Dev News Stream

[Eric]

Now available for Community Supporters - Inline Dice!

Inline dice and linking to existing tower rolls are now available within the WYSIWYG editor. Consistent with past practice, Community Supporters get early access to in-development features, and there will continue to be tweaks and enhancements to this one. You'll find two shiny new beta-beta buttons at the end of your toolbar:

 ⬅️ Inline dice rolling. This button brings up a dialog box where you can enter a new roll, CLI-style (e.g., Test Roll:1d6). The roll will be performed and added to the tower results when you submit the new post (or edit an existing one).

  ⬅️ Link to existing roll. This button brings up a dialog box where you can select any of your existing rolls from the post. The existing result will be linked inline within the post.

For both of these, you have the option of specifying to show the result (analogous to the "z" flag on the OGMW dice roller) or the details (analogous to the dice tag on OGMW) as text in the post. If neither are selected, the default will be to show the details and result as an OOC tag.

For everyone, deployment of these features means that the auto-linking of dice results to post content based on matching text has been eliminated.

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If you're a Community Supporter and don't see the buttons after reloading the page, post in Site Feedback so we can check to make sure your membership info correctly transferred from OGMW.

[Eric]

Minor fix just rolled out: Within games, forums can no longer be deleted if they have content inside. This protects against GMs (or staff) accidentally hard deleting other users' posts.

On the sheets front, we've got the infrastructure set up and are testing the integration. We might slip past the end of March by a week or so, but it's only because life sometimes gets in the way. Stay tuned!

[Eric]

Sheets work continues at pace; we're currently doing testing with the original closed-beta tester group, and we should be rolling out to Community Supporters sometime next week.

Speaking of CS and early access, here's the latest early-access feature: the BBcode block editor!

But wait, you say; you just went through the past 18 months telling us that BBcode was going the way of the dodo; why this, and why now? There are a few reasons:

1. All of the existing sheet statblock functionality is written to produce BBcode blocks suitable to include in an OGMW post. To avoid the need for users to adapt their sheets immediately, we needed a backward-compatible solution.
2. We already had the necessary infrastructure to parse BBcode on the client side, in the form of the OGMW BBcode validator. Once we could be sure it was valid BBcode, changing its format to HTML is pretty straightforward.
3. We're trying to remove as many barriers to entry as possible, and recognize that for the long-term members, having to learn a different way of posting could actual be one of those barriers.

So, here's an example of the feature in action (direct cut-and-paste of BBcode, no tweaks). Thanks to @allefgib, whose post I cribbed for this example.

OGMW	Baldr

Hope you enjoy. More soon!

[Eric]

Oh, and one more thing... 🙂

[Eric]

Big news, and no, this is not an April Fool's joke.

The Character Sheets system for Baldr is now live for user testing!

Rodrigo has built an entirely new sheet viewer infrastructure that allows us to decouple from the aging vBulletin architecture. I've built the Invision Community integration to pull in sheet information for linking sheets to games and–for starters–importing the as-is BBcode statblocks from those sheets into Baldr posts. There is no change to your sheets data at all–it's the same sheets with a new viewer, so no need to worry that changes made on OGMW won't be seen on Baldr or vice-versa! Here are the obligatory screen shots:

 

On the game side, it looks like this:

 

Lastly, while we are still working on more complex integrations like sheetrolls, we are able to import the existing stat blocks from sheets in their BBcode format, using the new statblock plugin in the post editor: 

 

We'll get all of this written up in the guides soon, and there are still a couple of nits and lice to clean up ("Delete this Sheet", I'm looking at you...), but I wanted to share the news with you so you could start testing and giving us feedback right away. As always, post your thoughts and ideas in Site Feedback so we can keep track and continue to drive improvements.

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Lastly, this completes the final major milestone for our Baldr development project! Thank you for all of your feedback, assistance, and patience as we've worked through some significant design and integration tasks to make renewing Myth-Weavers for the next generation a Mission: Possible. Expect another announcement soon where we'll lay out the transition plan (expected to kick off later this summer).

[Eric]

Chart update:

Dice Tower	Games System	Privacy Features	Sheets Integration	Full Operating Capability
Complete - 10/3/2022	Complete - 10/31/2022	Complete - 11/7/2022	Complete - 4/1/2023	In Queue - Soon™

 

 

[Eric]

We've made updates to the server infrastructure to support load-based scaling, consistent with how OGMW operated. If you see anything unusual that persists through a reload, please let us know in Site Feedback.

[Eric]

Greetings! Today is T-95 days and counting to the target transition day, and I've been working bug fixes. Here's what was just released:

• Line height of text in the post editor was updated to match as-posted content in all themes.
• Advertisements now close on the expected date, rather than one day late.
• GM/moderator tools for merge/split/move in game topics now work correctly (though slow for staff).
• When games change status or topics change privacy, the list of following users is scrubbed to remove follows (and subsequent notifications) from locations that are no longer accessible.
• The Games and My Games lists now use the same layout as the Games > Advertisements list.
• Description text for Archived status on games now uses the correct words.

