MaterialDeck VS MaterialPlane

I use the Matrial Deck addon with my Stream Deck. You run a small application on your computer that acts as the go-between between your Stream Deck and the hosted Foundry instance.

Here's instructions: https://github.com/CDeenen/MaterialDeck/wiki/Linux-Instructions

There also is no easy way to have an SD plug-in fully communicate an external change of state without some sort of sever running to keep things updated. The only system I’ve seen that does this consistently is the purpose built Material Deck for the FoundryVTT virtual tabletop application. It uses a local server (run on your system) that can poll the states of various commands. When you invoke them via the keyboard, if available, the state of the corresponding SD key will update (music playlist playing or stopped, game paused or unpaused, for example). And when you invoke them on the SD, they react as though you hit the keyboard command. But this is a very specific usage case for a single app. It is not available outside of FoundryVTT (for other apps). Of course, the server app is available along with its source code, so you could figure out what it takes to make it work in other apps, but that would be far, far more work than learning AHK.

"It would be so cool to use my Streamdeck to interact with Foundry." -There's a module for that. "What if difficult terrain was automatically calculated?" -There's a module for that. "I wish my players could change their token for when they're sitting." -TAMFT. It's just crazy.

You could also use Material Deck: https://github.com/CDeenen/MaterialDeck Another module by me that allow players to control their tokens using an Elgato Stream Deck. They can move tokens, run macros (for example to attack), display token stats, and more. Right now you can only use 1 stream deck at a time, but I'm planning to add support for multiple Stream Decks. It's an expensive solution, but it does do what you want it to do (or at least it will soon).

Maybe not the answer you're looking for, and it'll require you to buy hardware, but you could take a look at my Material Deck and Material Keys modules that use an Elgato Stream Deck and Novation Launchpad, respectively, to control and display various Foundry functions. Both allow you to play playlists or individual tracks by pressing a physical button, and both show which playlist and track is playing (through LEDs for Material Keys, while Material Deck can display playlist and names). As a bonus, you'll also be able to do a lot of other cool stuff :)

Dry erase and a projector is honestly probably one of the easiest/ most customizable. Could potentially project from the bottom if you have a glass table. Unless you got some money and time to go the full foundry vtt table material plane. which would be my dream.

Gosh, this made me look into the status of Material Plane, which looks abandoned. I wish it had panned out, or some other project that tracked minis to tokens. So you could physically move the mini and get the token movement and lighting changes.

I'm the developer of Material Plane, and on the GitHub wiki I've made a comparison between the various mini detection options, including IR touch frames (which is what Frame-Touch uses). I suggest you give that a read to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the options. I'm personally not convinced that IR touch frames are the way to go, but you might think differently :). https://github.com/CDeenen/MaterialPlane/wiki/Mini-Tracking-Devices-Comparison

Originally it only worked with special hardware, but I recently added support for touch screens (including IR touch frames). While it is still a bit experimental and has some limitations due to how the touch technology works, I have had some positive responses on it. There's some more info here: https://github.com/CDeenen/MaterialPlane/wiki/Touch-Screen-Guide

Depending on what kind of objects you want to recognize and what you want to do with them, I might interest you in Material Plane. It tracks physical minis so the tokens in Foundry follow their movement, and update their vision. I have an experimental build with support for touch screens (normally it'd need dedicated Material Plane hardware), and it appears to work reasonably well on IR touch frames. For capacitive touch screens you'd need to add something to the bottom of the minis so the screen can recognize them, but in that case it should work on those screens.

https://github.com/CDeenen/MaterialPlane https://youtu.be/K3RhkTjiXv4

Which one would be best used in conjunction with at the table play? (Not nearly as important as most games I'm playing are online, but something I want to future proof for as I've seen some interest) Base Foundry has the same problem with other VTTs when it comes to in-person play. It's awkward to use and it ain't fun prodding on your laptops when your friends are in front of you. However, this is where Foundry's modularity comes into play. You can disable the player GUI entirely using modules and apply a "shared" vision for all players. This allows for gameplay over a large display such as a TV. There is also a very nerdy way to use a sensor to interact with real life miniatures and have those miniatures update Foundry's line of sight depending on where you place your minis (it's called Material Plane). I've tried playing in person, with my laptop screen facing me and a player screen containing 4 shared tokens in one player account and it worked surprisingly well for A Wild Sheep Chase.

You may want to have a look at that: https://github.com/CDeenen/MaterialPlane