making a custom deck of cards. . .

[Icedfate]

okay, i'm new to this, trying to learn how to add custom assets to like, make up my own board game prototype and test it out on the simulator.

i've been looking at videos tutorials (which is confusing because half of them are made for an old version of this and the new version seems totally different) but from what i gathered, it looks like, i'm supposed to take this "template" from the game files and then use a paint or photoshop program to make all the cards and then they all have to be the same size and then i arrange them on the template?

and then what's really confusing. . .

and then i'm supposed to upload the image to an image hosting website and then copy paste the link and then from inside the simulator when i do custom deck of cards, then i have to paste in the website link?

i did find something in the local files called the "deck builder" and it seemed like it was letting me use images from my computer but i guess is that just filling up a template for me and i still have to upload the template to a website?


if what i said above is correct, then i guess i just want confirmation.


but, on a side note

gonna give some criticism but. . .


why does it have to be so frigging complicated?!
why can't i just create an image, save it on my hard drive and then from insite the simulator just upload it from my desktop folders?
why do i have to put the images onto a website before i can use them?

what i really would have liked is just to be able to create from within the game, a blank deck of cards and then just type in text onto the cards and then i can shuffle them up and deal them out.

was there some sort of technical coding issue preventing them from making this more user friendly?
or did they just assume, "meh, it's good enough, we'll let the players do the rest of the work"

[Sekkuar666]

Deckbuilder can be used to fill the template instead of manually doing it with paint or w/e

Once you have finished filling the template, export the image somewhere on your computer;
Open TTS, load Custom > Deck;
Click on the tiny "directory" icon to search the image you exported from the deckbuilder;
Be sure to select "cloud" rather than "local", else only you will see your deck;
Set the options and click "import".

Done.

[Icedfate]

well what do you mean "export the image"?
export it to where? an image hosting website?

if that's the thing ...that's so stupid. why do I have to upload the image to a website just so the software installed on my computer can then redownload it when it was already fricking on my computer in the first place. why couldn't they just make it so I could pull it directly from my local files to begin with?!

[Carlzilla]

Originally posted by IcedFate:

well what do you mean "export the image"?
export it to where? an image hosting website?

if that's the thing ...that's so stupid. why do I have to upload the image to a website just so the software installed on my computer can then redownload it when it was already fricking on my computer in the first place. why couldn't they just make it so I could pull it directly from my local files to begin with?!

because other people might need to be able to also access the image for multiplayer games...and this way avoids TTS doing any actual filesharing of copyrighted images, etc.

You can actually use local files (hit the little folder icon next to the face image url, back image url, etc.), but if you play with anyone in a non-hotseat game, they will not be able to see your custom cards.

I don't really understand why this is so difficult for you. It's fairly straightforward if you spend a few minutes with the program instead of complaining ignorantly on the message boards.

[Icedfate]

look,
I think you are confused by my rant.

I'm not complainig that "I can't do it"

I know how to do it.

I'm criticizing the process because it's needlessly complicated.
if the files are on my computer, then why didn't they program the game to access the files right from there?
why make people put the files on an imaging website to get them into the game?

why should other players need to access the images from the website, if the host has the images, shouldn't that be enough? the host is hosting the game, the host has the images, other people entering the room...

i dunno.

I'm not a l33t haxxorz like you, I don't understand the coding process.

I don't really understand why it was so difficult for the programmers to code a more user friendly process into it.

[Carlzilla]

Originally posted by IcedFate:

look,
I think you are confused by my rant.

I'm not complainig that "I can't do it"

I know how to do it.

I'm criticizing the process because it's needlessly complicated.
if the files are on my computer, then why didn't they program the game to access the files right from there?
why make people put the files on an imaging website to get them into the game?

why should other players need to access the images from the website, if the host has the images, shouldn't that be enough? the host is hosting the game, the host has the images, other people entering the room...

i dunno.

I'm not a l33t haxxorz like you, I don't understand the coding process.

I don't really understand why it was so difficult for the programmers to code a more user friendly process into it.

If the hosts has copyrighted game images, and then sends them to other people via some peer-to-peer sharing through TTS, The creators of TTS could be liable on some level for distributing copyrighted material...so no, it's not enough that the host has the images. If they're pulled off the internet, then ONLY the person who uploaded them to the image sharing site is liable.

