This year we stayed with the rest of the Mesa Mundi team in Norwood (about 25 miles out of town) and rode with them to and from the convention. We got to spend a lot more time with them this year and even met Toby and Rebecca’s kids. It felt more like we were members of the team.

See all the pictures of the Mesa Mundi booth.

As usual, we had one touch table and 1/4 of the booth to use to run our games. We were busy all the time. Convention goers were always quick to step up to play a game though lines were rare. It is hard to describe how big this convention is. The expo hall was expanded this year and there are 255 exhibitors. When the convention is running it takes 5-10 minutes just to walk from one end to the other and there are always people walking by or checking out the booth.

We mostly played Pair Soup and Dungeon Raiders along with quite a bit of Fas Jack and Got It. But we played most of our quick games at some point during the weekend. The new games – 20 Questions Wrong and Egyptian Ratslap, were popular among the competitive groups. We also had some very competitive Pair Soup groups. One group from 2014 came back to set a high score. They set a great score, but they were blown away by a new group that stopped by a couple times on Sunday.

This year we had a new game launcher that was full screen and looked more professional. A combination of that and having eight new games changed people’s reaction to our table. After finishing an intro game and dropping back to the launcher, people often commented at the quantity of games available. I don’t know if that will turn into any touch table sales but it did seem to help people’s opinion of spending $4000 on a gaming system.

We didn’t get out to see much of the rest of the convention. Bill got a ring from CritSuccess. Also nearby was a board game booth selling Pixel Glory. Bill bought the game and talked to the creator about making a touch conversion. He was familiar with Mesa Mundi and our other board game conversions from Gen Con, and was excited to see his game converted. I guess it wasn’t new this year, but this was the first time we saw the “Condom against Humanity” from the “Cards against Humanity” booth.

While it didn’t snow much at while we were in town, Boston was still recovering from the blizzards. The parking lot at PAX had a 20-30 ft mountain of snow, but more impressive was the ubiquitous hedge of snow next to the roads. It was around 6 feet tall all along every road we saw. There were cut outs for the driveways and parking lot entrances. It was difficult to spot the entrances to stores and to see traffic when pulling out onto the roads.

I always feel a little out of place in the exhibit hall at PAX. The exhibit space is not cheap and the exhibitors, including Mesa Mundi, have spent a lot of money to be there. While we are selling games, we aren’t really expecting/needing to make a living from it. So there is a dissonance between how the other exhibitors are behaving/feeling, what the convention goers are expecting, and what we are doing. This year, one of the other exhibitors openly expressed confusion about why we had created so many games – many of them freeware or not for sale – for such a small market. We are excited to just get some positive feedback from attendees and one or two sales, while other booths are trying to sell some number of units to break even, and other booths are just staffed by employees of a big company.

We were on a 60″ table using the new SensaTouch IR sensor and modular wooden table frame. It did mean that we were standing all weekend, but it was actually easier than sitting and leaving over to touch the coffee-table sized screen we were on last year.

From the time the hall opened at 10, till it closed at 6, we were always busy playing games. We mostly played Pair Soup because it is super easy and cooperative. People could walk up and join a game any time. By the end of the weekend we had played 160 games of Pair Soup. That adds up to about 13 hours! We were really glad to have the new tile sets.

There was an overhead walkway above us, and many people stopped at our booth saying that they had seen the game from above and had to try it out. We also played quite a bit of Fas’Jack, Dungeon Raiders, Got It and Yacht with people who stuck around for a second or third game.

We played several games of Fire Platoon and people seemed to enjoy it. People didn’t have trouble learning the game and controls and the tablets worked well. The WiFi was much better than last year, but it was still hard for some people to connect to the game.

The other quadrants of the booth were occupied by d20 Pro; a system for running a role playing game, another game table running a fast paced competitive game called WhackIt, and a demo of the modular table system.

There are lots more pictures of PAX and a few of Boston in my gallery.

