TTS gets some competition. Maybe?

Games
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Tabletop Playground just came out into Early Access on Steam on the 15th. Just thought I’d give a quick opinion thingy.

I picked up Tabletop Simulator right after it was available, and made a bunch of mods for it early on, but grew frustrated with the awful physics and janky UI and stuff falling through the table (still happens) and the general lack of updates or improvements. So I have been waiting/hoping for something to come along and challenge TTS for the top spot. Tabletopia didn’t do it for me either.

Friday while going through the Steam “stuff on sale” page I ran across Tabletop Playground, which had just come out apparently. So I watched the two videos, read the handful of posts in the forum and bought it. I already like it better than TTS. The physics are smooth so far, haven’t had many issues with knocking things around accidentally or stuff falling through the table. I noted a couple things I was missing on the forum and got a quick response from the dev.
It seems like it is designed for gaming from the ground up, a feeling I never got with TTS, which seemed to be designed so you could “flip” the table (all the early adverts were centered on that, which didn’t help my impression).

Rotation works as expected, if you select a group it rotates centered on the object you click on.
The measuring tool is adjustable to at least some degree, the one in TTS is fixed.
It does need a means of making the measuring tool stick, to make miniatures style games easier.

Modding so far has been quick and easy and mostly painless. I ran into some minor trouble trying to import some models and get their collision boxes to match but that is almost entirely on myself and the source of the models and not TTP. I’m no great wiz at modelling but thought I might get away with making a hexagon lol.

No means of writing anything at present, that I am aware of (probably just didn’t see that either) but the writing stuff in TTS never was very useful either. It does track multi-state counters and such.
Not a ton of mods available at the moment but it just came out, and there is a decent enough selection to get a feel for what it can do.
Supports scripting from the start, I suck at that worse than modelling but its there for those with the know-how.
Has VR support, I don’t have VR so no opinion there.

I’ve got three mods in progress at the moment and look forward to playing some games on it soon. Currently battling my collection of antiquated 3d programs to try and get some hexagons in the game and textured.

It’s on sale on Steam till the 22nd, and the dev is offering 4 packs over on Humble Store.

To sum up, it ain’t perfect, but I’m already liking it better than the competition. Worth a look.

Edit: and no sooner did I type that and go back into the program I discovered a small bug with one of the modules used in the videos where some units sink partway into the tabletop when placed adjacent to others. Still, they didn’t fall through, so there’s that.

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This is one of those things where it could hang the moon and it wouldn’t matter if people don’t support it.

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I was hoping for some Text To Speech game. So disappointed ;(

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Agreed. And I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been 15 pages back on the “what’s on sale” pages on Steam. It is EA, and it did just release, but I hope it gets some attention cause TTS needs some competition in my opinion. They did go from 3 pages of mods to 4 pages today ;)
I just want something that works for what I want to do, mostly board wargames and some virtual miniatures gaming. To play with friends too far away, or anywhere at all given the current situation.

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shudders

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No link!? But I’m so lazy…

Edit: ok, for everyone else: https://store.steampowered.com/app/838410/Tabletop_Playground/

VR support. Neat.
Also I’m not seeing the 4 pack

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4 pack is here:

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Thank you!

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Sorry for lack of link.

Messed around with it a good bit more tonight, got my hexagon and multi-hexagon collision issues sorted (I was doing it wrong, unaware of the issues with convex collision in 3d programs)

It definitely feels better in many ways, though I have hit a bump or two. Custom chits that I made using models due to non-standard shape didn’t want to stack nicely, they “vibrated” a lot for lack of a better term. When I put the same objects into a stack in TTS they stayed put. At least until I moved the stack around a bit and some fell through the table and went into some sort of loop befitting of Portal. Which is a TTS thing. Still. LOL

At any rate, both are pretty damn cheap so it’s nice to have options. Interested to see what the scripting folks come up with.
The TT Playground dev seems pretty responsive so far. Look forward to seeing how it progresses.

