A Coat of Red Paint

So we come to the end of another weekend. Mine was relatively distraction-free, and so I was able to spend a good amount of it deep in the lab--and after I was finished sodomizing my dog, I got plenty work done besides. 

Firstly, a minor-though-critical update to Plutonium, v0.0.3d, which includes:

• Fresh compendium dumps, with Descent Into Avernus content.
• Updated Bestiary files, again to add Descent Into Avernus content.
• A fix for imported creatures always using Strength as their ability score modifier for all their attack rolls. As Foundry doesn't allow the specification of exact to-hit modifiers on NPC attacks, I had completely overlooked this--since 5e statblocks never specify the ability the creature is using for each attack, I'm doing some guesswork behind the scenes to figure it out. It should be accurate in the vast majority of cases, although there appears to be a Foundry bug where creatures can never have their attack proficiency disabled when creating them via the API, so e.g. Ghast's bite is busted.

Secondly, some much-needed <removed> performance tuning. With all the content pouring in recently, I've really been feeling the glacial loading speed of some pages; items especially. While things were never particularly fast to begin with, it's gotten to the point where I'd avoided working on these pages because hitting F5 would incur enough of a delay that I would start to get bored and mentally wander off.

So, I've ripped the guts of the entire site apart and am in the process of rebuilding it. I didn't intend things to get so involved, but one rabbit hole lead to another. So far, the items page loads about 1.5 seconds faster (other list pages should see similar speedup, relative to their sizes), and hover windows pop open about 100 milliseconds faster. 

Beyond this, I suspect the Encounter Builder will feel significantly snappier once work is complete. It's always been sludgier than it had any right to be, and hopefully all the internals-rewiring will perk it up a bit.

Naturally, all this has meant that no work was done on the character builder. My joking estimate of "done by Christmas" may yet come true. Whether or not that's "Christmas 2020" remains to be seen.

Until next time, stay safe out there.