I had been hesitant about linking directly, because to be honest its a horrible forum and I am ashamed to say that its trolls bring out the worst in me
Anyway, the impression Maptool has on this forum is important if we consider ourselves to be in the business of recruiting new users. Not sure we can though, not until b90 is available.
So I tried out the beta version. All of my previous issue appear to be fixed with this verision. The new launcher is much nicer, and I think it will be easier to explain. I like the brief comments inside each field for memory and stack size.
I have aready been looking at Starman's framework and keeping an eye on the D&DNext framework. I'll probably take another look once the beta version is released, hopeful MacroPolicebox will be upgraded to function with a version other then just b87.
I'm one of those people who'll tend to point users who've never used a VTT to give Roll20 a try. The thing with Roll20 is that there's really zero setup, you just point your players to a URL and play. It has built in voice chat, though it sucks, but even then most everyone knows how to use Skype so that's easy to get around.
But while a web based VTT is going to be easier to use, I think it's also always going to lag behind a desktop VTT for features, performance, etc etc.
One issue I had with Maptool was that there's a huge learning curve with the frameworks. This is really understandable though because any framework is going to start off simple, then as users use it it'll grow in complexity which isn't a problem for people who've grown along with it, but that can be a real first hurdle to jump over for new users who come in late in the game.
One of the reasons I wrote my own Hero Lab to Maptool converter was because trying to learn lmarkus001's Pathfinder framework was a non-starter for me. Sozin's Tokenlab(another HL to Maptool converter) was the first time I was able to create useful Maptool tokens and I wanted to take that concept and run with it because Maptool is really the best VTT out there once you're able to get into it.
I think there's really good Maptool docs and videos out there. The hard parts are getting the app up and running, firewall issues(and both of these things have seen some really solid work the last couple revisions) and just having a simple basic functional framework that let's you get monster/PC stats into tokens and roll some dice.
Also ... learning the basic native features, the advanced native features and all of that a framework adds is just really a lot. We advise to start without a framework, add slowly features until you have a solid grasp of the basics.
But then this is just a way to handle a steep learning curve ...
@AM I'll have to backtrack when I get the time and check what fixes this. IIRC, I came across a couple of well-meaning regular expressions that did some weird things, though I'm not sure if this is the cause. If it is, then I'll definitely submit a patch for it.
@wolph No, I haven't yet. I'll take a look at it when things settle down.
@Jagged Ah. It's good to see that you're convincing some to come and try MT out again
Tree features of Roll20 my group seem to like very much:
[*]Having access to the sheet between sessions and be able to update macros
[*]Being able to use a playlist for sounds within the application
[*]Having an easy list of all characters available at all times
I suspect the whole Java and launcher issues lost us some users:
I am not entirely sure, but there was a number of connection problems and then one of our DMs (we have two alternating with various campaigns) could no longer make it work on his computer. The number of times we had to spend an hour getting everything to work (sometimes without apparent reason) was rather bad, but when it stopped working on a DM computer we gave up. We have had two sessions with roll20 thus far. One to learn about the campaign and the basics of the tool and one with actual gameplay (introduction/social so no test of fighting yet). We still use TokenTool to create our tokens and I am a bit sceptic to using Roll20 for D&D 4e
Tree features of Roll20 my group seem to like very much:
Having access to the sheet between sessions and be able to update macros
Being able to use a playlist for sounds within the application
Having an easy list of all characters available at all times
1 - I save my tokens at the end of the game. I usually don't have to create macros because FW has all the needed macros, but I may have to update token when leveling. DM provides a campaign file for us to do that.
2 - Fluff (more work for DM)
3 - Connection window, Init Panel or Map Explorer.
ps - Is it my imagination or did the fonts get smaller?
aliasmask wrote:ps - Is it my imagination or did the fonts get smaller?
ctrl+0 is the shortcut to set default zoom in most browsers incase you're one notch out. I've always been irritated with the small code size so I always wrap it in size=125. Why a forum function for coding is trying to promote eyestrain is beyond me.