It's 100% user friendly as it is. I've made two games, one custom, and one a conversion of an 80's dice and card game, and at no point was I bothered by the process. It just sounds to me like it doesn't work like you think it should work (though it actually does, as long as you're not trying to play with other people), and now you're here, telling us all about it.

[Icedfate]

well okay, you explained that it's because of copyright law. if that's true and you aren't just making that up then I'll stand corrected.
it still looks like you're just being a fanboi though, someone criticizes your "perfect" game and suddenly you get all triggered and start calling them an ignorant jerk with a sense of entitlement.

maybe instead of throwing insults at me just because I said something negative about the game you love, you could entertain a conversation.

like, what anout the other thing I mentioned.

I see the programmers included painting tools to let you draw on the table. okay, that's cool.

so why couldn't they include a blank deck of cards with a drawing tool that I could draw on the cards myself without ever having to leave the game and use photoshop or paint dot net or gimp to manipulate files and images and upload them to websites and all that crap.

if I were the host and I were just drawing on the cards myself, where would copyright law come into play?
I suppose I might get into trouble for drawing copyrighted images on there with the tool?

but then, even if I could draw that well and I drew copyrighted images on the cards I used at my table which I can't, my images would look nowhere near as good as the actual cards, how would the other poeople joining my table gain access to those handdrawn images I created from within the game?

I wouldn't even care about drawing if they included an option to just type in the text on the cards, like if I could just have a blank deck of cards and type in "whatever card text here" onto the cards.

so am I being entitled by asking for a feature that should have been in there already without me having to ask for it?

maybe you are right this is the wrong place to post this because devs never look at the forums . . .

[Carlzilla]

Honestly, aside from making the two games I mentioned earlier, I've barely messed with TTS. I'm hardly a fan boy...I'm just saying I don't share your criticism of the creation process.I'd actually also like it if they allowed you to type directly on the cards...might come in handy for a lot of things. It's not that I'm blind to good suggestions, I just don't think you've made many in this thread.

However, there's lots of situations were hand drawn cards, created by tools that make MS Paint look sophisticated, complete with TTS overlaid text aren't really appealing...and so the developers appear to have opted to prioritize those situations and take image creation and outsource it to a 3rd party tool...why reinvent the wheel when you don't have to?

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I'm fairly certian that had quite a bit to do with them not wanting to send image files over the web through their program. The fact that I'm not is also why I can't say what status of hand drawn recreations of copyrighted images would be with any sort of certainty, but yes, if you hand drew something, and the drawing tools continued to function the way they do now, the program would share that without it needing to be uploaded...however, the creation process doesn't work that way, so it's a moot point.

The deck builder software even offers to upload the image file to one of like 5 different free image hosting services automatically, and if you just want to do local testing, you can use the local file straight from your harddrive, so I really think your criticism is unfounded.

[Icedfate]

yeah well, I was venting, because I felt it way too many steps. I was frustrated at first because many of the videos I watched on youtube are no longer relevant and I didn't understand it because they were telling me the templates were in a certain spot and I was looking there and they weren't there and then I saw the deck builders in the modding folder and the videos weren't even mentioning those because I was watching older videos made for a previous version of this.

I then found newer videos and they talked about how the "deck builders" seem to be new tools that were created by other users and then the devs decided to include those into the core game. so yeah I recognize it's easier now than it used to be.

I just don't like the concept of having to create more usernames and passwords for more third party websites just to upload the images onto the internet just so I can use them in the game. so what if it's "easy" and puts it on there automatically. I didn't like having to go outside the program to do stuff.

and if that's being an ignorant jerk by expecting to be able to everything I need to in the game from within the game itself without having to manipulate files from outside of the game then I guess I'm an ignorant jerk.

and I'm not a stranger to modding. I admit I don't do much heavy modding.

for examples

in baldur's gate, I just added some custom portraits but that was as easy as downloading them from the nexus and then putting them into the custom portraits folder and bam I could use the custom portaits from within the game. no having to reupload the images to a website and then copy pasting URLs. . .

in fallout and skyrim, it was a bit more complex as I needed to get nexus mod manager and then certain mods need other mods to work and some of the mods can't be installed my nexus mod manager and instead have to be installed manually and you need special skeleton assets if you want to use any of the mods that change the character body types so you can use the different clothing and armor mods and I got frustrated there but I can't criticize bethesda for that because they never intended for their games to be modded in the first place.

