Development

[icycalm]

So we spent an hour and a half dicking around with it with recoil and Rory.

dndbattlegrounds.net TaleSpire testing with recoil, icycalm and Some guy
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1077715657
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5WCd8gWb2w

Some aspects were much easier than I expected, and some were harder and more time-consuming. I certainly didn't accomplish my goal for today, which was to set up massive regions with towns and castles and forests and ruins, and flood them with units in the middle of warfare and take pics. I had figured it would be half an hour's worth of work, and I can see now that it could easily take a full day, if not more. Then again, maybe it just seems that way because I didn't bother to do the tutorials and look into the controls. So I need to spend a good day learning, and then another day or more to set up the scenes I want. I'll be doing this soon.

At any rate, we did this brief introduction and had fun with it, and we also got a bunch of viewers and a lot of messages in the chat, so it was a good first attempt. It's clearly the tool we need, and it can be very attractive to people if shown to them properly. We're not quite there yet, but I plan to get there soon.

And because I'd promised pics for today, but couldn't deliver, here are some of the coolest new ones from Steam. There's been an explosion of them over the last few weeks.















































































































And I've left the best for last. Someone finally saw fit to create a proper large battle scene. Nowhere near the wars I have in mind, but way bigger than anything we've seen in TaleSpire so far, or in any CRPG. Lots of verticality too in this scene, you really get a sense for the scale of the temple. Check the rays of dusky sunlight on the floor coming from the high windows. Tremendous tactical possibilities for a party caught up in this scene (the wisest of which would probably be to flee, but, precisely due to the tactical detail the program affords, it would be a gripping escape played down to the last movement and not simply hitting the "escape" command and waiting for a single die roll to determine the outcome).



Bonus stage. Someone managed to import a Space Marine: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2495974819



Awwwwww yeah. It's about to get real.

[icycalm]

Dude figured out how to import minis from Hero Forge!

Back again with custom minis from my group's campaign
https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... my_groups/



Fucking LEGEND!

Via TaleSpire subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/

If anyone can help me with this, report to the #cultdev channel on Discord. I'd like to start importing minis, preferably hundreds of them found for free online. We will of course be buying the ones we run as PCs, but we need countless of NPC ones, and we plain simply can't afford those. So we need to figure out haxxoring.

[icycalm]

ZELDA MODELS IN TALESPIRE!!! OMG I'LL GET AN ANEURYSM!!!



Talespire had better release Talesweaver or nintendo is coming after them
https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... weaver_or/

If they can get Nintendo models in there, they can get anything! We need to get on this asap!

[icycalm]

Finally a fortress populated with a bunch of units to show off the scale and immersion of the scenes TS can produce. Unparalleled atmosphere, especially when you realize every single item in the scene can be interacted with, unlike CRPGs where pretty much everything in the scene is glued to the ground and can't even be touched, let alone moved.

done my first map. can't wait to blow my friend's minds with the potential of this app!
https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... y_friends/

Good sir, we are moving from free roll20 to this, built in line of sight is mind blowing to us lol

Yeah, I try to always use this rather than Roll20 now. Line of sight and having actual height is great. Tabaxi running across the rooftops and down the sides of buildings is so wonderful to see in 3d.

Just ran a one shot in it yesterday. Soon as they saw the lighting system one of them made a shadow monk. Plus having 3d maps is just so great (being able to see height). Its such a great vtt!

[icycalm]

zomg you could import the PA models and play turn-based PA. You could import even the SupCom models. SupCom 2 as well.

When they churn out sci-fi biomes, I'll do it. The PA and SupCom universes will be a galaxy each among the countless galaxies of the Battlegrounds universe. And they can clash with each other, or with the 40k galaxy etc.

When someone adds animation you'll basically be able to play PA in a real-time VTT.

[icycalm]

Mod manager and library: https://talespire.thunderstore.io/?orde ... ded&page=1

There are some marginally helpful mods there, but overall very few mods yet. It’s very early days though and people are working on stuff.

The number one thing I would want is to make the miniatures move around the board on their own in semi-random patterns. Imagine having a town and a few hundred miniatures moving around while Syrinscape plays a town soundset. And some controls for the DM to pause a specific mini to initiate chat, or all of them to initiate turn-based battle.

