Alpha 0.0.8 Release Notes

Hi friends, I'm pleased to share the final Alpha release build for the month of November. For those of you who supported the project this month, I would like to say a very humble thank you. I hope you will consider staying on-board through December, but I wanted to be sure to release this version in order to get one more set of bug fixes and feature updates out the door before the month-end renewal period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAzrZVGAR_k

Before I get into the update notes, I have a new Development Video Update to share! This episode features some detail on the dynamic vision and lighting systems which have been added the last few versions and continue to be improved here in 0.0.8!

As we move into December, I will begin a major focus on several key areas: the Journal and Notes system, improved Modding support and documentation, D&D5e SRD Compendiums, Weather Effects, and Event Triggers in addition to a host of smaller updates. 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/23019899

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New Features

• Tokens may now act as light sources and emit light much like ambient lights. Tokens which emit light will update the visibility for other players when they move. This allows for a deep level of immersion with certain party members carrying torches or light spells into dark dungeons and acting as beacons for players with more limited vision. To configure tokens to emit light, add the Emit Dim Light and Emit Bright Light settings in the Token Configuration menu.
• Introduced soft shadows which improve upon the new dynamic and ambient lighting additions in 0.0.7 by gently blurring the borders between bright/dim/dark fields of vision. These soft shadows are benchmarked to perform very well on modern desktop and laptop machines, but I am interested in collecting user feedback from anyone with a less powerful laptop to learn if you encounter any noticeable performance dips following this update.
• Token width and height dimensions have been changed from pixels to grid units. A token which takes up a single grid space will therefore have height and width set to 1. A "large" token which occupies a 2x2 space would have both values set at 2, and so forth. The primary benefit of making this change is that pre-configured actors and tokens become much easier to share across a wide variety of maps which may have different pixel grid sizing requirements. A side effect (aka consequence) of this change is that ALL tokens have had their width and height reset to a value of 1. Any extra-small or large tokens you previously had in your worlds will need to be reconfigured. Sorry!
• Added a new context option in the Scene Navigation menu which allows you to "preload" a scene background to players. This will cause your players to start loading the background image immediately so that when you switch to the new scene it will (hopefully) be already downloaded and processed and ready for immediate use. To make the most effective use of this feature as a game-master, trigger a preload of the scene background at least 20-30 seconds before you switch the active scene, resulting in a more seamless transition experience for your players!
• Added backend server-side support for core software migrations. A migrations framework was already in place for game system version changes, but this new framework also handles necessary data migrations when the core software is updated. This will help your game data to automagically update or change internal data structures when needed.
• Any hyperlinks are now forced to open in a new window or browser tab, preventing pesky (or helpful) links in the chat log, character biographies, or scene notes from breaking your active session.
• You can now interrupt an in-progress token movement with a keyboard movement in a different direction. Also improved (slightly) the smoothness of token keyboard movement animations - it's still not where I want it to be so expect further progress here in future updates.
• Added a new button in the Walls Tools menu which allows you to delete all walls from the existing scene (after a yes/no prompt).

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Bug Fixes

• Pop-out sidebar tabs now have maximum heights applied and should vertically scroll when necessary.
• Chrome will no longer attempt to autocomplete the password field of the player management form.
• Fixed a bug which prevented Actors and Items from being drag/dropped into folders in Firefox (and some other browsers).
• Improve the performance of the vision masking rendered texture by downsizing the masking polygon before rendering the texture. This improves performance and resolves some fatal WebGL errors with very large maps.
• Placing new light sources only triggers if you drag their initial radius a sufficient (but still small) distance from their origin point.
• Fixed an issue with drag+drop for large (2x2 and above) size tokens where the resulting movement position was incorrect.
• Fixed a bug which prevented the Actor sheet's "Configure Token" button from correctly updating the default token if the token was not linked to the actor data.
• Resolved an issue which caused actors imported into a Compendium pack to lose their default token configuration in the process. The good news is that now when you store an actor to a compendium it also saves the appearance and setup of their default token, the bad news is that any actors placed in compendium packs before this update may need to have their tokens re-configured.

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Mod Development and API

• The Foundry VTT software is now distributed using the SDK flavor of the NWJS native environment. This means it has a built in debugging console which may be accessed by pressing F12 while in-game. This will be especially helpful for mod developers who need better tools to debug and test their systems and modules which are under development.
• The renderApplication API hooks have had their signature expanded. Previously they transacted a single argument (html), now the renderApplication hook is called with (app, html, data) as positional arguments. This hook allows you to intercept different UI elements when they are rendered and manipulate their content and behavior. For example usage of this hook, please see how I register Item and Spell Card event listeners in the D&D5e system: https://gitlab.com/foundrynet/dnd5e/blob/master/scripts/items.js#L439