http://itabletop.com/
Looks interesting, I am not sold, but over all it looks kinda slick.
It looks very polished, I wonder how it plays?
Have you downloaded it yet to see how it runs? The marketing speak makes it sound great, but I do wonder what happens with five or six webcams going at the same time...
Still, I'm gonna check it out and see what it's like. I wonder if any of our D&D players would be interested in virtual tabletop games?
Something to consider that's for sure!
Might be neat. The SilverTop version once its done might be more neat as I wont have to run the program in a vm :o
lolz at linuxer
So, I downloaded and installed iTabletop. Here's how it works, basically:
I have a new chat program running. In that chat program, I can have contacts and place them into groups (like any chat program). I can then make Gatherings, and invite contacts to Gatherings (Video, Audio, and Custom Audio/Video Gatherings). If I had any friends I could try out the Video Gathering. Err, if I had any friends with iTabletop installed.
To sign into the chat program I had to create a user account. That user account also lets me sign into the forums to see the FAQ written by another user: http://www.itabletop.com/Support/iTabletopSupportForums/tabid/133/aff/6/aft/37/afv/topic/Default.aspx (http://www.itabletop.com/Support/iTabletopSupportForums/tabid/133/aff/6/aft/37/afv/topic/Default.aspx). Too bad it requires a login for an FAQ, that would've been useful info to make publicly accessible. Oh well.
So the strength of iTabletop is (according to its makers) its simplicity. You see a shared map and can move things around on it, you can video- or audio-conference (or both), there's a simple dice roller in the chat section, and there's no complicated scripting options.
I've tried the mapper and quickly got frustrated with it, though. It's completely non-obvious what object I'm grabbing, so I kept moving the grid by mistake, and there's no Undo for any moves. And I'm not interested in making glossy maps for online play, I just want to be able to sketch out the surroundings and get on with it. But no, sketching out the map was frustrating.
Let me expand on that - it didn't just frustrate me, it pissed me off. Basically they made this great videoconferencing software for businesses, and are now trying to shoe-horn that into a Virtual Tabletop for roleplaying games. The videoconferencing part works great, but the shared whiteboard doesn't work very well for maps.
That would be the point wouldn't it? The shared whiteboard stuff?
So your saying we should host a OCS / Live Meeting server instead ;)
iTabletop is sorta like running a Live Meeting server, yes. A Virtual Tabletop, though, needs to allow easy square and hex grid mapping. And iTabletop does not allow easy mapping.
Quote from: Lazybones on May 28, 2009, 03:59:10 PM
So your saying we should host a OCS / Live Meeting server instead ;)
Hmmm... seeing as though we are setting one up at work currently... and with our MSDN subscription.... :P