Electronic Battle Mat

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.

Building

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.

Building with Maven

To build with maven just set console default to main folder and type.

mvn clean package

Building with Eclipse

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.

1. 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
2. Install Eclipse. I use the enterprise addition@ Eclipse IDE for Enterprise Java Developers
3. From eclipse marketplace install checkstyle.
4. From eclipse marketplace install gwt plugin.
5. 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.
6. From eclipse you then just need to import the project General->Import Existing Project
   into Workspace.

Running Electronic Battle Mat Server

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.

1. 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.
2. Install Apache Tomcat and install
   ElectronicBattleMat.war in the tomcat webapp directory.

Included Software Licenses

Included Dungeon

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.