Infrno Issues

So, I think we should drop Infrno as a platform. I mean, we pretty much only use it for a voice chat, and there are other platforms that do that better. Every week, we have issues with people getting in who are supposed to be there, we never know if people are there who aren't supposed to be there, and each update makes another thing that causes problems.

Basically we're only using the table to share pictures, and there are better ways to do that in any chat or IM that we could find, really. Yes, I am complaining about a free service, but when there are other, better free services, and the one we are using has some glaring security holes, I think it's valid to complain.

I agree. Infrno was really good until they upgraded it and since then it sucks.

I would suggest iTabletop but it doens't really work either.

Are there any good free webconference tools? I know I have found them in the past but never used them and since forgot them. I'm up for trying anything.

Also, as a side note, did all the graphic icons on this forum go missing a few days ago for anyone else or is it just me?

shit, for my thursday game some of the people wanted to use a program i forget what it was called though. maptools? I think that might be it. I'll check it out real quick.

http://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=tools

Check it out, and i think they have some videos on youtube. its a pretty powerful tool but i've never used it. don't really know anything about it. It's free though. If nothing else though we can use yahoo or skype and have a confrence call. No shared whiteboard though.

I use Maptools for D&D, and it's pretty sweet.

There are a lot of 3rd party add-ons you can get that make it even more robust as well. The guy who made the D&D one I use apparently made on for ShadowRun as well, but I've never tried it. It doesn't have voice that I know of, but we can easily use Skype or whatever for that (or maybe it does and I don't know about it because I use for in person gaming). It's really impressive with its ability to handle line of sight, light levels, and that sort of thing on a person-by-person basis, which is pretty sweet for SR style gaming.

does it have voice coms in it? or would we have to use another program for that?

I would like to suggest two possible webconferenceing sites:

First Vyew, which I have plaid around with in the past. It's probably been 3 or 4 years but it was pretty good back then, might still be good now:
http://vyew.com/s/

Here is another one that I just found but know little about, still it looks good:
http://www.anymeeting.com/adw/Free-Web-Conferencing.aspx

what about dice rolls on one of the confrence sites? I think RPG tools has a multi computer diceroller... idk

Yeah, RPTools has an integrated dice roller.

Do we have an idea which of these options we are trying out for this week? I want to make sure I have it set up ahead of time as I am always coming in a bit late as is as I have to put the kiddo to bed.

btw are we getting together this week? what day?

I assumed yes, if nothing else to talk character stuff and how this is all going to come together. Monday or Tuesday works for us.

Either day is fine with me. I kind of think we'll have to stick with Infrno for this week but I would like to try something else.

It would be great if we could actually start playing but honestly I'm still trying to get all my stuff together so I wouldn't mind if it was more of a planning session.

By the way, this forum still looks screwed up to me, all of the graphics are missing. Is it just me or is anyone else having this issue?

It looks fine to me.

By images, do you mean the avatars? Or something else? It looks fine to me.

Upon review, I'm so hard against using Infrno again (at least until they make some serious changes) that I'm making a executive decision. This week, we will use Skype. We will fiddle with it and see if it will work. Over the weekend, I'll work on RPTools and see how plausible that is so I can talk about it intelligently on Tuesday. I second my own motion. There being no objection? No? Going once... going twice... Motion passes. This week, the meet on Skype.

i vote we play monday if possible as i'm off that day. even though i know we don't usually get playing till after i get here this is a discussion i'd like to be in on from the beginning.

OK, Monday is good.

A few quick things about MapTools that I found out/thought of over the weekend. I'm sure we'll talk about some of this tonight, but putting here as well will help me to remember and possible give other people something to think about and save some time later.

1) There is no integrated voice, so that would have to be handled by an external program (like Skype)
2) It has included dice roller, text chat, and other useful functions.
3) It can be downloaded or used in your browser.
4) Someone has to act as a "server" to host the game, (probably the GM).
5) If you put in the time, it can handle individual line of sight and such with ease, but it takes a fair amount of preparation beforehand. This is because, in addition to drawing the map, you have to go over the map and manually which things block line of sight in the Vision Blocking Layer by drawing lines, circles, rectangle, etc. You can draw these lines freehand or use the tools to do squares/rectangles/lines.
6) I found a fairly robust SR4 framework made by the person who made the D&D one I sue. It does less automatically in exchange for simplicity of use (which is a very good thing in SR). However, anyone who wants to DM with it would have to DL it and learn to use it, which isn't difficult, but would take up time.
7) Everyone who DMs would have to take the time to learn to use MapTools to create their runs.
Anyone who doesn't DM can basically just drag their token around to move and the program handles the rest for them (except for RP over the chat channels).

To sum up: MapTools is a very robust program to handle the sorts of highly tactical battles we occasionally get into in ShadowRun, so long as the fight is in a place the GM expected us to be in a fight against people the GM expected us to get in a fight with, making such fights much easier to handle in-game. It is a pretty good program to handle shootouts with goons in alleys and such as long as they are either expected or not overly complex, making suh combats a bit easier by picking up a lot of the record keeping (damage tracks, ammo, initiative, etc.). It is the next closest thing to useless winging it unless the GM is really, really good at building maps on the fly in the program, nd the more complex the situation, the harder that is to do.

Overall impressions - GMs who do lots and lots of pre-planning will find it lightens their load a huge amount and love it. GMs who mostly wing it on a plot outline or skeleton will find it less than useful, possibly even negative useful. Since I am sort of hybrid on that front, I could go either way.

alright, so I will be winging it and putting up stick figures.

Ok, so I can't seem to make MapTool work on my desktop, and I'm not going to switch everything else to my laptop, so I guess that's out.

I checked out Vyew, which Kelley talked about. It looks like it's got pretty much everything Infrno has, plus being able to control who has access and multiple pages (So we could keep the funny pics in one place without them getting in the way of the game, for example), and each page seems to have a lot more vertical room (it expands as you add more, and I never managed to see if it bottoms out eventually). How do we feel about using that for out visuals?

I'm good with trying it out, especially as we can control who can come in and see what we are doing.

I am pro keeping my funny pics in place.

Vyew sounds great.

Found out why non of the forum icons were loading. They are being pulled from hitskins.com and my antivirus flagged that site as dangerous and blocked it. Now they are working again.