Alpha 0.1.0 Release Notes

Hello friends, I'm excited to share Foundry Virtual Tabletop Alpha version 0.1.0 which adds some exciting new systems while improving upon existing mechanics with internal improvements to many systems. This ended up being a large update with many changes - 8 of which came from the community in Discord and were drawn from the vtt-suggestions channel. Thank you for your feedback and I hope it is reassuring to see your votes and voices counting towards development priorities for the software.

The next release version will focus on continued improvements to the Journal, Lighting, and Fog of War systems. Thank you all for your continued help, enthusiasm, feedback, and support. Please keep an eye on the development progress board here for visibility into what features are in progress and coming up next!

https://gitlab.com/foundrynet/foundryvtt/boards

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Download Instructions

If you are a Patreon supporter at the $10 or greater level, please download the new build here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/23379498

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New Features

• Added the new Journal system - a new type of game entity (like Actors, Scenes, and Items). Journal entries may be created on the journals tab of the sidebar (looks like an open book) - and entries can be organized into chapters with different visibility permissions set for different players. This allows the GM to easily define rich notes or handouts that they can share with all players, have a shared party stash for tracking miscellaneous treasure, allowing individual players to have private journals, or collecting GM notes throughout the session. Please note - this is just the first phase of work on the Journal - there is a lot more work to come here.
• Journal entries may be shown to all players by right clicking on the entry and choosing the "Show to Players" option.
• It is now much easier to configure global illumination in a map which has full illumination and visibility. On the scene configuration menu this option can be enabled which grants all tokens unlimited vision until/unless a wall blocks further sight.
• Token nameplates have been reduced slightly in size to mirror the smaller overall UI which was implemented in 0.0.9.
• A Game-Master user may now drag owned items out of a player's inventory, or between the inventory tabs of multiple actors to copy the item data to another location. Owned items can be transferred back to the global items tab or into another player's possession.
• Players may now each select a player color which is used for their mouse cursor, their scene location, and will be used for other future purposes throughout the application. To set a color, right click on the Players UI at the bottom-left and when selecting your impersonated character you may also set a color. This will likely be moved to a different UI location in the near future, as incorporating it in the character select UI was a short-term solution.
• Compendium packs may now be marked as private to configure which compendiums contain data which is safe to share with players (like available items and spells) and which packs should be restricted (like the list of prepared monsters they will be fighting in the next session).
• The formatting tools available within the standard rich-text editor have been expanded to include <hr> dividers, HTML tables, and image support.
• Clicking the header bar of a windowed application will now pop it to the top of the stack, allowing you to recover full visibility of a character or item sheet by bringing it to the front.
• Added a help window to show an Controls Reference providing an overview of mouse and keyboard controls. This help window is available from the settings tab (the question mark icon) on the right sidebar.
• The "Observer" permission level now grants a user ability to see from an actor's perspective but not the ability to control that actor's token. This provides a nice way to handle situations like streaming from a neutral perspective, or allowing a split party to have visibility into what other characters are doing.
• Added support for the "Limited" permission level for entities. In practice this does not change much - as how to implement a "limited" permission view is left up to system and module developers, however the intention for limited permission would be the ability to see a record for the Actor or Item, and some high-level details, but not full visibility into statistics or attributes. 
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Bug Fixes

• Audio controls on the Playlist were previously out of sync with the playing status of individual tracks and should now better reflect the expected behavior.
• Sounds which were not looping previously did not set their playing status back to stopped when playback had concluded. Now sounds will go back to a stopped position once they have finished playing.
• Fixed an issue which prevented entity permissions from being set back to "Default" once they had been assigned to a non-default value.
• Resolved a UI issue which caused the player "bubbles" indicating which scene players are viewing to overflow the scene name in the navigation bar making it difficult to use.
• Resolved an issue which prevented all hook callbacks from being reached even if no callback returned false to prevent further handling.

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Core Software, APIs, and Module Development

• Breaking Change. The ContextMenu instance previously provided an Event instance to the callback function for entries in the menu, this has been changed to instead vend the HTML element which the context menu is attached to as the argument to the callback. While this necessitates some code changes from early mods and systems it will provide a more convenient overall API.
• Breaking Change. Entity management methods for create, update, delete operations have had their behavior changed to return a Promise which will resolve to the created or updated entity, or the ID of the deleted entity. Transacting a Promise for these operations is a better design as it allows the client to ensure the change was correctly handled by the server before proceeding.
• Hooks have been added for whenever an Entity is created, updated, or deleted which can allow mods to extend or override the behaviors which normally occur. For each entity type (Actor, Item, Scene, JournalEntry, ChatMessage, and Playlist) the following hooks are triggered, where <Entity> is the upper-case entity name from the previous list.
  - create<Entity>
  - update<Entity>
  - delete<Entity> 
• Added some logic to allow audio playback to condition on first observing a user gesture in anticipation of Chrome browser changes which block autoplay of audio unless triggered by a user interaction.
• The Game class which manages the core platform data, UI, and interactivity has been refactored for cleaner code and better structure.

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D&D5e System

• Added critical hit highlighting for natural 20s and natural 1s on attack rolls, tool checks, and more.
• Added support for alternative proficiency levels for Tools - with options for Jack of All Trades and Expertise both supported.
• Improved the saving behavior of the rich text editor to save work-in-progress in the editor when the primary save button is used.
• Added Feats support to the character sheet - this is still work in progress, but an initial version of feats is now supported. This tab is designed to capture racial or class features, active abilities, or (unsurprisingly) feats which a character or NPC has access to.
• Added support to track Prepared Spells - by editing spells in your spellbook you may check that certain spells are prepared for the day - prepared spells will have a small sunburst icon to the right of their name in the spellbook tab.
• Corrected a bug which prevented owned item descriptions from re-rendering properly when details of the item were updated.
• Corrected some incorrectly entered spells and added several new spell entries to the SRD spells compendium.