Mad Brew Labs

GenCon

Last night GenCon released the Exhibitor List & Map^[1] so future attendees can see where their favorite game companies will be positioned in the new expansion. That’s right, this year’s exhibit hall will not be in the same place as last year, but rather in the shiny new areas along Capitol Street. GenCon even made a video to walk you through the new area.

Exhibitor List (PDF)

GenCon 2011 Exhibitor Map

Listening to: Passenger – Passenger – In My Head

References

[1] GenCon Community – Exhibitor News Post

Calibre - eBook Management

Print is far from dead, but digital is definitely here to stay. My eBook (inluding my RPG library) collection surpassed my physical collection more than a couple of years ago and its size has continued to grow exponentially. I spent a lot of time organizing, maintaining, and converting books in my library, which could be a hassle until I found Calibre.^[1]

Calibre is the most feature rich eBook management tool I’ve seen. Calibre can also be extended via plugins or by improving the source, which is open. Most of the following can be found on the Calibre site, but I’m so thrilled by the software I’ll repeat the features here.

Library Management

It manages your library from the concept of a logical book, which means it will only have one entry per book regardless of how many formats I have it in, which keeps the interface clean and concise. It can also sort on all the metadata you’d expect: title, author, date added to library, date published, size, rating, series, etc. It even stores covers. Calibre will even go online and download metadata for the book based on title/author or ISBN.

It also supports custom metadata via tags, which is especially great for RPG libraries. You can tag with system, version, setting, or as a third party publication. This makes finding all the relevant resources for your game a snap. I used to organize my library by publisher, but then I’d find myself needing to access lots of directories to get all the material I needed. You may also attach comments about the book.

Format Conversion

The eBook converter is pretty amazing. It supports more formats than I’ve ever used and it can rescale font sizes, detect and create structures (table of contents), and even insert metadata into the “book jacket.”

accepted input formats:

available output formats:

Device Sync

Calibre supports a large number of devices natively, but it be used with any eReader that exports itself as a USB disk. The following is a list of just a few of the devices supported: Android devices, Edge, iPad/iPhone, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Sony PRS.

eBook  Viewer

Calibre can also be used to read your library and its viewer supports a wide array of formats. It also supports bookmarks, table of content, CSS, printing, and searching. You may also customize the experience by adjusting a user style sheet and fonts.

RSS Download

Of particular note to bloggers and blog readers is Calibre’s ability to automatically fetch feeds and convert articles into an eBook format. It supports about 300 news sites out of the box, but users can build recipes for new sites and upload them to the Calibre forum.^[2]

Content Server

My favorite feature of the Calibre program is its ability to serve my books so I can access them from anywhere. This feature is particularly useful for those of us with mobile devices that don’t have a lot onboard storage.

You can actually browse your collection from anywhere with an internet connection with a simple browser (like on your smartphone or even with the Kindle). Hell, this ability is even useful when running a game at home as it allows me to keep all my eBooks in one location but access them from multiple devices at the table.

Calibre gets my highest recommendation 5 out 5 flasks!

5 out of 5 flasks

Listening to: Kyuss – Blues for the Red Sun – Green Machine

Resources

[1] Calibre’s official website

[2] Calibre forum

The ePawn Virtual Game Board

E3^[1] usually doesn’t have much to offer the traditional roleplaying and board game world. However, at this year’s E3 a 23” virtual game board was introduced. Behold the ePawn:

ePawn at E3

Gamespot reports that the large touchscreen device will retail for approximately $400.^[2] Gamespot also declares that the unit is a touchscreen, though I haven’t see anything directly from ePawn that says it responds to touch (but it would make sense).

What ePawn does claim is that it can track 100 objects simultaneously that have been configured (possibly using fiducials^[3]) to work with ePawn. In fact, it can track orientation and altitude (how high above the screen) of an object.^[4]

ePawn D&D

Another interesting specification is the ePawn does not come with an embedded CPU or memory. It works in tandem with a smartphone, tablet, or computer. So game designers can work with platforms they already know (their SDK supports Windows, Android, and iOS).

ePawn D&D Zoom

While I’m not exactly thrilled when the acronym DRM is said in the context of positive features, the ePawn provides a seamless DRM in the tracking technology. Which means game providers can limit their game to only work with their objects (which, of course, would be sold at a premium).

The Virtual Mat

There’s another virtual tabletop tool in development, and it’s called the Virtual Mat.^[5] What separates Virtual Mat from something like MapTool^[6] is that it presents the game space in 3D. It accomplishes this by re-using the models and animation from Neverwinter Nights.^[7] This means you’ll need to own NWN to use its resources. That being said, the NWN mod community^[8] has provided a ton of free resource that could be used.

Virtual Mat is written in Java (using the jMonkeyEngine^[9]), so it makes the software fairly cross-platform. However, like most virtual table tops, Virtual Mat has no plans to implement actual rules, but it is trying to hook a lot of the animations and models present in NWN along with common virtual tabletop elements like fog-of-view.

Listening to: Crowbar – Sever the Wicked Hand – Echo An Eternity

References

[1] The Electronic Entertainment Expo is an annual trade show for the video game industry

[2] Gamespot’s E3 2011 Gaming Hardware & Accessories report

[3] A fiducial is a mark that can be recognized by imaging technology

[4] ePawn’s official website

[5] Virtual Mat’s home page

[6] RPTools’ MapTool Virtual Table Top

[7] Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights

[8] Downloads can be found on Bioware^[7] and IGN’s NWN Vault

[9] Virtual Mat thread on jMonkeyEngine