Legality of HeroScape emulators?

[Pygon]

Since placing and reporting order markers manually would be an initial turnoff, I got to work on an Order Marker screen that allows you to place markers, report them to everyone else, reveal one at a time, and clear them and start over. It's working well. It summarizes the order markers in a grid, shows which ones are revealed, which ones not, etc.

What Pygon sees:



What bob sees:



Unfortunately, it doesn't cover all possibilities. Namely, you can't remove any yet (see Dund (EDIT: hey, I didn't put that umlaut there!), Glyph of Oreld, Silver Surfer). So for now, that will have to be handled "manually".

If I really want to cover the possibilities, the app should show all the army cards for each player along with the counters on them, rather than summarize them by figure name. Then, if you want to remove any, you just right click the marker and select Remove, or right click the card itself and select Remove All Order Markers. Then the other player accepts or refuses (in case it's incorrect) the operation. But that means I have to handle army cards, which I'm not doing yet. It also means you'll have to decide which army card to place the first removed figure on if you're using a lot of commons (imagine having three Stinger cards and the opposing player controls Dund. Will you put all your Order Markers on one Stinger card, or put one on all three? This also affects how many you can move if one dies and it's on a card with an unrevealed Order Marker. EDIT: After reading Dund's card, splitting up the Order Markers wouldn't matter, not for him anyway.), which adds a level of inconvenience for new players. I'll want it to be as much drag-and-drop as possible.

All of this I have yet to get into the program. It will be a lot of extra work to accommodate, what, 5% of the playtime situations, if that. But if I want it to be a full emulator, then that's what it needs. It may be some time before this much gets in there. But in the meantime, simple Order Marker operation is now supported.

And then there's the possibility of a Ne-Gok-Sa on one side Mind Shackling a Ne-Gok-Sa from the other side. Yech. How do you track that even on the board game? How do you decide which army card to put more wounds on?

EDIT: Saving and loading games with Order Markers, along with the requisite repairing for disconned players now working. Next big project may be recording a game and allowing playback. Not sure about that one yet, though. Perhaps army card drafting (just a screen that tracks point totals and reports your draft to others) would be more economical.

[Pygon]

14 more figures added. I keep visiting my local Target since they seem to put up a new Wave pack every week or two as they run out. I also ordered one from Hasbro.

Here they are on a peak in Hero-X's Trinity Canyon.

It would have been 16 but I was negligent and hesitant, and missed out on the Monks and Guards pack.

*click*

[Bengi]

This is great Pygon. I hope you get it to a point where you're willing to go public. I'd love to be able to play online sometimes.

[Pygon]

One barrier of going public is the trouble of manually registering those OCX's in Vista. Someone could screw up their machines trying to get it to work. So I'd like to get a more foolproof setup running.

Another is, of course, the legality of going public with it. It's still a foggy issue, and simply hoping Hasbro politely turns away because they don't see it hurting their profits isn't exactly reassuring enough. I don't know how far they could or would go if they felt the need, even though I would fully cooperate with their reserved rights.

In addition, not all figures are in there yet (I could put the information in there, but the figures wouldn't have the graphics), and it doesn't support custom figures or terrain. I'm not sure what everyone would want out of it, and I wouldn't want to get inundated with requests at this time.

Finally, I could just put clients out there, but I'm the only one running a Host, so my sessions might get banged with other people wanting to join If I go public, I would just release the Host version to everyone.

[Karkadinn]

Since potential legal red tape is still worrying you, consider the efforts of your predecessors. Gempukku and Apparentice both use separated database files for their cards that are quite apart from the actual program. That way, if things go south, you ditch the database if necessary, but the main program itself is clean as a whistle. With an easy enough file system, you could even use that to enable others to update the database for their customs or for other official units later on, if you got sick of doing it.
And personally I'm hoping Vista will die a miserable death, but I can't blame you for striving for maximum compatibility.

[Pygon]

Separating the figure data into a file is certainly an option. However, it can also cause a massive headache if people hoping to hook up with each other decide to modify it for their own purposes and it causes overlaps. The Host could send its figure data file down to the connecting clients as an override, I suppose... but then everyone would need to make sure they have the same textures. Bleh.

I'll keep it in mind. Thanks for the insight.

[Gomolka]

Despite the "cheesy" graphics of the maps, figures, etc, this is a huge step up for the HeroScape community. Hopefully some day you will have a full beta version open to the public for all to use.

Keep working at it and improving! All of your hard work will pay off some day. Maybe your services will be as good as or better than what VirtualScape has to offer.

[Pygon]

It isn't really my intent to replace VirtualScape. VS allows you to make maps, and does it very well. eScape is just a way to play online when you can't play in person.

At this time, improving the graphics also isn't on my list. The way it is now, it does the job, and that's all I need. I was never planning on offering full 3D figures, accurate structure models, pretty textures and shadows, etc. As such, it also won't support true LOS, doesn't check for collisions between figures (*cough* Nilfheim) and doesn't allow tweaking the positions and rotations of figures behind barriers, so it won't be something that can be used to sanction online HeroScape tournaments, because it won't and was never intended to truly replace the tabletop game. But it's a 90-95% accurate replacement, I think, and that's enough for casual play.

Here's a tentative list of things I'm THINKING about adding:

* (likely) More Wave figures and graphics, as they are available to me
* Move figure and texture references to a data file, host sends this file as an override to clients (not necessary if it stays private, of course)
* [DONE] Count land movement over bridge walls, battlements (2 from inside, 3 from outside) and ruins (height 6) where applicable.
* VS file converter (will make a .txt for eScape to load, or will load it directly)
* Army cards with Order Markers and destroyed figures on them, allows for more Order Marker and other operations (removal of Order Markers because of Dund, tracking where Finn was placed when destroyed, etc.)
* Army drafting with point value tracking
* 3D rolling dice with sound effects
* Directional lighting (not shadows, yet)
* Indicator on double-space bases to indicate facing, since all figures are billboards
* 3D viewpoint rotation for viewing inside rooms or under overhangs, or possibly limiting the height it renders so that areas under overhangs are exposed
* Private channels support more than 2 chatters for multi-person teams, tabbed access in addition to popups - I'll probably implement "team" chat channels organized by the host in addition to private chats allowed between two players.
* [DONE] Game recording and playback [not fully tested, but what I've done so far works] (how did I lose again?)
* [DONE] Support for Marro Hive placement
* Single exe install that works on 2000, XP and Vista
* [DONE] Add the rest of the Wave 1 glyphs, and Marvel glyphs
* Support for flag bearer dice

None of this stuff is really necessary since it can all be handled manually. But to have the program handle some of these things without having to type more to the other players is a plus.

[ewabbie]

You can use Installshield to install your program and it will register all your OCX's, dll's etc for you.

[Pygon]

The version of InstallShield I have doesn't handle User Account awareness in Vista, which is necessary to register the OCX's. It works great in XP, but it's a clump of files that I'd rather not distribute because it's also messy.

Dang it, the stores only have Wave 5 again. Grr!

[STAROCEAN980]

Good thing I have XP.

[Pygon]

I now render Shades of Bleakewoode as translucent. Ooh...

I think I'll tackle game recording and playback next. This could get ugly.