I tried making custom dungeons in legend of grimrock and found I had to take a crash course in lua programming language to do so and I was asking for help on the forums and had people on the forums going "gosh, don't you even know how to concatenate the booleans?! just make a simple array, index your tables with integers, gosh, how hard is that?" and I spent 300 hours making a dungeon that takes 3 hours to play through and I was like...eff this I'm not making another one. some of those guys spent over a year working on theirs before putting them on the workshop.

and everyone talks about this stuff like it's so easy and then I watch people on youtube and they have like hundreds of mods installed and everything works perfectly for them.


I have a friend uses tabletopia, because it's free and they didn't want to pay for tabletop simulator and they just use photoshop (which is a paid program when they could be using gimp which is free so go figure) and uploaded their custom assets onto tabletopia and use them.
I have tabletopia too, but I paid for this, so I wanted to start to use this.

[TRIBALien]

Originally posted by IcedFate:

it still looks like you're just being a fanboi though, someone criticizes your "perfect" game and suddenly you get all triggered and start calling them an ignorant jerk with a sense of entitlement.

Where did any of these things happen? It seems that the only person getting belligerent in this thread is you.

[Sekkuar666]

Originally posted by IcedFate:

well what do you mean "export the image"?
export it to where? an image hosting website?

Originally posted by Sekkuar666:

export the image somewhere on your computer

And then a dev adds me to complain that I'm "too snarky".
Figures why.

[Bojan]

You are just still noob in modding. If I have artwork ready I can 'make' a game mod in 8-10 min top. It's just copying and pasting of links into placholders and setting some sliders for god's sake, it's not rocket science.
It gets a bit compicated only if you gonna use 3D models, but even that is a job of 5-10 min when you know what are u doing.

Pesonally, I've used PS to make cards, tokens, dice, board templates, then export them into separate folders for easier tracking when I need to change something later. Then I jump into TS, go to single player and make a mod so fast that my icecream on the table doesn't even begin to melt.

[Skates]

When you consider the fact that 20 years ago we were FTPing compressed bitmap images saved as .txt files to separate-domain hosting sites to bypass hotlinking and filesize restrictions while trying to build geocities sites with cgi-bin scripting done in notepad.exe to make it work... it really doesn't make this look too complicated.

For games that you are hosting locally, you can absolutely just link to an image on your PC. It really is that simple. The only caveat is the layout of the image has to have to correct dimensions for the game to parse it as a deck of cards, which is the same as eny restriction you'd encounter if you were, say, customising skins in a game to fit a mesh.

Furthermore, the developers 'recently' added steam cloud integration into the game, so if you want to host an image now, you can literally just click the "cloud" radio button AND IT'S DONE! You don't even have to faff about with dropbox or google drive any more if you don't want to; it can literally be done from within the program. In fact, that's exactly what the Dice Throne developers did! All the files for the mod were just added by them in TTS itself and are hosted in the Steam Cloud.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=908560170

[Kimiko]

You don't need to upload images to a web host unless you want to. You can click the file folder next to the URL box and import images directly from your computer. From there, use the "Cloud" option if you want the images to be shown to other players. The file will then be uploaded to your personal Steam cloud which has 100GB of space.

Our tutorial videos are a bit outdated due to UI changes, but we hope to create new videos once we're sure we won't be making any more major changes.

Thanks.

[Marquise*]

Woah... didn't knew we could use Steam Cloud for this... Althought the 6B clause of the workshop would get me jittery!

[Icedfate]

Originally posted by Kimiko:

You don't need to upload images to a web host unless you want to. You can click the file folder next to the URL box and import images directly from your computer. From there, use the "Cloud" option if you want the images to be shown to other players. The file will then be uploaded to your personal Steam cloud which has 100GB of space.

Our tutorial videos are a bit outdated due to UI changes, but we hope to create new videos once we're sure we won't be making any more major changes.

Thanks.

aha, I figured that was why I got frustrated. because the videos I was watching were outdated. I see it now.