It shouldn’t be that hard to make and it would take our game to the next level. If you get that far, all you need is a basic “attack” combat AI and you’ve got RTS D&D.

If anyone wants to work on this, let me know. The first thing to do would be to simply MOVE a miniature one square via the mod. If you can do this, I think you can do the whole thing.

I will look for modding resources. For now I have the following.

How to use plug-ins and mods with TaleSpire
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fJFxT6K7nTM

This guy purports to mod TaleSpire with all sorts of crazy shit like spell effects: https://twitter.com/millermark

I don’t know if he has succeeded in anything. It all sounds too good and too complex to be true. He streams his coding sessions on Twitch so, if he is capable, the streams could be helpful, and you can always tweet at him to ask for help. I should do that actually.

[icycalm]

OMG THIS GUY GETS ANIMATED MODELS INTO TALESPIRE!!!!!!!!!

Unofficial Mods - How To Convert Mixamo Assets To Unity AssetBundles For TaleSpire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMIengmpbFw



WATCH AT 39:15... I'VE NEVER SEEN SUCH BEAUTY IN MY WHOLE LIFE!!!!

WE GOTS TA FIGURE THIS SHIT OUT!!!!!

He can press keys and she performs different animations as if he's playing a fighting game lol. Keep watching from 39:15 to see this. Incrediburu.

[icycalm]

My first attempt at setting up an epic scene, Slaughter at Sundown: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2541627161



You can't really appreciate all the detail I've put into it from this angle, but the dragon and wyrms look cool, and you can see the scope of the scene and most of the units. If you could zoom in and pan around you'd see I have a dozen flying wizards and vampires and shit, and all kinds of armies with their leaders: humans, elves, dwarves and half-orcs versus undead and dragonkin.

If you look at my video and fast-forward past the halfway mark, you can see everything.

dndbattlegrounds.net TaleSpire testing with icycalm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOgqZU-BQMQ

I started off slow because I didn't know the controls, but I eventually figured out the camera, unit placing and all kinds of unit manipulation like enlargement, flying, etc., visual effects, music, and finally photo mode which allows you to zoom out as much as you like. So you see this wasn't the best board with which to demonstrate massive armies because the bridge constrained me in terms of space. Next attempt will be with an open area so I can flood it with units.

It's a constant battle however between wanting to zoom in so I can show the cool units, to wanting to zoom out so I can show the scene's scope.

I guess I could use a 4K screen here.

[icycalm]

This looks exactly like what an Age of Empires-Rust hybrid would look like. And we have it in our Steam libraries to play RIGHT NOW if we just devise the rules for it.

[icycalm]

Building a Medieval Bourg :) (video in description)
https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... scription/



I have never seen such realism and beauty in a medieval town, not even in a real one. It doesn't even look like TaleSpire. How did he get it to look like that?

Looks great! How did you get your textures to look so dynamic?

lots of experience and work ;)

He left out talent.

The pic above makes even the NEW AoE look like dogshit. Ugly, fake dogshit. Now getting your actual IN-GAME graphics to look like that isn't easy. Above all, you need to start with great assets. If you copy-paste crap or even merely mediocre assets, there's no saving your game: it will look crap. Start with the best assets, and then learn to manipulate the camera and lighting, and you should be able to get close to the pic. I suspect a 4K screen could help too.

The possibilities of this program are infinite, and the possibilities of a version of it that includes proper movement and AI are infinite squared.

[icycalm]

Enchanted Island
https://talestavern.com/slab/enchanted-island/





Dudes are creating miracles and the program just released with barebones assets and no one even owns it yet.


P.S. Don't follow the link because it contains spoilers.

[icycalm]

My TS screenshot is currently at the top of most popular recent screenshots: https://steamcommunity.com/app/720620/screenshots/

I would appreciate a few more likes if you could spare them to get this nearest the top of all-time screenshots. I will be asking you for this again with some upcoming screens I have of various UE phases, and other screens I might set up just to demonstrate to people how cool TS can be if you try to play epic stuff in it.

I set up a screenshot showcase in my Steam profile to promote this.

[icycalm]

Early Access Content Pack 4: Caverns & Creatures
https://steamcommunity.com/games/720620 ... 9870671542

Out of the cavernous gloom comes our fourth Early Access Content Pack. Expand your caverns with the teeth and bones of the depths below - steel yourselves for what lurks behind the long shadows they cast!

