Chapter 34

Pairing Your Phone

A Mac or a Windows machine has no camera worth pointing at a table, and Far Table leans on cameras for two things it will not do any other way: photographing your dice and photographing paper maps. So on desktop you pair a phone or a tablet, and it becomes the camera the computer reaches for.

This is one phone paired to one computer, and it is not a table session. The phone is not joining your game as a player; it sits next to your keyboard waiting to be told to take a picture. Pairing takes a minute and sticks between launches.

Pairing, step by step

As DM, the phone pairing card lives on your Session tab. As a desktop player, the same card appears on the join form, worded more urgently, because without a camera you cannot roll.

Press Pair a phone. A window opens with a QR code, a name for this computer taken from the machine's hostname, and a line of instructions.
On the phone, open Far Table and tap Mirror on the role selection screen.
The phone shows a camera viewfinder with a square frame and the prompt "Point at the QR code on your computer."
Hold the phone up to the screen. The moment the code registers the phone reads Pairing, saves the pair, and lands on the Mirror screen.
Back on the computer the window closes itself, and the card now reads your phone's name followed by paired, with a green dot.

The phone names itself iPhone or Android phone, and works out whether it is a phone or a tablet, so later prompts on the computer say iPad or tablet where that is what you paired.

If nobody scans within roughly a minute the offer expires and the window says no phone scanned in time, with a Retry button that mints a fresh code. There is no typed pairing code and no account: the QR is the only way in, so the phone has to be in the same room as the screen.

What the computer asks the phone to do

A paired phone does nothing on its own. It sits on the Mirror screen showing a connection dot and the line "Tap a camera action on your computer to see it here." Every job starts on the computer, and there are three kinds:

Dice photos. Press a roll button on the computer and the phone lights up one purple button. Tap it, photograph your dice, and the photo flows back through the computer to the table. Chapter 20, Dice Are Photos, covers the rolls themselves.
Photographing a paper map. Add Map and Update Map send the phone into its camera and then into the corner alignment screen, where you drag the four corners onto the corners of the paper. The straightened image comes back. Corners are placed on the device holding the camera, so the loupe sits under your thumb.
General captures. Anything else that wants a picture, such as adding art to the asset library, opens the plain camera.

Every one of those places shows the same phone button, labeled for the job at hand. Press it and a small window walks through three states: the request being sent, then "Tap the button on your phone", then the image arriving. The bar at the top of the computer's window shows the same progress. If the link drops mid-wait the window says it is waiting to reconnect rather than freezing, and a job that cannot finish ends with one plain line saying why, plus Cancel and Try again buttons.

Paired but not answering

Backgrounding the app, locking the phone, or wandering out of Wi-Fi range does not unpair anything. The computer just marks the phone as paired (offline), with a dim dot instead of a green one, and every phone button changes to read Turn on phone, or Turn on iPad if that is what you paired. Wake the phone, bring Far Table back to the front, and the buttons come back.

The phone deliberately does not report itself offline while it is taking a picture, because iOS backgrounds the app the instant the camera takes the screen.

Unpairing and re-pairing

Either side can end it.

On the computer, press Unpair on the phone pairing card. It warns that the phone will stop responding to camera actions.
On the phone, press Unpair in the top bar of the Mirror screen. It warns you will need to scan a new code, then returns you to the role selection screen.

Re-pairing is the same flow from the top and always generates a brand new QR code. That is also how you swap phones: open the pairing window again, scan with the new phone, and the old pair is replaced.

Without a paired phone the dice buttons on a desktop do not appear at all. Phones and tablets never need any of this.