Hexagon Shaped Cards

[ctracey2]

Decks of cards currently have only one option for shape, the standard rectangle. The game I am working on requires hex shaped cards and utilizes several decks of these as well as map tiles that are also hex shaped. Please add a feature to allow for hex-shaped cards.

I have read about roundabout ways to use decks of hex shaped cards using the tile feature and a bag to shuffle them as needed, but given the various numbers of decks that we have in this game, playing like that would be extremely time consuming and tedious, rendering the game practically unplayable on this platform.

I have read about other users looking for this feature as well, but have not seen any specific requests for it in the forums. I am working remotely with my partner to design this game, so a platform like Tabletop Simulator is essential for us to complete the design and playtest our game.

We are planning on starting a youtube channel in a few months when our design is finalized and would love to put in a plug for TTS. It's a great tool, but unfortunately missing a critical feature for us at the moment.

Thank you for your consideration!

[Tragic]

You can use PNG images with transparency for cards to make them hexagons but it isn't perfect.... the "stack" is still using the rectangular bounding box....



But it works pretty well, decent enough to use as a proof or a playtest.


This is just a normal deck made with transparent png files.

front

back

Your right though, the best thing to do is make bag I would say. You can make it so objects can go into your hand... and with some fiddeling you can make bags work almost like decks.

I agree irregular shaped cards would be awesome.. but there are some work arounds and there is also the dirty fix I showed you here.

[LordAshes]

I think you can also import a Hex object (card) using the Custom | Model options and (i believe) there is a checkbox to indicate that the object should behave like a card. Obviously you would import the object once and then just adjust the image on the object for different cards.

This should get you better edges because the edges will actually be hexagon and not square.

[ctracey2]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've already tried using rectangular cards with a transparent background. For now, that's the route I'm going, but it's not ideal. See screenshot below. This game involves many hex cards. The screenshot shows what it will ultimately look like, give or take. It basically involves cards going on and off the board from people's hands and each of the hex cards in the center of the board will be a stack of 2 or more cards. Since they are rectangular, they do not lie in a grid very well, as you can see. It's clunky, but it works. My worry was cards getting knocked over when lifting piles that are resting below them, but luckily that doesn't seem to happen.

I looked into the custom model option as well. I don't see an option for making the model a card type. Even if that was an option, that doesn't seem ideal either since we're likely going to have over 300 cards in the game when all is said and done. I assume you can only load one custom model at a time, so that would be painful.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'll be using the rectangular card approach for now. Seems like it should work well enough, but hopefully they will eventually add other card shape options.

Screenshot.jpg

[Tragic]

You can't make objects behave like cards... but you can make them be able to be loaded into a player hand.

Looking at your image, that is how I would do it. I would make a two sided token, with using the TTS object or a custom 3D Mesh in the shape of the Hex. Then right click on it and there is an option in the toggles, I forget the exact name, that allows them to be held in player hand zones, but the look of your image is that the "hands" are just on the table anyway... so you might not even need that.

Then I would make a BAG area that looks like the token, there is a number of ways to do this. You can drop the tokens into the bag, draw them into your hand and for all intense and purposes it behaves exactly like a deck, apart from some small things like sliding cards under it. Though you can script to do similar things.

I would use a 3D Mesh.. as you could add a script to it to scale the bag based on its total contents. I use this in a number of my mods for "stacks"... that way the stack grows and shrinks as you take out or add items to the bag. If you check out my Mage Knight Mod you can see that in action. Also, the "Altar" tokens are hexagon shaped double sided tokens.. so like all my mods anyone is free to nab stuff from my mods.. so if you want grab that and you have a working, hex object with a texture map.

[LordAshes]

What aspect of Card are you looking for that a model does not allow. Yes, there is no official "Card" object type but you can probably compensate for that fairly easily with minimal scripting. For example, the stacking functionality can be achieved fairly easily by having a script that detects a drop of a object on another object and then aligning the objects if they are both card types. Or have a UI button that allows you to select a deck and stack it (i.e. align the positions of all selected objects).

Agreed, adding each card would be a pain but you can make it a little easier to do by editing the save game file directly instead of using the UI. The save game files are in JSON format (i.e. a human readable format) and are fairly easy to modify.

[DashXero]

I too am designing a game that uses hexagon-shaped cards, and I am finding this to be a serious issue. I've already printed out three prototype decks (pictured below), and I'm interested in modding Tabletop Simulator to make it possible for more people to test my game.

PIC_2415.jpg

I'd really like to have hexagon-shaped cards that behave like their rectangular counterparts, but the lack of a function that lets models be treated as cards is a serious oversight. Ideally, there would be a checkbox in the deck-maker UI that switches the card model to a hexagon-shaped card. However, I'd settle for an option that lets imported models be treated as cards. If anything, I'd like for the developers to know that hexagonal cards are a thing that we want.


EDIT: 'Didn't want to be one of those guys who just comes in from nowhere with harsh criticism and nothing at all to contribute. So, I spent some time building a hex card model (there is probably something wrong with it. I just took a lot of educated guesses on how the cards in Tabletop Simulator are constructed.) It can be found here: https://skfb.ly/6POwz

So, aside from the card mesh, there's a collider there for physics, and a plane to obscure the card for when it's in a player's hand (at least, that's how I'm assuming the card-hider works. The mesh of the card itself uses three different materials - a front face, a back face, and the sides. I used my own card front and back designs to figure out how they would look.

I just really want hexagonal cards in Tabletop Simulator.

[LordAshes]

If you have a working Hex model and you have a list of the Steam Cloud images (you will need individual images - not one large images of the deck), you can fairly easily edit the Save Game file and add many instances of the Hex model with a different image file. I would suggest creating one model and giving it the first image reference. Then save the workshop. Find the save file on your computer (it will be a JSON file associated with the save game number which you can see in the corner of the game icon when Loading saved games). You can open the JSON file in a ordinary text editor. Find the section that adds your Hex and duplicate it multiple times with each of your images.

I would probably copy the necessary entry into Excel (or similar) and so that you can easily duplicate while changing the image reference. Then export as text and insert it into the save game...but other methods are also valid.

Yes, this is very hacky in order to get around the fact that TTS does not have true hex card support...but it should work.