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Yeah, unfortunately, so far there’s maybe somewhere between 5-10 games I have any interest in playing that have mods on TTP, and none of them are priorities for me to actually play. It’s also really difficult to tell how complete they are and most don’t have screenshots. I can see why they’ve chosen to go with a third-party Workshop equivalent, and mod.io does have a few niceties I wish Steam Workshop had (most notably a language filter - I don’t need to see mods in Russian, or Chinese, or Italian, or…well, any non-English language really, thanks.) but it also needs a fair bit of work.

Definitely keeping an eye on it, though. If it gets enough momentum, I’d be happy to give it a shot.

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It’s true, but it is also early days indeed. He is certainly up against inertia getting TTS folks to switch, but then there are folks like me that get frustrated with TTS pretty quick. While messing back and forth between the two tonight TTS crashed on me multiple times while loading mods, and there were issues with some of the ones that did load.

I was dubious about the mod.io thing at first (fear change!) but his explanation made me feel a lot better. He said the games are uploaded and stored as a complete package instead of a collection of obj files and images like TTS does. This should prevent the inevitable loading a mod and finding half the stuff missing. That alone was worth $13.

Some of the initial excitement has worn off after 15 hours in it since Friday night. But I think if he can keep moving forward it will be the better product. Uphill climb winning over folks to be sure.

Not a lot of mods yet it is true, and I’ve only downloaded a few, but Manouevre and C&C Napoleonics appeared to be in good shape. And I liked the cute little guys someone made for the Risk mod, even though I will never play it lol. Completeness and screenshots are all up to the users, same as TTS.

Speaking of cute little guys, I found this mod in Tabletop Simulator tonight:

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Little voxel ACW dudes! Low poly, so ya can put millions of em on the table! Huzzah!

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I don’t know that TTS does mods as a collection of links to pull because it uses Workshop (though maybe it does - I know one mod was over a gig after I pulled all the files and I think Workshop tops out at like 500 MB). Having mods exist as a single package is definitely one of the top reasons to prefer Playground, though.

And yes, completeness and screenshots are up to the users…but most TTS mods tell you in their description what’s in them and have screenshots, and so far virtually nothing in TTP’s mod.io page does. Although a lot of them do say stuff like “test” or “WIP” without details, so that makes me worry they aren’t done.

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There’s other competition out there for TTS, even beyond the likes of Vassal. Tabletopia springs to mind.

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Yes, one thing that kinda sucks about TTS is that mods can just stop working because the dropbox links in them are dead but you don’t know that until after you subscribe.

Here’s the actual list of mods for it, if anyone else wasn’t sure where to find them: https://tabletopplayground.mod.io/#modsbrowse

There’s really nothing there I’d want to play right now, but as someone who just recently picked up TTS as a way to play Gloomhaven with some friends who are now far-flung and is finding it quite clunky (not unlike VASSAL!), any improvement in the space is welcome and I’ll keep an eye on it.

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Yeah, this is the problem. People will play on whatever their friends play on, so it can’t just be 37% better…Playground needs to blow it out of the water to get mass movement.

Competition is good so I hope they get there, but I’m in wait-and-see mode right now.

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At least it’s not a subscription service, so you can have people switch between TTS and TTP depending on where the games they want are and neither is so expensive that it’s out of the question for friends to buy both. But since everyone involved has to own them, that’s still a barrier.

For me, it’s purely about where the games I want to play are. That’s pretty much entirely TTS at the moment. There are a couple of things on Tabletopia, and I think probably some on Vassal if I wanted to a) figure that shit out and b) make my friends do the same, but in general, TTS.

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Remember this platform has JUST come out and its actually surprising its got that many games on it already. Give it a few weeks at least before judging it. TTS has been around a long time for it to build up such a deep catalogue.

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I think we all seem willing to be convinced in this thread…it’s just that even their own promotional materials don’t show Playground doing anything particularly new. I’m not sure if an improved storage solution for mod assets is gonna get it done.

Honestly, I’ll probably just go ahead and buy it before this promotion is up. $13.50 is cheap enough to just check it out, even if I rarely use it.

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I actually think it looks like a significant improvement over TTS on multiple levels. But, like…Google Plus was a significant improvement over Facebook on several design points. But everyone was already using Facebook, and there was never the critical mass to make the switch. TTP has a very similar mountain to push the rock up, and it being better doesn’t really factor in very much.

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:p

I kid!