RPTools.net

Together with Geek Chic, I brought my 42" Multi Touch display to Gencon to demo in a new table we're building together (the Locus).

Below are a couple of images. They aren't great images due to the fact that I spent 99% of my time demo'ing MapTools on the table.

MapTools was a huge success by the way. Many are the people who were interested in Map Tools after I showed them lighting and fog of war support!

Awesome!

Very slick!

Hey! My SO and I talked to you for a bit on Thursday -- very cool setup.

Excellent.
Saw this also about your table :
http://www.rpgblog2.com/2010/08/zacks-g ... day-3.html

(middle of the page)

Very nice!

Thanks for the plug -- and the pics!

No problem! I use maptools for my own games (all the maps I demo'd are from a spelljammer game I'm running).

I'll be honest, the tools attracted as much attention as the table. This is how it should be. The table is really just an interactive display when you boil it all down.

The plan is to add full Multi-touch support back into the RPTools MapTool application chain. Azhrei, Is this something that RPTools would be interested in?

Do you have a link to more info about your table?

grimjack2600 wrote:No problem! I use maptools for my own games (all the maps I demo'd are from a spelljammer game I'm running).

I'll be honest, the tools attracted as much attention as the table. This is how it should be. The table is really just an interactive display when you boil it all down.

The plan is to add full Multi-touch support back into the RPTools MapTool application chain. Azhrei, Is this something that RPTools would be interested in?

So, did you make a custom Maptool Build, or something else? There are some plans/hopes for putting alternate input device support into Maptool at some point, but not quite sure when that might happen.

grimjack2600 wrote:The plan is to add full Multi-touch support back into the RPTools MapTool application chain. Azhrei, Is this something that RPTools would be interested in?

Sorry, I missed this somehow.

Yes, we'd be interested in hearing about it. If your code is well partitioned from the rest of MT that would be the easiest for us to integrate. However, a bunch of the mouse handling code is currently a bit "strange" and will be rewritten in 1.4 so the actual glue that binds your input code to MT will be different.

grimjack2600 wrote:Together with Geek Chic, I brought my 42" Multi Touch display to Gencon to demo in a new table we're building together (the Locus).

Below are a couple of images. They aren't great images due to the fact that I spent 99% of my time demo'ing MapTools on the table.

MapTools was a huge success by the way. Many are the people who were interested in Map Tools after I showed them lighting and fog of war support!

P1040011_resize.JPG

P1040005_resize.JPG

Simply incredible- I'm speechless. This is SUCH an awesome display and I'd love to play on a game table like that (when my buddies and I get together, we often use a huge t.v., two laptops, and take turns moving our pieces with a mouse (very cool, but I miss the miniature feel sometimes).

Sorry for the delay, just got back from doing another round of Demoing at PAX Prime.

At this point the we have not done anything to MapTool to make it run with our table. We have some simple mouse emulator type interactions which work well, but the plan is larger than that.

The basic events we have now are stock to Win7 and OSX:

* Zoom
* Single finger and two finger pan
* Rotate
* Single finger and two finger tap
* Press and tap

There is also the press and hold but I shy away from that now.

The directly we're going is to integrate Fiducial marker tracking and events. This means an additional input option in MapTool. Using this method miniatures can be used as well as interaction objects. One simple example is have the area effect shapes mapped to an interaction object that causes the shape to be displayed dependent upon which face is up. So flipping the object to a new face selects a different area effect shape, then rotating the object scales the shape up or down. Finally the position and orientation of the object determine where the effect will occur. All of the orientation and location data is currently available via our vision interface (Community Core Vision 1.4 or better) and can create events which would need to be handled. My initial plan is to leverage heavily from MT4j (MultiTouch 4 Java) when adding these elements to MapTool.

I would love to get an official sanction to add MT support to MapTool.

Should we spawn a separate thread for MapTool MT discussions?

grimjack2600 wrote:All of the orientation and location data is currently available via our vision interface (Community Core Vision 1.4 or better) and can create events which would need to be handled. My initial plan is to leverage heavily from MT4j (MultiTouch 4 Java) when adding these elements to MapTool.

I would love to get an official sanction to add MT support to MapTool.

Should we spawn a separate thread for MapTool MT discussions?

I have zero experience with MT4j but I'm certainly willing to help in integrating that library. Feel free to start a thread in the Developer Notes section to discuss technical details. One of the first goals for 1.4 is to better modularize the existing code and that could serve you well as the input handling would be separated into a set of APIs for input event handling. Start your other thread and we can get into it in more detail.

This looks very cool. Would using miniatures on the table interfere with the multitouch screen? Also, does the table have its own "player" connection or is it a mirror of the laptop that's connected to it?

I gave serious thought to using my ipad as a map when I was judging games in the Paizo room, but the screen was way too small for it to be a viable idea. This looks like the best of both worlds...touch screen capability AND maptool functionality. If moving a mini across the touch screen could somehow simulate moving a virtual token(and revealing fog of war), major league awesome.