What X-Wing Players Need to Know About TTS Modding

Hello and welcome back to the Salt Mines Blog, a place where we rant at extreme length about things which you may or may not actually care about. This time we're talking about something that, love it or hate it, has defined X-Wing this last year, and will likely continue to define X-Wing for the near future: Tabletop Simulator!

1. How to Play

Ok so we're not going to go too in depth here because Hexiled Gaming has already made a wonderful guide to playing X-Wing online. But we will spam some links so that if you have no idea what you're doing starting with TTS you know what steps to follow.

Tabletop Simulator is the most popular online platform for this game (at least according to Friday Night X-Wing's extensive poll data). Your first step is to buy the core game here. After this, you will need to subscribe to the mod on the community workshop here. For a basic tutorial of how to play, you can watch this video. It's all pretty straightforward but if you still need help just go join the Discord server and ask for someone to teach you the game, there's always plenty of people around who are happy to help. 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention VASSAL here. If your computer can't meet the minimum hardware requirements for TTS (generally you probably want a desktop gaming PC, as TTS is after all, a video game, and pretty graphics intense), or if the 3D view is uncomfortable (some people with smaller monitors report an unfortunate "fishbowl" effect even with field of view cranked all the way down). Anyway, VASSAL is totally free, light on resources, and a good time. Download the VASSAL engine here, then download the X-Wing mod here, saving the file somewhere you can leave it but will be able to find it. Launch VASSAL and then go find the mod from where you saved it. There's also a tutorial here and a solid community here but that's pretty much all we're going to say about VASSAL for now because this article is about TTS. 

2. Sharing and Saving Things

Alright so now we get to the basic functions TTS has for sharing custom objects on TTS. If you're in a game with someone and they spawn in a cool item, you can save it to your Saved Objects (also referred to by TTS as your "Chest"), and in turn spawn things in from your Saved Objects to share with your friend. 

Alright so we're playing X-Wing and I give you this awesome Mango Fett alternate art card. First you're going to right click it with your mouse to open up this little menu here. 

Next you're going to click that Save Object button you see (5 down from the top) to open up the next menu

Type in what you want to call the object and hit Save. 

Now if you're playing with someone else, you can click that "Objects" button you see at the top of the screen (highlighted pink here). 

You'll see the following menu. Click "Saved Objects"

Now you'll see the following menu. Click and hold on the item you want to spawn in and then drag it out onto the table to spawn it in. 

We won't need to mess around with this yet but you should be able to also find all your saved objects at Documents\My Games\Tabletop Simulator\Saves\Saved Objects on your computer, as little .json files. 

The next trick you need to know is Additive Load. So you're playing X-Wing with the X-Wing mod, as intended, but you can load in other mods on top of it too! This is helpful for things like backgrounds. First click the "Games" button at the top of the screen

Now you'll see this menu. For this tutorial, I'm gonna additive load up that Tokyo Apartment you see in the third row, one from the right, but if you don't see your mod you can click that "Workshop" button on the left to see all the other mods you've subscribed to. 

Hover over the top right of that square until three dots appear, then click them

Next you're going to click that "Additive Load" button. When the menu comes up double checking you want to do it, hit "Load". Now you've got another mod loaded in on top of the X-Wing mod!

I recommend trying this out with this mod and this mod, they're both really fun to play X-Wing inside of. Of course half the fun is finding your own stuff for your own playgroup, so browse around on the workshop and subscribe to whatever looks neat, try it out!

You also might want to check around for other places X-Wing players stash their stuff. CrazyVulcan's Asset Pack, Kyle Ren's Asset Pack, joeshmoe554's Double Sided Configs, T1TAN's Alternate Ships Liveries, and Monkeys_Inc's Animated Ships Mod are some good places to go look for fun items to save and use in your games.

