Our Pathfinder campaing using HD Led TV and UDK for maps

[mikav6]

We just finished Counsil Of Thieves adventure path and I wanted to share our set-up and some videos of it. We're using HD LCD TV on a table and UDK for displaying the maps.

Warning : Contains some spoilers about the Counsil Of Thieves adventure path!

Watch it here.

[Mattastrophic]

Hooooooly cow. How much effort, would you say, does it take to drop a map from a Pathfinder PDF into the Unreal Dev Kit and get lighting working?

I'm wondering about the possibilities of a super-sweet and easy-to-setup tabletop solution here.

-Matt

[Karui Kage]

That... is pretty awesome. I use MapTools to display maps on an LCD TV on the table for all our games, but that interface looks a lot smoother.

[Krodjin]

This is very cool. When we sell our condo and get a house (with a basement) I intend to set-up a games room... I was thinking of using a ceiling mounted projector pointed down at the table top for basic map display - but what you've done here with the various views and 3d imaging and lighting effects is unreal!

[Pax Veritas]

I've looked into using UDK, however the technical time to set it up seems excessive over the typical 3d terrain objects or use of dungeon tiles, vynal mats, etc. For now, I use a projector at table top about 15% of the time, with preference for the more tactile minis and PAIZO flipmaps and other dungeon tiles and vynal wet-erase about 85% of the time.

I would love to use UDK, and noticed they just did it in the video for the final battles of the campaign. Sure, if I work on something like that for a grand finale it would be great, but I'm waiting for a company like PAIZO to craft a 3d world that is plug and play style for GMs to project a 3d world onto tabletop, without needing to know so much intensive programming to achieve similar effects, such as appears to be the case for UDK.

I first heard about UDK about 3 years ago, and even though it is free and makes for excellent eye-candy, the cost-benefit in time just isn't there yet imho.

Pax

[mikav6]

Just dropping a map from PDF into UDK is easyish and doesn't take more than 10 mins (after some practice) but before you can do that you need to have a working 'game' (that handles the top-down camera, etc.) and some pre-made game assets (in-game torch for fog-of-war,etc). I'm considering releasing my game and assets but there are some hurdles to overcome first.
Usually I also want to make masks for only the insides of levels, add all levels of the same building on the same map (toggle visibility with a trigger),etc. and that all takes time.

If I want dynamic lighting inside a square buildings I've added invisible walls that block light on top of .pdf map.

I've been tinkering with the idea of a more packaged approach (as our GM is changing). I'm thinking about a ready-made UDK game that load up a .png map of your choise (or you can paste it from clipboard) and it handles all the rest (just loading the map and adding fog-of-war)...work in progress.

[Edit:] UDK has a steep learning curve. I had a solid background in programming, some in 3D graphics programming and nothing in 3D graphics design. It took me a few weeks to get the first version of the game up and running the way I wanted. I used UDK from the day one of our Council of Thieves campaign - every encounter, every map. And I've learned new stuff all the time. I used UDK because I wanted to challenge myself and learn something new - in that I succeeded.