Beyond20 v2.9.0 release

Hi Beyond20 lovers!

It's time for another update to your favorite extension! This one has been cooking for a long time, and there's many reasons for that.

As many of you doubtless know, Wizard of the Coast messed up pretty badly in January with the OGL fiasco which was a huge blow to everything that we stand for. If you haven't followed what happened, just google "OGL scandal" and you'll find plenty of information about it. Needless to say, that whole situation left a lot of sour taste in many of the community's mouths. I personally have stopped playing D&D entirely when that happened as my group has moved on to Pathfinder 2e ever since, due to the outrage we felt. While WotC has rectified its stance and made a move in the right direction by the end of the scandal, it was a bit of a "too little, too late" kind of situation for many of us, and the motivation to continue working on D&D related stuff waned a bit. In the case of Beyond20, as I personally stopped using it for my own games, it made things even more awkward to keep maintaining it, as I didn't have any specific personal needs that needed to be handled.

That didn't stop me however, as I have continued (along with my good friend and contributor Aeristoka) to support Beyond20 and fix bugs as they were reported, as well as adding new features. It did however slow down the development, which had already been pretty slow due to how stable and "feature complete" the extension itself is. There's been very few new bugs reported and none of them were critical.

This update fixes the few bugs we've had, as well as adding a few small features. The big feature that was added is something I had planned for a while, and will expand what Beyond20 can do as it adds the ability for websites to integrate with Beyond20, not just as a VTT, but also as character sheets. This means that Beyond20 can become the glue that connects any character sheet website to any VTT website.

In order to make that possible, an extensive documentation of our API has been written and this should hopefully allow various websites to send their rolls to Beyond20, letting it pass along that data to the player’s VTT, making it a truly universal extension. I have heard from quite a few websites who are excited to bring the ability to roll from their sheets to any VTT via Beyond20!

I expect, as more websites start supporting Beyond20, that we’ll see additional improvements to the API and a possible increase in activity to support various use cases that may be non-d&d specific. I can’t wait to see what the future brings and how Beyond20’s horizon gets expanded with this new feature.

As usual, thank you to all contributors, as well as to my generous Patrons and Ko-fi/Github supporters, who are making this all possible.

Head over to the Beyond20 website to see the full release notes and changelog for this release.

Thank you all and keep on rolling!😄