3. Alternate Art Cards

Alternate-Art Cards, or "alt arts", are among the most popular forms of prize support and are pretty ubiquitous in the X-Wing community. Making alt-arts in Tabletop Simulator is actually super easy! First you have to have the image for the front and back. For making alt arts, some people like cards that look like the real deal, just with a different image, in which case you want Strange Eons and/or the X-Wing Card Creator. Most people however like cards that focus on the art a little more, in which case you're going to want to create your own images using some image editing software like GIMP, Affinity Designer, or Photoshop. A few strange folks prefer publishing tools like Microsoft Publisher, its freeware equivalent LibreOffice Draw, or Affinity Publisher. If you want a regular-sized card, export an image that's 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches (63.5 by 88.9 mm). 

Once you have an image you like, importing to TTS is pretty darn easy! Open up the Objects menu we talked about before

This time we're going to click the yellow "Components" button

now you're going to click the "Custom" button you see on the second row, left hand side

and click the "Card" button on the bottom left hand side of this menu. 

Click on the table to place your card, then right click anywhere on the screen. Now you'll have a menu asking you how to put together the card. If you already have the images hosted somewhere (Imgur, Pinterest, Discord), you can paste the links in the "URL" fields for front and back, but alternately just click the little file folders on the right. 

Once you navigate to your image and select it in the file browser you'll see this message

Do as it says and select cloud, then hit upload. Do this for front and back, and your card will be all good to go! Make sure to save it to your Saved Objects and then you can share it with anyone you play with!

4. Custom Paint

Custom painted ships are another popular pastime for X-Wing players. You can actually do repaints in TTS too! First spawn in the ship you want to paint and right click it to open up that menu we saw with the card before. 

Click the "Custom" button this time to open up this menu

Click the link next to "Diffuse/Image" and hit ctrl-c on your keyboard to copy it, then paste it into your browser. You should see something like this

Open it with GIMP or PS or MS Paint or whatever you use to edit images, and repaint it how you'd like. It can be tricky to tell where parts of the model are, so maybe leave TTS open as well so you can refer to the model while painting stuff. Alright so let's do a really simple paint job, just going to open it up in Microsoft Paint 3D and spray the whole X-Wing area black and then fill the windows green

Now go back to TTS, right click Luke again, hit Custom, and then click the little file browser icon next to Diffuse/Image. Upload it like we did the alt art card files, and then hit the "Import" button at the bottom of that menu

Great now we have a StealthX! As you can imagine, you can also fill it in with really fancy patterns and get really sweet repaints. 

5. And Beyond...

The next steps to learn are using Blender. Just like we pulled out the Diffuse/Image, you can also pull out the Model/Mesh and edit that. You'll have to download Blender and then hit File>Import>.obj to pull the object in. 

Don't edit the base, you can select just the X-Wing. As you can imagine Blender is its own can of worms and for the interest of time we won't get too far into it here, but you could make your X-Wing a wide boi with the scale tool

or replace him with a shark from Thingiverse

The possibilities are truly endless. If you use custom models, you'll have to also go into the "UV Editing" tab to remap the texture if you want to paint them. 

One last thing. For homebrew/proxy you might want custom dials. Changing the dial on a ship is actually pretty easy, all you have to do is edit the .json files. Save the ships as objects and then navigate to Documents\My Games\Tabletop Simulator\Saves\Saved Objects. Find the appropriate .json file and open it up (easiest way is with the Notepad app on Windows). Find the part where it says MoveSet like below and change the list/numbers around to fit your new dial. 

you'll need to change the list after actSet to make the dial have the actions the custom ship has available. F = focus, E = evade, BR = barrel roll, etc. 

\"wtl1\" means white turn left speed 1, etc. 

Make sure that you also give the ship a custom name and paint scheme or something too, because using custom ships like this with the wrong dials accidentally would be really bad. :D

Anyway, there's more but this is kind of the limit of what we think X-Wing players would normally need to know to do whatever they can do on a "real" tabletop with TTS as well!

If you have questions/comments/concerns, feel free to comment here or reach out to the author (@Kyle Ren#7802) on the Second Edition Discord Server! Good luck, and may the Force be with you.