Also included are a few sheet updates for the Baldr sheet viewer. I'll be focusing on closing the divergences between Baldr (which was based on our code repository) and OGMW production (which had a number of "hot-fixes" in place that were not correctly documented). Today's fixes include:

• D20-based sheets now correctly calculate total weight carried to include armor, shield, and weapons.
• Dark Heresy sheet first page layout has been fixed.
• Pathfinder 2e sheet statblock is now correctly generated.
• Textbox expansion and scrollbars have been updated so they no longer overlap. (This works only for Chrome/Edge, Opera, Safari, and any other webkit-based browsers. Firefox doesn't have this level of customization for the scroll bar; sorry.)

I still have a number of sheet gaps to close, but I'm aiming for mid-May to be able to start working on the feature request queue. Keep that feedback coming!

[Eric]

T-90! (And no, not a tank.) At this point we've resolved all the open differences between the Baldr and OGMW sheet viewers, though we uncovered some even older bugs pre-dating Baldr that we'll be fixing in parallel with other deployment tasks.

The next priority for me is to take on sheetrolls. The data model is ready and the interface is starting to take shape:

 

However, the OGMW sheetroll interface concealed one fact that is now glaringly obvious: there's no "list" of valid attributes to roll against. Conceivably you could roll 1d20 plus your experience points, or the number of second level spells memorized, if you felt so inclined. So in the next day or two, I'll be setting up some Google sheets to get input from members on what roll capabilities should be available for each game system.

[Eric]

T minus 77. Not a lot to post about today, mostly back-end stuff. I've been steadily fixing some niggling bugs on creating and advertising for games. There's work afoot for language support and sheetrolls, both of which should have more glitzy reveals in early summer.

Today's bug fixes:

• Inconveniently long saving times for new topics are now a thing of the past.
• Creating a new game no longer throws a spurious error (fixing a regression from the next bug.)
• Clearing the advertising date for a game now works correctly.

These fixes also mean that users shouldn't end up with notifications that lead to inaccessible places (e.g., a game or topics that they previously followed has become private.)

[Eric]

70 days and counting! There's been a number of minor cleanups for the themes and the editor buttons, but today's big-news headline is:
 

Language Tags now live for Community Supporters!

Like their OGMW counterparts, language tags leverage attached sheets to reveal or obfuscate text based on whether the reader's characters know the specified language. If the language is known, the translated text is shown to the reader. Otherwise, the reader will see "something in a foreign tongue".

 

Have fun, and let me know if you see any issues!

[Eric]

Also worth noting, this is phase 1 (the "minimum viable product") of language tags. Implementing the Risus language tag equivalent is still on the docket, as is pulling the list of known languages from your sheets to display in a dropdown.

[Eric]

Seven weeks to go! Today's new feature is the addition of the Members list to Public (aka Advertising) games. Prior to this update, Public games were considered by Invision Community to have no members, so it was both impossible to join one and impossible for the GMs to invite members. This led to a lot of confusion around the end of the advertising period where the selected players would lose access temporarily until the GM had extended the invite and the player accepted it. As shown in the example below, the Members tab is now visible, and GMs have the Invite Members button.

Similarly, non-members have the Join button, which functions like Closed/Read-Only games where a request is created for the GM to approve.

 

Look for other improvements related to advertisement visibility in the near future. Keep on weaving those myths!

[Eric]

Freshly back from Myth-Weavers Meetup and just over five weeks to the cutover date; here's a new feature for your posting pleasure!

For posts where you have made edits, you can now switch back to a previous version of the post with convenient Revert buttons found in the edit history. Enjoy, and make sure to report any issues you experience.

[Eric]

Happy Independence Day for those of you in the US! Regardless of where you hail from, I have some new features for you today as I start to work through more of the feature request backlog:

1. Game Advertisements are now much more prominent on the home page. ( @Neopopulas )
   
    
2. My Games widget is now sorted with the games you GM at the top. ( @TiffanyKorta )
   
    
3. "Hide from" and "Show for" labels are now visible on the New Topic form. ( @Chimi @SerakHawk )
   
    
4. The Edit button is now back at the bottom of posts, in addition to in the dropdown menu. ( @Jadetarem )
   
    
5. Control-click (right-click/long-press) on the Clone button now copies it to the editor buffer, where you can use the new Clone button to paste it into any other topic. As an additional enhancement, the Clone button is now available from the dropdown menu in locked threads, so you can use this capability wherever your content is. ( @hakootoko )
6. Marking a forum as read now automatically carries through to subforums. ( @hakootoko )
7. From the Manage Game dropdown, you can now Mark Game as Read. ( @Inash )