Hi! I just got a huge boost and it was recommended I introduce myself.
Heya Steemians, how're you?
I'm in awe today after a video Red and I made together got a stunning number of upvotes, and the curator who promoted it said I should take the time to introduce myself. But before I do, I wanna thank you all for the support -- it means the world to me.
As for who I am, I'm Jennie 'sevvie' Rose. I've worked in programming and electrical engineering most of my life, until I was waylaid by cancer, and in the last few years I've focused on providing my technical perspective on the news as well as producing live programming streams and taking part in political discussion on YouTube. It's been a wild ride so far, with ups and downs along the way, but in some ways I feel like I'm still just getting started.
My little family is me, Red (the woman with whom I make entertainment videos on dTube and YouTube), and my dog Elty, and we're out here on the bleeding edge of tech just trying to make a name for ourselves -- and while we're here, hoping to develop some new tools to play with in the process. I've actually just recently started a project aimed to compete with Roll20, an online tabletop-roleplaying system, and my goal is to produce something properly decentralized that takes advantage of the latest and greatest in internet technologies, including WebGL and, with hope, cryptocurrency as a basis for sharing and purchasing assets to use within one's game.
Most of my hobbies are pretty tech-oriented; I'm quite the nerd, but I'm a nerd who can't help but stick her libertarian nose into politics whenever a story comes up. But Red keeps me sane and talking about movies and video games as well, so I suspect no matter what your interests may be, I'll have a few videos to your liking! Or at least, I hope so.
But enough about me, how about you? I'd love to learn more about all of you, spend more time chatting with you here.
Welcome to our little corner of the madhouse!
Despite what you might see in my feed, I don't typically spend all day writing complicated statistical visualization systems for looking at the steem blockchain. Most of the time I prefer to write about GM-less role-playing games and tabletop wargames with solo and co-op options.
Most of the time.
I'm also doing my best to collect all of the folks on the platform who write about role-playing games in an interesting manner. Which should work out neatly!
Competing with Roll20? Politically libertarian? Welcome aboard.
One of my interests in developing a competitor to Roll20 is making a system just as compatible with wargames like Warhammer and Warmachines as it is with roleplaying games like Pathfinder and the like. WebGL makes that very possible.
I've been cheating on that one a little bit, myself. Tabletop Simulator gives me most of the tools that I need to do tabletop wargaming.
What it doesn't do is make my life easy when it comes to importing my own assets. Tokens and chits are really easy, don't get me wrong. Models, on the other hand – it utterly objects to fairly standard object models with image textures which have no good reason to fail. Their documented workflow goes through Unity, which I have absolutely no use for it all.
Emulate some of that environment with the flexibility of easy asset integration, and may be a somewhat better scripting language to connect objects up with and you very well may have a killer app.
I'm still very much in the planning and prototyping phase, but what you're describing is very close to what I intend. A 3D "table" with a grid drawn on it, easy importing of OBJ, 3DS, MMT and other modelling files, a scripting language that distills easily to a macro language (probably a Scheme derivative), and a vertical sidebar for chat, simplified character sheets, etc.
If you take a look at some of my previous posts about Two Hour Dungeon Crawl and 5150, you can see how I've been using TS as a digital gaming table.
I don't necessarily need a table with a grid drawn on it as long as I can specify a grid or no grid, or have the ability to overlay my own layers on top of the table. Sometimes you need hexes, sometimes squares, and sometimes you just don't want any distraction at all. Especially if you're working with 3D terrain.
I am all about using Scheme, as an old school Common Lisp and Scheme programmer, but you might get more traction with the mainstream user if you go with Python or Lua.
(If you want extra points with me, you'll support an Erlang node which can be taught to from any machine on the network – but I'm a weirdo and my suggestions should not be taken seriously.)
Some kind of system which would support my tabletop gaming both wargaming and really ridiculously-indie role-playing games would be great. I've been struggling and making do with TS for quite a while because there's really just nothing out there to compete with it.
Nice to know you