May 2006
I recently discovered CCG Maker. It's not a pbem tool, more like a design tool. It will assist you in creating beautiful Magic style cards for games. I added a link in the 'Tools' Menu.
Todd Zircher (remember him from the V_MAP days?) has created a PBM-ish "Virtual Miniatures" Space called
VIRMIN
(catchy!). It's not really PBeM but it does sort of relate to gaming online.
I don't think anyone has done any work on a PBeM aide for BORDERLANDS (Eon). Well, I have just finished a CB gamebox for it.
It is located HERE (the zip has much useful information in PDF format to assist you in getting started).
Here's a little something: I made a tiny Cyberboard Gamebox called DIPCHOOSER. It will randomly draw flags out of a "hat" to create the player order for PBeM Diplomacy games. I'm not sure that Cyberboard is the best way to conduct Diplomacy games any more (I would give that to JDip or some other judge program), but
DIPCHOOSER is still useful because it creates a nice graphic of the period flags coming out in random order.
Download it here
.
Tristan Koehler, the fellow who built the first (licensed) OGRE Cyberboard gamebox, has outdone himself.
His new OGRE ON MARS gamebox is outstanding-- a visual treat (see a picture). If you wish to
download OGRE ON MARS, visit Tristan's OGRE Page. Beware, many popups. The OGRE on Mars idea, is
based (partially) on my old (circa 2000) OGRELuna Variant.. yay! I hope I can convince Tristan to make a Lunar landscape some day, as I recently rediscovered the special
counters that Cisco Serrett drew for the Lunar variant. Tristan's OGRE page, by the by, has much good supporting documentation for OGRE via PBeM and just PBeM in general.
Courtesy of the Javascript
RSS Box viewer, I have added Message Feed Pages
added for CYBERBOARD ML, VASSAL and VIRTUAL WARGAME
CLUB Yahoogroups. This can be a useful feature if
your network doesn't allow acccess to Yahoo. See
the Menu, bottom left. I will continue to add to
these as I discover new relevant feeds.
April 2006
The CSW Chat room hosted Dale Larson for a discussion
of the next stage (version 4.0) of his popular PBeM
utility Cyberboard. The
Transcript is here.
The Cyberboard
Open Documentation Project has resurfaced,
this time using a wikki engine. Please contribute!
February 2006
The Virtual Wargamers Club has stood up a website,
a Yahoogroup,
and a
wiki. Their first "virtual Convention"
was a success. Another one is in the works for July.
December 2005
The Cyberboard Design Olympics concluded. See the
winning gameboxes HERE. Congratulations to the winners!
September 2005
Correction on the previous entry: "The 3.0 release
has a few nasties in it that I'd rather not have
propagate." -- Dale Larson
The current (3.1) version is at THIS
LINK
August 2005
The Final Version 3.0 of CyberBoard is
now available at:
CyberBoard
Version 3.0 (It's about a 1.3 MB download)
IMPORTANT! The final version upgrades
your files so they will no longer load into the
V3 Betas or V2.0 software.
The software has no time limits. Feature-wise (and
bug-wise) it is essentially the same software as
Beta 7 but has much the internal debug code and
the time limits removed. I feel the software is
stable enough to go gold even though some nuisance
bugs still need to be dealt with.
-----------------------------------
CyberBoard 3.0 new features:
A revamped user interface including:
-
Dockable trays and markers.
- Tabs that allow direct selection of open windows.
- New XP menu style with icons. - Customizable
tool bars. - Assignable hot keys for menu items.
- Compatible with new WinXP user interface.
-
65536 color (aka 16
bit color) support. Along with the new UI framework,
this was a large chunk of the work for this release.
-
Greatly improved color palette
window:
-
The first 3 x 8 area from
the left are standard colors along with a
grey scale
-
The next 6 x 8 area are
the custom colors that can be set in a variety
of ways.
