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Author Topic: Virtual Tabletop Wargaming Program  (Read 1526 times)

Trekkin

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Virtual Tabletop Wargaming Program
« on: October 12, 2010, 08:49:16 am »

First, a snippet of backstory: my friends and I all like tabletop wargaming. We all live in vastly distant states now. Additionally, we're all much better at 3d modeling than at painting, so I've been trying to figure out how to basically assemble a 3d surface and a bunch of models in virtual space and let two people on different terminals modify the position of the latter on the former. That way all the things we need physical models for (real LOS, for one, and real distances) aren't compromised, and we can keep playing even though we can't haul crates of minis around...and show off our 3d skills while saving the cost of the models.

So I need a 3d design program, ideally something like Lightwave, that isn't limited to one terminal providing input. Does anything like that currently exist, ideally in free form? I'm currently testing a suite of programs working in concert, with Gametable providing the random results in a way both players can verify, the aforementioned Modeler's companion program Layout letting us control the cameras and move the models around, Dropbox acting to put the current layout and the current game's models in a memory location accessible to both players, and AutoMate handling fetching the files as they become available and copying them over at the end of each phase. It's a bit like correspondence chess, and incredibly kludgy, so I was wondering if some 3d program out there exists that already takes multiple inputs, thereby making the game much more fluid...and I couldn't think of a better forum to ask.
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