Virtual Table Top

[AbdulAlhazred]

Too bad wizards won't just hire the maptool guys to freelance for them. If they hire freelance designers/writers, they should hire freelance developers too. If they worked with the maptool and masterplan guys to create an integrated system via DDI, i think they would see a huge boost in subscriptions.



Yeah, they uploaded them shortly after I spent 2 hours making a Keep out of dungeon tiles and drawing tool.

Speaking as a developer... Yeah, you'd think that hiring the Maptool guys might work, except they are all really highly paid developers already. You've got a team of 5 or 6 core guys, each of which can scoff at $100k a year offer. They aren't coming cheap. I'm pretty sure WotC isn't paying anything like what they would need to pay to get the best of the best.

Beyond that there's a big difference between "yeah, we mess with this on our weekends and when we feel like, and someday feature X will get in there and bug Y will go away, and if person A on platform M can't seem to get it to work, well we'll look into it." and commercial software with commercial support and commercial software reliability, written to something resembling a schedule and conforming to something like a spec. Ironically the Maptool community probably can overall proceed faster, but they have no agenda. There's not some update they are aiming to get out. They're not promising a specific feature, or needing to get some tweak done for the release of some new rules. Management just can't live with "stuff will get done someday" and "dunno what that will cost, we'll tell you when we do it".

The thing is too, a piece of software developed as a hobby doesn't have to be designed with some kind of business strategy in mind. Maptool has NO good way to import anyone else's data (people have cobbled together macros to parse things like stat blocks, sort of). Sure, maybe it can be added, and then again maybe not, or maybe not at a reasonable cost. Nobody had to be paid to sit down and map that out and make sure it could happen, which is exactly the sort of things that keep WotC guys busy I'm sure. That and fighting fires. People are paying for the software, you GOTTA fight those fires RIGHT NOW, drop everything, put the fire out, get back to work, lost a week.

Free Software is just a different world from commercial software. There's a reason why things like OO and Linux and Apache are darned popular, because IF you do it right you can have some of the advantages of free and some of the advantages of commercial. I dunno if WotC could ever do that though. The whole thing is so bound up in their IP that it is unlikely.

 

[Kzach]

I'm about to start a 4e online campaign. I have FGII, and am familiar with it, so I've gotten over the rather large learning curve already on that VT. Is it really that much more worth my while to switch to Maptools?

Honestly, probably not worth starting over with Maptools.

If all things were equal, then I'd recommend Maptools over FG2 any day of the week. But if you've already put all the time and energy into figuring FG2 out, then the advantages of using Maptool over FG2 are significantly reduced to the point of probably not making it worthwhile.

That said, it also requires that all your players have FG2 as well. So if that becomes a problem, then I'd dump FG2 because one of the best things about Maptools is the community and a constant stream of potential new players, most of whom already have a grasp of Maptools and obviously even if they don't, there's no buy-in so the learning curve is the only obstacle.

 

[Hussar]

Does anyone know why the VTT will not allow you to import your own background maps?

For me, that's pretty much a non-starter. I have no interest in using their tiles - I like drawing my own maps.