Quote Originally Posted by Redrobes View Post
1. You have to be able to set up a server for their Google wave federation protocol and become the wave provider hub. It has to be fantastically easy for any noob to do that. In fact you need to be able to set up a hub for just your own group. Ideally you need to set up this hub from your browser or else its not a browser only system and then becomes just like say ScreenMonkey the VTT. Also all the data only goes to that hub and no further like googles servers in some hidden way even to merely authenticate yourselves.
I don't think we'll get the "so easy a geico agent could do it" type easy... but Google's said from day one that they were going to make it as simple to set up server wise as possible. It's also designed to only send data to another wave server if that data is destined for a user on the other wave server. They've focused on that a lot in order to make it more attractive to security conscious organizations.

2. It has to have a map and token interface where adding a map is easy - i.e. not like making one for google maps.
I haven't recieved an invite yet, but from the looks of everything in the video where they showed off the very early alpha in January... this should be extremely simple.

3. The dice widgets and others tools need to be almost as good as any VTTs or better.
Again, you'd have to find someone who's got an invite to be sure, but Wave is almost entirely XMPP for communications... and there are some dice rollers out there for XMPP servers that hands down stomp anything Trevor or any other VTT (speed, and true-randomness wise) into the dirt. Making a truly good dice roller for Wave (which will add a layer of graphics still not doable with straight XMPP) will be a non-issue.

Everything else I think they could do easily or already have now.

They could do it brilliantly and wipe out all the VTTs no problem but like GP, I don't like it either (regardless of being a VTT creator). I just don't like one company having the whole cake. We have all been ruing that since Windows 95.
Except this isn't what wave was ever intended for. Google's intentions definitely lean towards offering the whole thing, but wave isn't that...

So do you guys pro MapTool agree that you need to host the hub or do you think that by using the google server as the entire chat host is alright. When you hit a checkbox and 'send to the wave' do you necessarily imply 'send to google' ? Would be interesting to hear Trevor & Herucas thoughts on this one actually.
They could write it to send to whatever server they wanted, or better yet, write it to default to wave.rptools.net and leave the option to change the server it reports to very simple as well. Not everyone who's interested in Trevor's Community Tool really wants to use one that's restricted to his server anyway. Personally, I'd want it to report to google... Why re-invent the wheel? Especially if all its going to be reporting is a version #, a link to connect, and # of people connected.

I've never been a big fan of google uber alles either, but this thread has hit some paranoia buttons that come across to me as rather silly. First, wave is not Google VTT, Google didn't start the wave project with that in mind... and even if it crossed their minds that it could be used that way... they really don't expect anybody to use it that way due to the limitations of Google Gears and HTML5 in their current states. As rumble said over at rptools, "[A VTT] is too heavy to write as a wave gadget."

What it is, is eventually, google's replacement for Gmail and Google talk, and Google documents. It's not just a chat protocol, or an email replacement, or a wiki, or a document suite, it's all those things and a subversion alternative, and a shared resource alternative, and a world domination plan organizer... and a whole bunch of other stuff. But it's not "THE whole cake", its more of "a nearly whole, undecorated chocolate cake" while there are still other cakes out there.

Also remember unless something has changed since January... they're dumping the entire code base on the public as open source material, they'd almost have to considering how much of it is XMPP... but only almost. There's a lot of stuff they could have gone proprietary with that they didn't/aren't.

They also know their limits. They know that they can only do so much in side a web browser no matter how many crazy scripts you throw at it.

In the end, I think wave'll be a good thing, there will probably be a extremely basic VTT gaget before its over, but the people getting the most out of it will be people tying existing, or new full on VTT's to it.