Devember2020 RPG virtual tabletop

Community Blog
#1

My first post!

I am creating a virtual tabletop for RPGs similar to Roll20 for devember. I already have a little demo up at role.quaternion.site

Key Technologies being used

  • Rust compiled to WebAssembly(frontend)
  • Rust’s Rocket Framework(backend)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Hosted on Linode

In August I created what I call a dice interpreter. Give it a command such as

/roll floor(3d6/2)[Fire] + 1d12[Piercing] \

and it will compute and format the result of the dice rolls.

Today I setup the server and database to let users change their username, email, and passwords aswell as store roll macros.

During devember I hope to get the server in a usable state. For that to happen I will have to create an extensible character sheet and map systems, manage game state, as well as a few other features.

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#2

Sounds like a fun project, there are a few options out there besides roll 20 but not a ton of FOSS options. FoundryVTT is probably the closest to what you are doing but isnt FOSS. As a users of similar VTT (Fantasy grounds) the biggest feature these days is LoS (Line of Sight) for tokens. Keep that in your mind while you are working on it not that it needs done at the start just so if you have a way to try and implement it later.

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#3

Thanks.
Yeah I’ve checked out foundry before. Line of sight is definitely something I’m planning on but there are miles of ground work before it will be added.
Do you know if there are any VTTs in the browser that support 3D maps? Something like Tabletop simulator

#4

Figured as much, just wanted to make sure it was on your mind.

Not that I am aware of, I was joking with my friend who was playing baldurs gate 3 that VTT will be that one day. Honestly 3D maps are probably not a huge deal tho, on FGU you can do some LoS tricks to make it so you can see just barely on things that are higher (PITA to get it all correct, but doable). Portals that link to other maps / sections of a map can replace the 3D element in most things.

TLDR not that I am aware of

#5

Figure I would do a small update. The main thing I wanted to share was that I created a Kanban board on github projects. Now people can follow development in almost real time.

Some other small things I’ve done

  • Started to implement the map renderer which uses webgl.
  • Fixed some css and interface bugs.

I meant to do more but most of my time has been eaten up by my job search.

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