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by jfabre 1715 days ago
The project is still in its infancy, so yeah they're missing a couple of things. I've been building stuff in it for a while and currently running my first campaign in it.

1. I agree with you, but hidden zones are good enough for now.

3. discord...

4. Meh... I think it's the kind of thing that people complain, but will still pay for.

You can't really compare foundry vtt who displays jpegs in a browser with Talespire who offers a 3d environment. It's like comparing a car to a plane.

4 comments

> You can't really compare foundry vtt who displays jpegs in a browser with Talespire who offers a 3d environment. It's like comparing a car to a plane.

Really, you can't compare Foundry which has rules support and rulesets for lots of games with TaleSpire where any rule support is off in the distance. Its like comparing a plane to a half-scale wind-tunnel mockup without engines or controls. Most tabletop gridded rules systems are 2d, so a 2d display covers the parts that aren't theater of the mind quite well; it's the rules support that makes or breaks a VTT.

> It's like comparing a car to a plane.

Planes can be impressively fast, but the vast majority of my commute/transportation needs are better served by a car.

These are both VTT software. I don't see a reason why one should be above reproach just because its 3d.

I get it, 3d makes everything harder, but tbh it also makes playing the games harder. I can use random jpegs and hand drawn maps and direct translations of existing tabletop content in Foundry. What are my options for making my own content in TaleSpire? Recreate every map object by object?

I can buy a PDF of The Shady Dragon Inn (published 1983) and copy-paste all of the maps over into Foundry in minutes, or spend as much time making pretty maps as I want. Lets not even get into the incredible modding support

Lookup talestavern and talesbazaar those are fan-made websites that host a ton of 3d maps that were built in Talespire and the game is not even popular yet.

People will be able to build their own minis, tiles and props very soon.

Building homebrew maps in foundry might be fast, it still looks like crap. We're in 2021.

I don't think Dungeondraft maps look bad by any means. I have both Foundry and Talespire, and while I agree that Talespire is very pretty, a 2D map in Foundry is more than acceptable.

The problem Talespire faces is that it does so much less than Foundry. It's like comparing MS Paint to Photoshop. A visually gorgeous MS Paint, don't get me wrong, but one with only a bare minimum of tooling.

I also get the impression that Talespire's future scope is mostly limited to visualisation. It's not aiming to provide character sheets for a hundred different systems, or automate hit and damage rolls, or provide shop and inventory interfaces, or visual-novel style character popups, or drag-and-drop NPC design, or any of the other thousand things you can get a Foundry module for.

>Building homebrew maps in foundry might be fast, it still looks like crap. We're in 2021.

Your attitude towards your competitors is pretty gauche. You dismiss features and the pricing model they have, etc., while they have been incredibly successful.

I'm always looking for interesting advancements in VTT, particularly because I've got a box with a 55" TV mounted in it I can put on top of my table for using them even when playing with friends in person, but as a potential customer, the dismissive attitude you've displayed towards your competitors has turned me off pretty significantly.

TaleSpire dev here. jfabre is not a Bouncyrock employee and does not work on TaleSpire. I'm sorry if you've run into people bashing our competitors. It sucks as there is plenty of room for different approaches in this space (see TTS and battlemapp for two ace alternative 3d vtts). You setup sounds awesome. We've not got any plans for supporting the tv tables so far, but arkenforge and foundry both seem awesome at it.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I misread one of his comments - 'I've been working in it' as 'I've been working on it', totally on me!
I'm just a fan... I do not work for them. I was just expressing my opinion about how I saw the whole space. I've been playing for more than 2 years on Tabletop Simulator and I consider Talespire a very big upgrade that's all.
Gotcha! I misread a comment of yours and took it as you saying you worked on the product, not worked in it for your campaign.
I'm a PC in two games right now but DMing zero (and maybe too busy to start), so I've only built a few maps with TaleSpire so far. But I'm very excited about it, and especially the sites where you can share assets.

There are multiple maps built for Waterdeep Dragon Heist, for instance. The modern, web-augmented experience of playing D&D is a huge change from the game's past, and it makes modules and campaign books a lot more useful, since the community can share so many more specifics than ever before. TaleSpire takes that a step further, since you can also now share buildings and outdoor spaces.

In 5 to 10 years, this space is going to be just absolutely incredible. It's going to converge with machinima. It's already begun converging with independent theater.

I'm super excited about this, but I do a lot of front-end work, so I've always hated Roll20. It reminds me of a terrible app I built with Backbone.js, with all kinds of event bubbling problems. Plus, before TaleSpire existed, I was building experimental maps in Cinema 4D to see if I could enable online games with gravity magic. (TaleSpire does not support alternate gravity directions, but it's still way better for this use case than C4D.) So I may just be the ideal target customer or whatever.

> You can't really compare foundry vtt who displays jpegs in a browser with Talespire who offers a 3d environment. It's like comparing a car to a plane.

I personally love the modding ability, which allowed creating a nice nostalgic middle ground, an Isometric view which works with 2d rule measurements, and brings back memories of old school RPGs

https://v.redd.it/iz4tui9ykou61/DASH_1080.mp4?source=fallbac...

https://www.foundryvtt-hub.com/package/grape_juice-isometric...