GenCon is one of the largest gaming conventions, drawing about 50,000 people this year. It uses the whole convention center and much of the conference space in the nine adjacent hotels. Most of that space is taken up by people playing board and card games. There were an overwhelming number of games being played at any one time. The event catalog had hundreds of events each hour and there were over 9000 events that they didn’t list because the program book was already 350 pages. The convention ran around the clock with games scheduled even between 2 and 5 am. There were huge rooms dedicated to D&D, Pathfinder and Magic. The largest board game companies had big areas in the exhibit hall with tables for people to play their games. But even that wasn’t enough; there were pick-up games on any free table and even on the floor in the hallways.

It is hard to convey the shear number of people playing games. In this photo you can see maybe 1/4th of the exhibit hall. The exhibit hall had maybe 1/3rd of the total games being played at the convention.

The main focus of the convention is probably role playing games – both table top and live action. Also popular are the highly themed (Ameritrash) games and games with miniatures:

At PAX, we spent most of our time in the Mesa Mundi booth playing our short and simple games with people who walked up and describing the technology. At GenCon, we spent very little time in the booth and the majority of our time in the gaming room. Due to some technical difficulties, we had twice as many time slots to cover as we had expected; and since it was a last minute change, those time slots hadn’t been advertised to the attendees and were lightly attended. So GenCon ended up being less intense and busy than PAX was.

GenCon also had a different atmosphere than PAX. The audience at GenCon is older and seemed more serious. There seemed to be less excitement and energy, but more focus and planning. Many of the attendees had pre-scheduled their time and signed up for the games they wanted to play. PAX seemed more free form and less regimented. I would also say that PAX was better run. There seemed to be fewer problems and a lot more volunteers/staff at PAX. The GenCon audience is probably a bit more likely to buy a touch table, and we spoke to several people who owned one already.

Like at PAX, having a big marketing budget makes a huge difference. The big companies were using space in the vendor room to demo their latest games and Mayfair brought in huge versions of their classic Catan games. On the other end of the spectrum, Hansa Teutonica, still ranked #56 on BoardGameGeek.com, was only being played at our table.

There were some interesting attractions at GenCon. They had 15 battletech virtual reality pods setup in one of the main hallways with a screen where you could watch the battle. There was also an area where attendees could build elaborate card houses called Cardhalla. They used donated Magic the Gathering cards, and raised money by letting people knock it down by throwing change at the cards. There was also a Cthulhu and Ninja Turtle made of balloons.

We came away from PAX with lots of ideas to improve our existing games and ideas for brand new games. We were energized and motivated by the excitement of the people who came to the booth. GenCon didn’t provide nearly as many new ideas/feedback and we ended up mentally exhausted. I don’t know if it was because of the different atmosphere, not being in the main booth as much, or just because it was our second convention. On the plus side, at GenCon we got to meet a lot more people who shared our vision of table-top games on the touch screen. Most of our Hansa players immediately saw the benefits to having a computer version where you could still sit around the table, face to face, with your friends.

There are lots more pictures in the gallery.

Machine code games was assigned one of the touch tables at the booth and we ran demos of our software. The booth was very busy and people were playing our games almost all the time. We were very happy with the reactions that we got from people. They seemed to really like the games and were always impressed with the touch hardware. You can see more pictures of the booth during PAX here.

All the vendors are in 1/2 of the 516,000 square foot expo hall. Even with all that space, the floor was crowded with a large portion of the 90,000 PAX attendees. Another 1/4 of the hall is used by the board game vendors and game tables and the PC free play area. The final 1/4 is for lines and a food court.

We arrived Thursday afternoon to help with the setup of the booth and to get our software running. This was the first time that we had seen Mesa Mundi’s new Monolith table. It is a very nice piece of hardware that combines a high end Samsung TV with a narrow IR touch sensor in a steel frame. It feels very solid and looks great. The picture is very good and the tempered glass means that touching the screen (even pressing firmly) doesn’t create any distortion in the picture.

Setup was fairly simple for the Mesa Mundi booth, but some of the larger vendors had large crews and rigging to assemble miniature buildings for their booths. We also saw the Intel people setting up the PC free-play area. This was a bank of 360 computers where attendees could play a wide variety of games.