-
The box to the right of
the 6 x 8 area is the current color mix created
by changing the bottom Hue picker and the
Saturation/Value picker on the far right.
-
The 48 custom colors are
saved with the gamebox file.
-
You can double-click on
a custom color to adjust it using a color
setting dialog.
-
The message history window
is now stand-alone and can be docked.
-
Message history text is
now color coded.
-
Playing boards can be rotated
by 180 degrees during play.
-
Playback functionality is greatly
improved:
-
The default hot key assignments
have been changed:
-
F2 - previous move
F3 - next move F4 - next history
entry F5 - close history playback F6
- toggle automatic playback
-
The spacebar can be used to
do "Next Move"s instead of F3.
-
You can hit the "Next Move"
command before the current move is totally played
back. With this you can blast through moves if
you don't want to see the animated playback.
-
You can turn on an option that
causes the "Next Move" command to automatically
load the next history record when at the end of
the current history record.
-
You can turn on an option called
"Automatic Playback (F6)". When you
hit the "Next Move" command CyberBoard
takes over and steps moves all the way to the
end without you having to hit any keys. You hit
the next move command again to abort the playback.
-
New game files by default render
locked objects underneath other non-locked pieces
and markers. For backward compatibility reasons
upgraded games render locked objects in their
current postions in the drawing order. This option
can be changed in the board properties dialog.
-
All three zoom levels are available
in the player program.
As you might have noticed. There's
some other folks out there doing a far superior job
to my own humble efforts in archiving cyberboard gameboxes.
I have resources, but no time. Therefore, I
encourage you to visit
LIMEY
YANK GAMES when you get a chance. These
guys are religious about it.
The big news is the CYBERBOARD DESIGN
OLYMPICS, being run by Andy and Fritz of Limey Yank
fame. Click on the logo to go to the discussion board
and enter!
.
Game
Turn (an open source PBEM toolsuite)
shows some promise. I've been following the development
of this on CSW but haven't really played around with
it enough to feel very comfortable using it.
HEXWAR.COM
is a play for pay site set up by Decision games.
Very nice interface. A bit pricey for me (personally)
but I love what they are doing. Try out their
Napoleon at Waterloo game, it's free. Bruce Wigdor
has also set up the
WARGAMEROOM
pay for play site using a java based engine of his
own design-- the modules are customized for specific
games, notably the GMT Card Driven series and Up Front
(AH).
I've seen a lot of webified games
hitting the internet lately-- mostly family or Euro
style games but also some grognard things like BLUE
MAX over at YouPlay.It This is a neat trend.
Many pbem sites try to be all things to everyone--
I much prefer a site that focuses on a subset of games
that it can present really well, such as Aaron Marriner's
no Frills
amarriner.com
or Jim McCann's
CONSIMNET.
There's almost a glut of tools available now, so I
really think that the community is better served by
sites that focus on administering a focused subsection
of gaming.
Trying out a new
CYBERBOARD PORTAL
PAGE Hope this is helpful.
Do me a favor, comment on it in the BBS if it needs
something. We are also adding a
Temple
of Mars section based upon the old Emporium page,
and will start populating Boardgame Geek's
PBeM
Wiki for a mirror of some of the PBeM educational
material that has been developed over the years.
Moved
Games on Screen to the "Defunct Utilities?"
page.
Jeff Fisher's excellent GTL utility
is now on site.
Look
here
I found another guy's cyberboard site was using this
freebie (alas, ad-driven) BBS/Weboard thing. It's
not too intrusive, and feature we could use here.
So what the heck? Drop on in and post to our new
Opponents
Wanted section (in the
Menu Bar above).
CYBERBOARD FILE PORTAL
INAUGURATED
I am kicking off a newer style of collating
all the numerous Cyberboard file distribution sites
into a script I call a "
File
Distro Portal ". I hope this is helpful.
This portal script is nothing more or less than Skip
Franklin's list with a few extras added, presented
in a different format.