In this update, you can find:

Creatures

• Cave Horror
• Burrow Beast
• Rust Eater

Props

• 14 Stalagmite, Stalactite, and misc Cave pieces.

Have fun! And see you for our next patch!

[icycalm]

Dudes just look at this and tell me in which isometric CRPG you've seen anything more epic: https://talestavern.com/slab/caer-dineval/



And that's BEFORE they've added snowing.

It's from Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden: https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tablet ... rostmaiden



Pretty much the entire adventure is already on TaleSpire.

[icycalm]

Final Design in Blender for the dog models with coloring
https://www.reddit.com/r/talespire/comm ... dels_with/

There are a ton of videos on how to create and edit minis in blender. I did a quick video to show off how to import custom assets using a guide written by u/ansonr

Blender is a 3d modelling program meant to make objects for use in other projects like unity, tabletop simulator, or stl 3d printing. It can also help you import heroforge models into talespire. If you start experimenting you can do a whole bunch of other stuff like give a doberman chainmail and a helmet

What we need is a site that hosts models just like we have two sites that host slabs and boards. If someone made such a site, it'd be a game-changer. Instant infinite miniatures and animated models.

[icycalm]

By the way, I figured how you can get horses and horse-riding, and even swimming and climbing and whatever the fuck else you want (magic-carpet riding, skydiving) into TaleSpire RIGHT NOW.

Simply grab a model of a guy on a horse from any videogame, and insert it into TaleSpire. Then remove the guy from the horse and add both of them as separate miniatures. Now you have three miniatures that the DM can give you and take away from you depending on what you're doing.

Same with swimming and climbing. E.g. Life is Feudal had swimming and climbing animations. Just import them into TaleSpire, remove the base of the miniature, and then place them on water or on cliffs etc. It should look perfect.

[icycalm]

Tundra slab (camp with aurora borealis)
https://talestavern.com/slab/tundra-sla ... -borealis/



It blurs the line between physical toy and videogame.

From Rime of the Frostmaiden again.

[icycalm]

Curse of Strahd Barovia Campaign Map
https://talestavern.com/slab/curse-of-s ... paign-map/



The above is only part of the map btw. Click through for more images. This is the full map:



Overworld Hex Tiles
https://talestavern.com/slab/overworld-hex-tiles/



Miniaturized Overworld Map
https://talestavern.com/slab/my-miniature-world-map/



You can make overworlds of any scale, all the way to tiny hexes. Since you can have multiple boards per campaign, some of these boards can be the overworld (or underworld, or plane etc.), and you use it like a normal overworld. You can shrink down the players' models to tiny size, and they move those on the overworld, and when there's an encounter you switch to the full-size board.

However, the beauty of TaleSpire is precisely that you don't really NEED to use overworlds anymore because the boards can be so huge, and chained together. So you can play the whole game in zoomed-in 1:1 scale, as long as you can find or build all the areas of course. And that's harder than it sounds, because the adventures only you give you maps of the encounter areas, they don't give you zoomed-in maps of the travel regions in-between. They don't give you miles and miles of forest for example. Videogames that are played in full zoomed-in scale don't give you miles and miles either, they just make the walk from one town to the next five minutes lol. That's why they feel so retarded, with "cities" made up of ten houses and the like. I think the Pathfinder CRPGs fix this by NOT allowing you to walk from town to town zoomed in, and zooming you out into an overworld for the trip. At least that's what I've deduced from screenshots because I've never seen anyone discuss this. So that's actually an IMPROVEMENT for CRPGs over their retarded five-minute walk between towns.

So the actual D&D adventures give you only zoomed-out overworld maps for the overland travel (which are the ones our World Anvil overworld is composed of). So that means that when players travel for days between say two cities, the DM would have to make miles and miles of TaleSpire terrain in-between in order to play fully zoomed-in in TaleSpire. Now there is a random terrain generator that could be handy for this, but I've tried it and though it works pretty well for small areas, it's too awkward to use for miles and miles of terrain as it doesn't just give you the whole area it generates in one slab, it gives it to you in I think it is 16 slabs, and you have to stitch them together, which takes ages to do properly because TaleSpire's snap-to feature is so weak. You can see me struggling with it here, starting at 1:16:22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXYHXPi2MHY

