but it is very much 2d oriented, while I wanted to try something 3d (actually, it is more 2.5d )

After that, I got distracted for few months, but now I'm back to the business and I would like to share the current state of development with you.

You can take a look at the small teaser video at youtu.be/6nwAJY3jIEc?hd=1

Trick which allowed me to bootstrap development is to reuse NWN (Neverwinter Nights) models and animations. Both me and my players have original version of NWN, so we can use the models for our play. There is also quite a lot of free models created by fans, so even without NWN, there should be enough content to get something working (said that, full version of nwn with all extensions costs few dollars in bargain bins...).

What is already implemented:

• a lot of framework code which is the foundation for later extensions
• client/server communication allowing to broadcast events between client machines
• model display and animation, partial implementation of particle system (visible in fire elemental for example)
• walk/run around action
• dice rolling using physics, properly displayed on all the clients (physics libraries are NOT deterministic...)
• basic big-jpeg-as-map display, with per-square height levels (editable online)
• shadows, bloom, glow, metallic reflections etc (jme3 engine provides this almost for free)
• basic footstep sounds synchronized to animations

To be implemented:
a LOT of things. It doesn't really make sense to list all the details, just few ideas I'm playing with

• PC model composition from equipment pieces (NWN way)
• movement acknowledgment mode - players are just drawing the path and sending to do GM for validation and execution
• targetting templates - shapes for spells/etc which will automatically highlight friends/foes in the range
• placeables - non-animate objects to be put on the map to make it bit more 3d
• macros - possibility to script certain sequence of actions
• MapTool-like walls/FOV? Only monsters in FOV would be visible to players
• possibility to compose maps out of smaller pieces connecting together
• proper walk path calculation, taking terrain into account (this means also possibility to define terrain types)
• per-model states/effects, to indicate conditions/spells active
• fight/charge/die animations connected to proper actions
• etc, etc, etc

What is NOT in scope:

• full implementation of any particular ruleset. Roll 1d20+modifier, compare versus static number, perform another roll if greater-or-equal ->  possible, as script action, but not built-in assumption
• public servers/game finders/etc
• real-time mode
• any kind of AI/versus computer play

Development is managed on assembla, under address http://www.virtual-mat.net/. In future, bug tracking/feature requests/etc will be handled there, for now it is just a place to store source code and keep my internal tasks.