Friday, April 10, 2020

Napoleonic Naval and more Video link experiments

We played Men o' War - our house rules for Napoleonic naval games:
French: Chris on table & Mark on line.  3 squadrons each one 1st rate & two 3rd rate, all regular.
British: Jim on table & Nick on line. 2 squadrons each one 2nd rate & three 3rd rates all veterans.

My plan was to do the battle with Zoom using 2 fixed big picture cameras & Chris & I each having a smartphone in hand for close ups.  With Zoom the remote players can be using a big screen PC & can choose betWeen a multiple window screen, or pick one to be full screen.  I thought this would help the remote players keep a  handle on it.  But we met a big snag.  We got audio feed back with the multiple devices in the wargames room.  There is a mute button in Zoom, but it muted all the devices in the room, or none of them.  We tried to turn off the mikes on the devices, but that didn't seem to work eithwer.  So we abandoned Zoom & used two WhatsApp links one for each side. 
The Brits are in the foreground.  The dice decreed the wind was blowing towards the windows giving the Brits the weather guage. 
Both sides manouvred to get their squadrons into a single line of battle. 
The upwind advantage helped the Brits to cross the French T.
In true age of sail style the two fleets sailed past each other in line ahead.  The lead French ship got dis-masted & has fallen out of the line.
The lead French ship has drifted thu the British line & struck her colours.
The lead British ship was also pounded so badly it had to pull out of the line, but it was able to escape downwind as the next ships in the line wrapped around the tail of French fleet. 
The end ship in French line has had to strike its colours & the next one has been sunk by the converging British fire.  Another British ship has has to pull out of the line with severe damage.
Having lost 2 ships captured, one sunk & others with severe damage, the remaining French broke off the action.  Since we last played it I came up with some ideas to fix a few remaining issues I wasn't entirely happy with in Men o' War.  They worked really well. 

We still have technical issues to iron out with the video system - mainly to do with the sound rather than the video (the camera quality is really good).  Using two WhatsApp links worked ok, but the remote players would really benefit from a bigger screen & more camera angles including a fixed point overall view.  The players on the table would like to have a big screen at one end of the table with the moziac of all the remote players heads.  These two items would make a much better connection between the players.   We need to either find a way to get Zoom to do what we want, or find another App that will.  The main problem with WhatsApp is that it doesn't provide video on a PC, so the remote players have at best a tablet sized pic.   Can anyone point us to a better App for our purposes?  Another problem is that the video sucks up the batteries - we have to remember to start with the devises fully charged.

Edit: I have found the way to disable the audio on smartphones & tablets, so maybe Zoom will work the way I want if all but one of the devices in the wargames room have their audio off.



1 comment:

Truscott Trotter said...

You could try skype for the big video on the PC and also on the phones.