When the expo hall opened on Friday, the line of people waiting to get in was huge. It was about 15 people wide and stretched back 500 feet. When the hall opened there was a mad rush of people to the big name games and vendors. They aren’t allowed to run so there was a lot of fast walking. During this rush to beat the lines, our booth was all but ignored. But it wasn’t long before the hall was full of people, and for the rest of the day the booth always had about 15 people checking out the tables.

We attracted people to our table with “Pair Soup“. It is a quick and easy cooperative game that made it less intimidating for people to come over and play. If they liked the game and seemed interested in seeing more, we would play “Fas Jack” or “Got It“. These games are competitive, but still pretty easy to learn. For most people, this was enough. They were ready to move on or to hear about the hardware itself. But some people wanted to keep playing. Over the course of the weekend we played all the games that were for sale (except Hansa Teutonica) many times. We even played a bunch of our incomplete games.

A lot of people were pleasantly surprised that the tables were for sale now, that they were running on windows PCs, and that most TVs can be converted to a multi touch table. I think that some people’s initial impression was that the table just ran MCG’s games. There was a lot of interest in the tables for both business and personal use. Some of the best reactions we saw were from people who had played our games for a while and said “I’d love to be able to run my D&D games on one of these.” When we pointed them to the next screen, which was running d20pro, they were so excited!

We were really happy to see how much people enjoyed and liked our games. We even gave an interview and signed autographs for someone collecting autographs from game developers. Several people commented about how great it was to be able to sit around a table and play games and a couple people said that it was the coolest thing at PAX. Considering that we were sharing the expo hall with huge game companies featuring their multi-million dollar titles, it was nice to see people interested in such a low budget production.

There were a couple of disappointments: We had hoped to demonstrate our system for transferring game controls to a phone, but we couldn’t get a WiFi network setup. We brought a wireless router along, but we couldn’t get a good connection even though we were just feet from it. I had also hoped that there would be more interest from board game players. I had expected some people to have heard of “Hansa Teutonica” and want to see the computer version, but that didn’t happen.

Overall it was a very good experience. We came back with a lot of ideas for improving our existing games and making new ones. We made contact with some interesting people and learned a lot about the state of the game industry.

We are planning to show off the new mini-games, which are on sale now at Mesa Mundi’s site, along with Hansa Teutonica and a new game in development where players can control the action with a web browser on their phone.

D20Pro will also be on hand at Mesa Mundi’s booth to show off their role playing system. It should be an exciting weekend where we can see how people react to the touch tables and our games. Mesa Mundi has a short write up about PAX here.

Enter Awesomium, a C++ library that lets you put the Chrome/webkit web renderer into your application. While it was not trivial to integrate Awesomium into torque it does allow us to display any HTML or public webpage within our games.

There were a couple of tricky parts to the integration:

• Awesomium has a couple layers: the WebCore, where the preferences are set, and the WebView which renders each webpage. The WebCore is initialized once and should be updated every few milliseconds. Each WebView is created from the WebCore and marks itself ‘dirty’ when the page needs re-drawn. Torque has an iTickable interface which called your processTick function every 32 ms, so we were able to use that to both update the WebCore and check the WebViews.
• We wanted to be able to render plain HTML. Awesomium is setup to render http:// and file:// addresses. To render plain HTML we had to load a special url asset:// which tells Awesomium to call a callback to get any data. We also had to add code to fix the URLs within our custom HTML to be files within our game directory.
• To render the Awesomium WebView onto a Torque sprite, we create a GLTexture that is re-drawn whenever the page updates and is drawn onto the screen every frame. This allows us to position, rotate, and animate the web page on the screen. As we have seen before, when the game switches between fullscreen and windowed mode, the GLTexture has to be re-created. We had this same problem with our custom font library  so we created a common iResurrectable interface that custom textures could implement to be re-built when the screen mode changes.
• We wanted to be able to use the TorqueGameBuilder to add the Awesomium web pages to our games, so we needed to create several hooks to tell the game builder (imagine it like an IDE for putting together the layout of a game) about the members of the web sprite.

Here is the final result in the game. As the player picks different options, the text updates on the fly. The instructions themselves can be moved or rotated with the player’s fingers.

