Development Update January 2022

Greetings Adventurers!

I hope the holiday season is treating you well, and I wish you all the best for 2022. 

What have I been up to?

DDB Importer

Plenty of big changes this month. Let's have a recap:

Support for enhancing 3rd party scenes with DDB Data

A lot of creators make amazing maps - especially for those modules with less than stellar art - this adds the finishing touches to these maps adding information pins and monsters.

We have two adventures out of the box:

• Steve's Scenes "House of Lament" (support on patreon)
• Cyrens Undermountain (Dungeon of the Mad Mage) (support on patreon)

Please reach out if you wish to add support for your own modules.

Character Import: Resource Selector

A dialogue will pop up asking what Resources you wish to use. This is the first part of improving resource management.

Monster Munch AC features

• Armor items will now be added to a monsters equipment.
• Natural armor will now be set as such in the ac calculation field.
• Experimental feature: attempt to set AC based on armor items. This works for most monsters. There are oddities for monsters with abilities or magic items, or just incorrect AC calculations (Arkhan looking at you), it should try to set it to a flat value where I have been able to detect this. Please report any bad monsters.

Smaller changes

• Encounters: you can now import encounters onto an existing scene.
• Support for Obsidian character sheet during imports (will keep existing Obsidian data and categorise feature types).
• Added function to fix base64 in scene thumbnails and alert to base64 in scene images. Run `DDBImporter.base64Check()` in the browser console or trigger from the Muncher tools tab.
• Try and make source book filter more obvious.
• v9 support.
• Lots of cleaning up the code base.
• Monsters: First pass implementing absorption for monsters (needs midi-qol).
• Effects: Support Potent Cantrip for midi-qol.
• Effects: If using midi-qol Bardic Inspiration effect is now applied to feature.

Bug Hunt

There were a number of small bug fixes this month, especially to monsters - it might be worth remunching your monsters if you are planning to upgrade to v9 if you've not done it in a while. A couple of folks reported problems during the upgrade migration process because of some previously partially imported monsters and the sticter checking in v9.

• Linking to conditions in descriptions: if multiple conditions were present in the feature description, it would remove text between these conditions. Rare, noticed on 3rd-level College of Spirits feature.
• Artificer Infusions: if using a Battle Smith int will now be used instead of str/dex (if appropriate) to infused items.
• Characters: some minor parsing bugs.
• Monsters: Support the new size category for Strixhaven template monsters.
• Monsters: a number of small parsing changes
• Monsters: tiny and small creatures had scale values different to SRD monsters. The grid size and scale now reflects SRD compendium.

DDB Adventure Muncher

• Initial support for Strixhaven
• A big shout out to Pariah Zero, who's been making considerable contributions to the mapping of Rise of Tiamat, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, Acquisitions Incorporated, Out of the Abyss, and Icewind Dale.

What went wrong?

Not too much this month, I have taken a good chunk of time off this week over the holidays, and I'm currently at the in-laws on a shoe-string telephone line.

What's coming this month?

I'm currently improving active effect generation, focusing on spells first, then adding some of the more exotic features into DDB Importer. This will allow a good addition of midi-qol/dae effects onto spells without needing to have the midi-srd pack installed and allowing a programmatic way to define these effects.

If you're still using v7 of Foundry then the proxy that is used by that backend will be going offline sometime later this spring. Please look to upgrade to v8 or v9 of Foundry. More details on the timeline to follow, but won't be till March at the earliest.

And finally, the key posts have now been updated with the new keys for January.

Many thanks and a happy new year!

MrPrimate/Jack