Rolegate, interactive maps -- New Options for Play-by-Post?

[Rowan]

Has anyone used Rolegate yet? https://www.rolegate.com/

It's a persistent chat play-by-post format that looks promising. Wondering if it would work well for BR-style games, better than or in addition to forums (if it can be integrated somehow)?

Also, has anyone found a magical interactive map software, yet?

This would be for just having a BR map with clickable provinces that let you dive into the stats and configure things, ideally build out actions to submit. Clickable map with data tables and forms to submit for actions -- it's amazing it's still so hard to do this.

It looked like Worldographer http://worldographer.com/ had some promise, but I don't think it's interactive enough. Nobody has yet built out a Tabletop Simulator or similar for BR, nor has there been a mod to one of the major strategy games like Total War that I'm aware of (which is more tactical, battlefield focused, anyway, where BR is really strategic, realm focused, on the wider map).

I had been exploring some of the actual mapping/GIS software or even interactive map tools on things like PowerBI, but I don't have enough knowledge of those yet.

[Vaelmar]

Speaking from a developer perspective you'd want something that is an easy to access medium for all players, handles the prominent UI tasks well and is written in a native programming language with access to libraries or has robust scripting and database capabilities.

Ideally this means:
- Handles map UI with submenus for actions and information popups
- Has messaging similar to a forum, for private messages and rooms
- Has real-time chat with ability to add separate rooms
- Can handle adventures (rolling dice in a room, group access to character info)
- Organizes and handles game data to facilitate the game (functions to handle the tedious calculations and possibly generate events/rumors/news, etc)
- Doesn't require software installation on client machines

Vassal (http://www.vassalengine.org/index.php) has been mentioned in the past on these forums. It might be easiest to combine forums with something that can handle a map and game database, along with chatting. If RoleGate can handle scripting, data structures and is easy to build UI elements it could be nice.

[Messy1]

Has anyone used Rolegate yet? https://www.rolegate.com/

It's a persistent chat play-by-post format that looks promising. Wondering if it would work well for BR-style games, better than or in addition to forums (if it can be integrated somehow)?

Also, has anyone found a magical interactive map software, yet?

This would be for just having a BR map with clickable provinces that let you dive into the stats and configure things, ideally build out actions to submit. Clickable map with data tables and forms to submit for actions -- it's amazing it's still so hard to do this.

It looked like Worldographer http://worldographer.com/ had some promise, but I don't think it's interactive enough. Nobody has yet built out a Tabletop Simulator or similar for BR, nor has there been a mod to one of the major strategy games like Total War that I'm aware of (which is more tactical, battlefield focused, anyway, where BR is really strategic, realm focused, on the wider map).

I had been exploring some of the actual mapping/GIS software or even interactive map tools on things like PowerBI, but I don't have enough knowledge of those yet.

Hi,

Well, I was looking in to Campaign Cartographer 3+ so maybe check it out . . .

https://www.profantasy.com/products/cc3.asp

Hope that it's helpful. Would be interested to see what you come up with.

Best,
Messy1

[Vaelmar]

As a developer an ideal solution would be something web based so that everyone can interact with it using java or flash(ugh) for the map and room UI. The backend and data could be run through a number of available free solutions. You could combine it with some forum and chat software or use something else with it such as Discord and a web forum for the least amount of work possible to get a minimum viable prototype. It would still take a large number of hours to get it going due to the number of lists, actions and data involved. Personally I would go a data intake route, getting the map, province, culture and npc data created from data files so custom worlds could be made relatively easily.

Foundry Virtual Tabletop software is new and looks pretty promising in terms of maps and GUI, it's in beta now. Below is an example vid, you can see a campaign style map and interaction at ~3:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=234&v=Iz-2lW3Ac_w
https://www.patreon.com/foundryvtt