[mNovak]

Very cool. I've seen a lot of these out there for DnD specifically, and am always impressed by how polished they seem, but I've long since wished there was a better way to play WH40k or other wargames online. The closest thing seems to be Tabletop Simulator, which just feels strange as a full 3D simulator.

It strikes me as slightly ironic, since games like 40k are traditionally extremely high $ investment hobbies, so seemingly a good market for the side-hustle tech crowd.

[tpmoney]

If you haven’t seen it yet you might look at Vassal https://vassalengine.org/ which is geared towards board games generally rather than ttrpgs

[bbor]

I agree! I think it’s super doable to annotate a real game with modern image segmentation running on a video feed paired with rock-solid modern TTS as dice are read, turns are declared, etc. From there, it’s just a hop skip and jump to a virtual tabletop, AR set pieces, and (IMO the holy grail) non-local AR games using real pieces. It’s such a procedural, probabilistic, simplified-spatially game; seems perfect for simulation.

I really don’t think games workshop has the corporate culture to catch this wave though, which makes the prospect of a IP lawsuit a big deterrent to even OS work.

Msg me if you want a link to my last pass at it as a react app. Got slowed down figuring out how to offload work onto the server efficiently, and also daunted at the prospect of translating all the simpler unit rules into JSON. Of course, with LLMs, that task just became about 1000x easier :)

[mNovak]

I mean, I would settle for a simple RTS style 2D web interface! A lobby and match making, if I'm really ambitious.

Unit rules are a special problem--Wahapedia has a csv download of unit and weapon rules.. I think there were several thousand in 9th edition.