RPTools.net

Another request that is probably redundant (or already in; we're using 1.1): my last session had a GM, five players, and about four observers. Occasionally one of the observers would accidentally move a token or something. It would be nice to be able to connect as an Observer (rather than GM or Player), which would basically not give you the ability to do anything but scroll and zoom.

We've wanted an observer role for quite some time. My hesitation has been that it may adversely affect your player's experience as the observers consume bandwidht obtaining the textures of the maps.

I'll add a tracker though since this would be super useful.

Yeah, but if they connect as a player anyway, then the same penalty is applied. =)

If you have an observer mode, it would make a list of games even better. So any DM could flag their game as registered with RPtools.net and observable. Thus anyone could hop in a take a look at the game. This would be great for getting more of a gaming community than just a bunch of guys who use the same tool with their friends.

Dracorat wrote:Yeah, but if they connect as a player anyway, then the same penalty is applied. =)

The difference is that players stick around, so you only get the penalty once. Every observer that desides to Check You Out will get a fesh copy of the image assets. So if 10 people simultaneously decide to observe your game, you'll be uploading all of you image assets 10 times. Then a couple minutes later another 3 join, 7 of the first disconnect ... ad infinium

trevor wrote:

Dracorat wrote:Yeah, but if they connect as a player anyway, then the same penalty is applied. =)

The difference is that players stick around, so you only get the penalty once. Every observer that desides to Check You Out will get a fesh copy of the image assets. So if 10 people simultaneously decide to observe your game, you'll be uploading all of you image assets 10 times. Then a couple minutes later another 3 join, 7 of the first disconnect ... ad infinium

As I think about it though, one of the features on the short list is to allow image repositories that are hosted on servers with beefy pipelines, so you would in essence offload the image distribution from your local MT server, which would make observers more practical.

Sounds like a good egg to place before the chicken!

this all sounds like good ideas to help build a community of gamers.

observer ability might be good for iCon as well.

snikle wrote:observer ability might be good for iCon as well.

I'd better get cracking !

Good Trevor

trevor wrote:

Dracorat wrote:Yeah, but if they connect as a player anyway, then the same penalty is applied. =)

The difference is that players stick around, so you only get the penalty once. Every observer that desides to Check You Out will get a fesh copy of the image assets. So if 10 people simultaneously decide to observe your game, you'll be uploading all of you image assets 10 times. Then a couple minutes later another 3 join, 7 of the first disconnect ... ad infinium

You could designate an observer quota that is set by the server/GM...
Default 10, then when it's full, a message appears indicating it's full but may be available in the future, then when someone drops, it's open

Good idea emryys

And maybe the off-site server thing wouldn't be too tough? I'm thinking of something like the explorer path, but using URLs instead. Whenever the client needs to get a new resource, it checks the local explorer path first, then tries putting the resource name at the end of each URL and tries them.

Maybe let the URLs come first and check timestamps only, then if the resource isn't found locally, go back to the URL to actually obtain the resource.

Hmm, that sounds like more work than I initially thought it might be...

Heh. Actually the idea is that you can have a list of repositories.

First it checks your local cache, if not found it will walk down the repos, if none of them have it, it gets it from the maptool server.

Since the images are keyed off the MD5 sum of the actual image, it's possible to know you've got the exact correct image, regardless of the source of the image.

I will be creating a php script that people can drop into a directory on whatever server they want, and it will index the images that are accessible under the dir heirarchy, you then add that php script URL to your maptool instance and it will use it to look for images.

I'm hoping I can convince some sites like rpgmapshare to drop it in and be a repo. We'll add it to our gallery, and ask users to post their image repos