🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Mon, Jun 13, 2016 10:35 PM UTC:
I bought it when it was on sale for half price, because there was someone who was developing Chess variants with it, and I wanted to see what he was doing. On the plus side, Tabletop Simulator has 3D graphics. On the minus side, it is missing everything else you would need to easily play Chess variants with it. First of all, this is a physics simulator, not a board game simulator. It treats Chess pieces as physical objects and has no knowledge of the game. It doesn't even understand that when I move one piece to another piece's space, the piece I moved should replace the piece originally on the space. It seems to have no concept of a space as a discrete area of a game board. Except for one thing, which I haven't really investigated yet, I would say it has no usefulness for playing Chess variants. This one thing is that Tabletop Simulator can be controlled with the scripting language Lua. So, if someone were to write code in Lua that made Tabletop Simulator treat pieces and spaces as game objects instead of as physical objects, it would begin to be useful for playing Chess variants. If someone could code the rules of Chess variants into it with Lua, that would be even better.
In case you're not aware, this site has Game Courier, which lets you play innumerable Chess variants with others online, and it includes many important features for playing Chess variants that are lacking in Tabletop Simulator.
I bought it when it was on sale for half price, because there was someone who was developing Chess variants with it, and I wanted to see what he was doing. On the plus side, Tabletop Simulator has 3D graphics. On the minus side, it is missing everything else you would need to easily play Chess variants with it. First of all, this is a physics simulator, not a board game simulator. It treats Chess pieces as physical objects and has no knowledge of the game. It doesn't even understand that when I move one piece to another piece's space, the piece I moved should replace the piece originally on the space. It seems to have no concept of a space as a discrete area of a game board. Except for one thing, which I haven't really investigated yet, I would say it has no usefulness for playing Chess variants. This one thing is that Tabletop Simulator can be controlled with the scripting language Lua. So, if someone were to write code in Lua that made Tabletop Simulator treat pieces and spaces as game objects instead of as physical objects, it would begin to be useful for playing Chess variants. If someone could code the rules of Chess variants into it with Lua, that would be even better.
In case you're not aware, this site has Game Courier, which lets you play innumerable Chess variants with others online, and it includes many important features for playing Chess variants that are lacking in Tabletop Simulator.