If I wanted to set up a day's journey this way, I'd have to work an entire day! And that's without populating this journey with road traffic, roadside inns and farms, encounters etc. If someone made this, it'd be insane—nothing like this has ever been done in a videogame—but unless we get a super usable terrain generator, no one's going to do it. Unless creators start putting these things together and posting them in the sharing sites. Then they could potentially map out an entire planet this way, and DMs just pick whatever regions their players are in, and use them. That's actually the future of TaleSpire and whatever VTTs follow it up: eventually we'll have the entire D&D planets in full zoomable Planetary Annihilation style. We need a lot more assets to do this justice though, as we can't have every region of the planet have farmhouses with the exact same style roof, etc.

Some resources.

The terrain generator I used in the video:

TalesTerrain v0.2.9
https://quzzar.github.io/TalesTerrain/

And a forest generator I haven't tried yet:

Forest Generator v1.8 - D20 Army Knife
http://d20armyknife.com/talespireforest/

So TaleSpire is extremely versatile and can accommodate any scale. It's just a matter of people releasing tools that make all scales far more usable than they currently are. And this will happen, I have no doubt. We already have so many tools, and the thing has been out for only a couple of months.

[icycalm]

The dude's "hexes" above aren't hexes btw. They are "octs". That's why I am not sure they can be used for the "Ultimate Campaign" rules. But I guess we could use octs.



This is what a hex looks like. It communicates with six other hexes. The dude's octs above communicate with eight, if we include the diagonals.

[icycalm]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2460814096



The future perspective of D&D.

TaleSpire is holding it back because they refuse to offer over-the-shoulder and first-person cameras, but it is possible to manually use a camera like that, so I hope modders will be able to add them so that the DM can lock you in this type of camera while he sees the world from overhead.

[icycalm]

Fantastic new piece for the Warhammer RPG.

Untergard's Bridge
https://talestavern.com/slab/untergards-bridge/







It's from an adventure called Through the Drakwald, which I believe is included in the second edition rules book.





You won't be able to build any official stuff either in my standalone videogames, or in my role-playing universe. The only way to play this stuff is to go where it is located.

This guy is a new creator, he'll go far: https://talestavern.com/userprofile/2558/

[icycalm]

Another new piece, a fantastic swamp.

LIVING SWAMP
https://talestavern.com/slab/living-swamp/

Please check all CRPGs ever and get back to me if any of them can match the drama of this scene:



Both my standalone strategy game and my role-playing universe will generate scenes like this every freakin' hour. Every few freakin' minutes really.

[icycalm]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2544700831

The atmosphere effects can really change the feeling of an area

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2528727776

Sewer Time!

[icycalm]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/720620 ... 7450281601

Early Access Release Pack 05: Adventure for Charity (St. Jude Hospital)
BUILD-ID: 7074049- Download Size: 46.8MB



Hail and harken, good folk of the land - it's time for another Early Access Release Pack!

This one is a bit unique. We recently ran an adventure on BlueBoxRPG’s St. Jude Charity Live Stream for some good ol’ fashion TTRPG fun while supporting a good cause - and of course, we used TaleSpire!

This Pack contains the minis, known as the Company of the Bounding Boulder, that starred in the adventure.

Creatures:

Jonny Ree (BR) as Hubert Rocksocks (Dark Gnome Caster)
Jason Roy (BR) as Lok Rocksocks (Dark Gnome Warrior)
Demongund as Rahmris (Half-Demon Caster)
Istallri as Sand of the FordRiver (Human Warrior)
MadWizard as Baubard "Bobby" Fibbletor (Dwarf Warrior)
BlueBoxRPG as The Blue Wizard (Human Caster)
Plus, an added bonus - the most dreaded beast of the land - a Bunny Rabbit.

Fixes:

Replaced reflection probe rendering with custom solution improving performance
Creatures with no name get asset name instead
Validate hash of sector files and non-unique creature data
Double right-click (move camera) is now pixel-perfect

Other:

Added 4 new stat slots adding up to 8 total.

Until the next pack - have fun!

BUILD-ID: 7074049- Download Size: 46.8MB

https://steamcommunity.com/app/720620/e ... 3805233553

[icycalm]

Retards in that comment thread are telling me to use my imagination "because that's what D&D is about!"

My reply: https://steamcommunity.com/app/720620/e ... 3806829776