It came in a large tube:

The tube contained:

The four sides attach to each other with an HDMI plug and one corner has the USB cable. Once connected, the corners each have two screws to lock them together. It is powered through USB and is quite thin. We wont be using the included tape since we want the minimum spacing between the sensor and the TV. Overall, the assembly was simple.

The next step is to place the sensor on the TV, attach it to the computer and install the driver. After installing the driver, and rebooting the computer, the sensor was detected and the control panel allowed us to calibrate the screen.

We assembled the screen upstairs next to a bright window and the light was too high for the sensor. We found a setting in the control panel for bright light later, so it may have worked upstairs, but we had planned to set it up downstairs anyway, so we went ahead and moved it down.

Here is a picture of the current setup. Installing the software was also easy. The control panel has options for palm detection, speed vs accuracy, and lighting levels. The touch detections can be sent out as either TUIO events or windows events. The computer is currently running Windows Vista, which doesn’t support multitouch, so we haven’t tried that out yet. In windows mode the touches are converted to mouse clicks. In TUIO mode, we were able to get about 30 simultaneous touches registered.

A friend is planning to build a custom frame for the TV and sensor and we are eventually going to replace the PC with a laptop.

The IR sensor was mounted to a 46″ Sony (A Google TV). It is a very thin system, at most 1/2″ thick, and could detect more than 20 fingers at once. They were using it to run the D20pro role playing system (which was pretty cool). That system was not really designed with a large touch screen in mind, and some of the buttons and menus were a bit small to hit accurately. The sensor also had a higher latency than we had hoped. If you moved your finger across the screen, the cursor stayed a few inches behind.

William’s GemHoarder software ran flawlessly on the screen. The screen was sending out TUIO events and the game connected and played just fine. See a video of GemHoarder here.

The demo was enough to convince us that the IR sensor system was the way to go and so we bought the TV that we are going to attach the screen to. The TV was recommended by the helpful owner of Mesa Mundi as being a perfect match for the 46″ screen. It is the Sony Bravia NX720:

There are several features that make it well suited for our setup.

1. It is very thin which will make mounting it in a table easier and will leave plenty of leg room under the table.
2. There is no bevel around the edge. We need the screen to be as close as possible to the IR overlay so that there is a minimum of distance between when a touch is detected by the IR sensor and when your finger touches the screen.
3. The viewing angle is excellent, even from the top and bottom. The top/bottom viewing angle is bad on many monitors because you are rarely looking at a TV from significantly above or below it (as opposed to sitting off to the side). But we plan to have people sitting all around the table.
4. It was on sale at Best Buy for the super bowl.

It may be the only one of its kind that was sold during that sale that wasn’t used to watch the super bowl.

Imagine being able to play board games without having to waste time setting up and putting away the game, without having to have a ‘banker’, without misinterpreted rules. Or imagine playing computer games where your team or opponents are sitting around the table with you. Currently, the price of these systems put them outside the mainstream, but as the technology improves, I think they will be adopted by more and more people.

William has been in the market for a multitouch table for a long time and has considered several options.

1. Projector and web-cam with acrylic screen
2. Microsoft Surface and Surface 2
3. Multitouch monitor
4. IR sensor

Each of the options above has some advantages and disadvantages:

The projector/web-cam approach is what he considered first because it allows a large screen while keeping the cost low(ish). The main concern with this option is that there would be a lot of trial and error involved in getting the projector and camera setup in a reliable manor.

The Microsoft surface is a nice, if expensive, system. The original surface was a $7000 30″ unit. It was a little small and the sides of the table came straight down making it inconvenient to sit around. Surface 2.0 just came out. It is $10000, has a 40″ screen and looks like a normal table. It also has a per-pixel camera system so that it can detect objects and read bar codes on the bottoms of objects set on the surface. Another disadvantage is that the computer is built into the surface which would make it difficult to upgrade.

Multitouch monitors are smaller than we are looking for in a gaming table. And the large ones are prohibitively expensive.

The IR sensor system is an overlay that you can place over the top of any monitor that detects objects that break the ring of IR lights. It is a cheaper solution. William recently found a company called Mesa Mundi which sells large multitouch IR sensors. It turns out that an early prototype of their system is being used for a D20 gaming session being held at Gryphon Games in Fort Collins this weekend.