Glow, lights, web browser, and grid

Tabletop Playground continues to evolve: over the past months we’ve added many new features and improvements. You can find the highlights below and the full list on our Discord:

  • You can now add Emissive Maps to models in the editor: They work like a regular texture, but emissive colors are not affected by lighting and look like the object is lit by itself. The red color channel of the new emissive map makes the color at that point emissive, the larger the red value is the more emissive the part of the model becomes. Fully red will make most colors glow. The other channels in the emissive map are not used for now.
  • Cards and multistate objects have a switch in the editor to make them emissive, effectively switching off lighting for them
  • The object coordinates window now allows arranging object into a hexagonal grid
  • A new option in the advanced interface settings allow you to change the behavior of the Flip/Upright key (middle mouse/F) when holding a group of objects: instead of flipping or turning to their default rotation, align all held objects to the rotation of the grabbed object
  • You can now place text labels. Labels can have different colors and sizes as well as custom fonts. They don’t get blurry at larger sizes or zoom levels. Apart from a fixed text, you can also set labels to show the name of the player in a selected slot. Press K to toggle label mode.
  • A new UI element for cursor modes is available in the upper left corner. It allows you to see your current mode and quickly switch to other cursor modes without memorizing the hotkeys.
  • There is now a tablet object available among the “General” objects. It allows you to browse the web while playing, the active website URL is synchronized with all players.
  • Drawing now supports glowing lines: a new checkbox in the drawing dialog allows you to turn up the emissive value of your lines to make them glow.
  • Add a new option for measuring angles (in measure move mode, selected in session options): you can measure the rotation of the movement compared to a straight line as before, or the rotation of the object.
  • Add support for TGA textures. TGA files are generally larger than PNG, but they can be useful when using an alpha channel as a mask (in the extra map/mask map) because some graphics tools don’t save colors properly in PNGs when the alpha channel is zero.
  • The session options now contain a new “Grid” button where you can set options for a global snap grid: it can be hexagonal or rectangular with adjustable size, offset, and rotation as well as different visibility and snap settings.
  • The session options now contain a new “Lighting” button. Here you can set the color, intensity, specular intensity, and direction of the main light. The settings are stored in the game state.
  • When arranging objects from the coordinates or by pressing a number button while holding a group of objects, keep their current arrangement as intact as possible

These new updates we’ve added are just some of the many features on our early access development roadmap for Tabletop Playground, which you can check out on our roadmap Trello board.