paffers wrote:Things I like best NOT in ZunTzu ? off top of my head :
1. Ability to add, copy, paste, delete, resize components on the fly while playing.
I can see where you'd want that while editing. But resizing during play? Adding components out of thin air while playing? Hmm. Might be my focus (war games) speaking, but part of the play can be the component limits, using only what comes in the box.
paffers wrote:
2. I personally like the 3d engine and components - it looks great
Rotate and look at the board from any angle is really useful (even top down
). But thats eye-candy and not important to all I guess.
I think it's very important. If eye-candy didn't matter, I think we could all be using Vassal.
For me, playing a wargame in the middle of a virtual field doesn't present the right "feel."
That doesn't mean one couldn't add the beach at Normandy as the backdrop around the table and take a certain wargame to a WHOLE new immersion level.
paffers wrote:
3. I am finding it quicker to build gameboxes. Measuring up pixels and doing masking to get clean components in that XML file did my head in.
(With respect) is this really fair? It would take a tremendous amount of time (outside of XML and ZT, admittedly) to chop up all my counter sheets into individual files. There are pro packages (Photoshop) that could make the chopping and masking much easier, but it's still measuring and masking, right?
I'm going to take some license and figure you'd be far happier if the pixel boundary definitions were mouse-draggable in the UI of ZT, and this issue would go away for you.
Also, add to ZT the ability to import individual counters (rather than require they all live on a giant image "atlas"), and I bet your issues fade quickly.
Yes?
paffers wrote:4. Show a zoomed picture of a component without zooming the whole board. Great for deck building games with a gazillion cards on the table.
Battlegrounds does this. I put it in my wishlist posting for ZT. I don't know how that would sit with Jerome's ZT vision, of course.
I was also hashing out a design for tooltips in ZT. I think they could be used to ameliorate the issue.
paffers wrote:5. Dice can be positioned / zoomed like any other component where they are used for non standard things - War of the Ring in ZunTzu anyone ?
6. View is independent of the players. You want to zoom in to see something - does not affect anyone elses view.
No more cries of "STOP BLOODY MOVING THE TABLE !" from your mates as you zoom around the board.
Yeah, these are big. My wishlist for save/restore of views was meant to ameliorate this, but it really needs a new design to be correctly fixed.
paffers wrote:
Those are the important ones for me.
My biggest beef is that yes, it IS more difficult operationally to boardgame in a physics engine, but not so much that its a painful experience.
We have learnt to lock stuff down if we want "terrain" (and thats just an "L" keypress), and to throw dice AWAY from that important stack of counters
I'm curious: is there a way to roll dice without physically picking them up and casting them through visual space? Or is it ENTIRELY physics based?
I like my realism, but using the mouse to represent virtual hand movements is very clunky for me (and I imagine, quite a few other folks).
paffers wrote:There are some other small bugs as well such as components not 'landing' properly when reloading a game but I expect these to get ironed out as time goes by. None of them are deal-breaking.
Yeah, I see where you are coming from re. table flipping. Its a gimmick. But then again the guy is trying to sell a product and it makes the trailer fun. It should not put you off !
We embrace it by enforcing that whoever comes last in a session MUST flip the table and be the resident loser for the week
It's a cool gimmick, but it's attracting "the wrong element," I fear. Lots of griefers. It's not the gimmick that bothers me, it's the kind of community it's attracting.
Feel free to think of me as a cranky old curmudgeon here, that's fair...
paffers wrote:I am quite surprised to hear about C&D orders. To the developer himself ?? I understand mod makers getting them (they have) but not the developer - its nothing to do with him surely.
In any case I don't see this as any more of a problem than say Vassal or ZunTzu have. Got a link for that story ?
http://www.berserk-games.com/forum/gene ... ssion/350/
paffers wrote:Legality is not something I have really thought too deeply about to be honest. Anything I produce will no doubt not be sanctioned
but I will not distribute anything to the Steam Workshop if I think its going to upset anyone. It will be for private use. Your situation sounds different. Are you developing 'official' gameboxes for someone ?
Yes, I am. High quality, sanctioned, needs encryption, "you need your reference materials at hand" type stuff. And I have no particular horse in the Legality race, either. I do have to keep my stakeholders (who provide clean assets and OK the use) happy, though.
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paffers wrote:I don't ever see ZunTzu resurrecting. Jerome has disappeared completely, unless someone else knows otherwise. If he has dropped the project altogether, or put it on hold for a year or two, at the very least he could have left a post in the forums to tell us.
I know several here, including myself, have sent him emails to find our what's going on, but no-one has received a reply.
:-X
LOL... Heruca just recently (like, two days ago) contacted me to see if I'd give his application a try. I just downloaded it yesterday and started to evaluate.
Competition is good for everyone. Very good. It has some issues I'm not happy with (rotating anything kills anti-aliasing, the hex grid is not usable in its current state, etc.), but to be honest, I was thinking of asking YOU why you thought TTS was a better way to go than BGE.
I think BGE has a future. ZunTzu has a future. We will see how TTS comes together over time.
-- joshua