We knew it was coming, and now Megavoid Studios has launched their crowdfunding project to bring tabletop enhancing software to your laptop.
Infinite Realms is Kickstarter, software designed to work with flat-screen TVs laid face up or with projectors pointing down. The start-up is asking for €10,000 to fund, the campaign has just launched, so we’ll find out whether geeks are in the mood for something like Infinite Realms. You can check out the details or join in from the project page.
What exactly is Infinite Realms? You don’t need software to project a battle map onto your tabletop, but you do need it if you want to control animated fog of war, weather, time of day or special effects.
Once you’ve got the system set up, Megavoid argues it’s perfect for lazy or busy GMs as you can then use battle map graphics from the web, for personal use, as almost physical maps on your around the table gaming experience.
Infinite Realms isn’t a VTT. It’s the opposite. It’s for face-to-face gaming with an actual table.
It was important to us from the beginning that you can play both images and video maps through the software easily and without problems, so that you can continue to use all your existing maps. However, the motivation for Infinite Realms was the idea to create 3D maps and to be able to adjust wind, weather, time of day, color effects and much more. For us, a good gaming experience includes a flexible grid system and a Fog of War. Infinite Realms is for the lazy DM who doesn’t feel like designing his own map, who wants the right maps for his campaigns with little effort.
I had the chance to talk to Megavoid about the project and pushed for future plans. The stretch goals are public and the future plans, at least the immediate future, are about expanding the range of maps if the project is successful. That means cyberpunk and sci-fi, even space maps.
I’m intimidated by the hardware requirements. Climbing around isn’t easy for me so I wanted to address that too. The Megavoid team started with this ceiling mount.
Here’s what Danny from Megavoid walked me through;
We started out with a cheap projector some three or four years ago. We built a box for and let it hang from a hook on the ceiling. It was a noisy little beast with 1/4 Full HD resolution and a really weak LED. But it had HDMI and worked pretty well in a dark room. In 2019 we supported the Indiegogo for the Philips Picopix Max, a small but powerful 1080p projector. Once we got it we attached it to a 1/4 ceiling mount.
That didn’t seem so scary. Danny also explained;
Recently, we got together for a few hours and built a table case for Jessi’s old TV. We plan to release a video on our YouTube channel about this soon. We also think about doing a video on “TV vs projector” as both solutions have their pros and cons and this will most likely be very interesting for our community.
So what do you need on the technical side? Any projector or display / TV which can be connected to a Windows PC or Mac will do. Wireless may work, but I would strongly recommend some modern wired connection like HDMI or DisplayPort / USB-C.
Resolution of the device can be anything, the higher, the better. Less than 720p is most likely not very nice looking, and to power 4K, you would need something like a gaming PC or a 2021 MacBook Pro – which can get costly fast.
Our 2020 MacBook Air (€ 900) can easily handle 1080p in Dual Screen Mode with high-quality settings in Infinite Realms. A standard PC with a dedicated graphics card can easily handle the same. So I would recommend aiming for 1080p as a sweet spot in price and image quality.
Another note on the cheap projectors: They usually are “compatible with 1080p” or something like that. This just means they accept a 1080p signal but may scale down to a lower resolution anyway as the cheap display cannot handle more than 960×540 or 1280×720!
Early access to the project, along with wallpapers, unlocks for backers who find €20 (there are tiers before this), and that’s about £17.
If you want a one-year subscription and early access, that’s €40 (about £34), while €75 gives you two years.
The “Hero Sub” level, which supports 3d-maps, is at €100.
There are higher tiers, up to an early bird of €500, which includes a dedicated map creation session and a dice bag!
Early access is expected to be available in March 2022.
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