Electronic battle mat is a web application to aide a Dungeon Master make a more enjoyable gaming experience for the players. This allows the DM to setup ahead of time all the rooms and monsters in a dungeon so that there is much less down time during a gaming session. Once the web site is up and running DMs and players only need a platform that supports a browser with HTML5 to use it.This includes mobile devices like tablets.
Electronic Battle mat is based on Google Web Toolkit. This allows the application to be written in Java and then compiled to javascript.
NOTE A prebuilt version of the web app is kept in a sub-directory called ElectronicBattleMat. This allows a user to just try out the program without having to build it.
To build with maven just set console default to main folder and type.
mvn clean package
This project is also an eclipse project. I found it easier to develop and debug using a standard eclipse project instead of a Maven one. To build it using eclipse you will obviously need to setup a few things first.
- Install Java JDK. I found JDK 1.8 works best. Eclipse and Jetty seem to have issues with newer versions. You can get the JDK @ Oracle Java JDK
- Install Eclipse. I use the enterprise addition@ Eclipse IDE for Enterprise Java Developers
- From eclipse marketplace install checkstyle.
- From eclipse marketplace install gwt plugin.
- Follow the instruction @ Download and Install the GWT SDK. After un-zipping gwt 2.8.2 you need to go to preferences in eclipse and add the path to gwt under Window->Preferences->GWT>GWT Settings hit the add button and navigate to where you un-zipped the SDK.
- From eclipse you then just need to import the project General->Import Existing Project into Workspace.
There are a couple of ways you can run the web app. Both methods require that you have Java installed. This is because the server side servlet is written in java and both web servers require it. This only needs to be done once within a local network.
- Use the supplied Jetty web service. To make things more convenient this project also supplies a small java application called ElectronicBattleMat.jar that can be used to setup a local web server within your network. To run it on windows just double click the StartServer.bat file and answer yes if a firewall dialog comes up. At the top of the console window it will tell you the url that people within your network will need to use to connect to get to that main page. For example http://192.168.115.128:8088. The ElectronicBattlemat.war must be in the same directory as the jar file.
- Install Apache Tomcat and install ElectronicBattleMat.war in the tomcat webapp directory.
| Name | License | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Drag and Drop Touch | Mit | https://github.com/Bernardo-Castilho/dragdroptouch |
| Gson | Apache License 2.0 | https://github.com/google/gson |
| Commons FileUpload | Apache License 2.0 | https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-fileupload/ |
| Jetty | Apache License 2.0 | https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/ |
This deliverable also includes a dungeon. I made it from the free module Dawn of the Scarlet Sun. All pictures and text come from the PDF and should abide by its rules. Later I might give a small tutorial on how I used GIMP 2 to prepare the assets to include in the battle mat. I haven't had time to do this yet.