I've been toiling away at an extension the icon over the last three months or so that turns icon into the virtual role-playing game table top specifically for the champions fifth edition role-playing game.
I've really really good progress on an integration layer between icon, and an existing piece of software that helps simulate combat for the champions role-playing game known as the hero combat simulator.
If anyone is interested I'd love to give a demo to show to folks. I will be putting a video out there, but just testing to see what the interest is in this type of stuff.
When combining HCS with icon on my integration software I've matched put together a solution that provides the following features:
Advance crowd and character management.
- Rosters of characters can be loaded in the hero combat simulator, and corresponding model/costumes can then be manually/automatically spawned into icon. State is persisted to take into account positioning.
- characters can be configured with specific ability animations that will fire based on champion's events (E.g. character activation)that get fired by HCS
- movement of models / characters with animations based on configured movements (eg fly), as opposed to just the player, including the ability to move multiple characters at once, drag characters to each other, etc
- Full support for the champions combat lifecycle, when an attack or other ability happens in the hero combat simulator, the corresponding attack cycle is rendered in HCS. This includes the attacker firing power specific animations and FX/powers, the defender rendering a hit or miss animation, and then different animations firing based on whether the target was knocked down, knockback stunned, etc. I am also currently working on knockback coming out of the hero combat simulator actually sending the target in icon flying back in a predetermined direction and distance.
- Health and endurance bars are updated based on the target you select, with the correct stun and endurance being tracked for the corresponding character in hero combat simulator
The code is still shaky in some areas.
There are also a few key features I want to add, these include:
- enabling the ability to drive actions, attacks, etc directly from icon, with HCS becoming a background service. This would in effect make icon appear like a turn based version of COH, only using champions as the game engine
- better integration of distance and location, so things like range modifiers, movement limits, turn constraints, area effect radius, knocback distance are all automatically calculated
- better animation / ability library to make it easy to just map a power to an animation / fx set
- minion / mob control so that GMs can direct large crowds of minions using simple rules
If anyone is interested in trying to be a GM with this, or otherwise wants to hack around let me know, as I would like to get this into other people's hands.