A little update

Hi everyone,

Long time no speak!

I wanted to update you a little on the progress I've had in the last month with regards to my various projects.

Here's a mix of the various things I can think of at the moment (Doing it bullet point style to prevent myself from ranting for too long) : 

- Popout module v0.9.1 received a big update in the last couple of days. This update was practically a full redesign of the whole way popout worked, and it was entirely done by a new contributor, Alec Posney, who did an amazing job with it. The new popout will work for pretty much every window now, it will be instant (no more reloading of Foundry in the new window) and should work much better overall, as it even allows to pop in/out the windows. This is what popout should have been since the start (what I had tried to do initially and failed), so I'm quite happy about this change. Try it out and let me know if you're having any issues!

- Today I've pushed an update to the Forge servers which add the ability to import compendium-only modules to your game by separating the assets and moving them to the assets library and optimizing the compendium to use it. This brings it on par with what the Forge does when importing worlds, and it should make compendiums created with R20Converter importable into the Forge now as they wouldn't take your Data storage anymore.

- While on the subject of the Forge, today marks the one year anniversary of my first commit to the Forge codebase! 🥳 I can't believe it's already been one year since the idea started to emerge in my mind and I decided to give this project a try. It wasn't worked on constantly in the beginning, as I've tackled other big projects, but still.. I can barely believe that it's already been over a year that I've been using Foundry! Anyway, to celebrate that, I've launched a contest with nearly 500$ in prizes (split between 6 winners in 3 categories). Head over to the announcement on the forums for more details : https://forums.forge-vtt.com/t/the-great-forge-contest/8922 

- For all the other stuff I do for The Forge, you can always check the update changelog to see what's happening, or the Feature Roadmap for  what I'm currently working on or what's planned in the short term. 

- While I've been extremely busy with my that (and I now have hired people to help take some of the load off my shoulders and help with other tasks), I've managed in the recent weeks to find some time to give Beyond 20 some more love as well. There's a lot of fixes and new features coming soon. I've come to realize that I can probably only do one release every couple of months and I can't cram every possible feature request into it either, so I'm being a bit more selective on what I can and can't include in each release. I'll try to include at least 2 or 3 "big features" per release though. One external contribution of note which I've been reviewing/testing/brainstorming lately is the addition of Astral Tabletop as one of the supported VTTs for Beyond20. I don't know if any of you, dear patrons/readers, are Astral users, but I'm sure that will be very good news to some people. I expect to continue working on Beyond20 in the next few days and hopefully have a release ready this weekend. Crossed fingers 🤞 that I can manage it. Either way, a release is coming Very Soon ™.

- There's not much news at this time about R20Converter. I was hoping to do two more features for it, the first being the ability to select an assets directory and remove duplicate images from the export, and the second is the ability to select the target system, so PF1/PF2E/other system users won't have to manually edit the world.json and unbreak their character sheets with a macro. This is still planned, but I don't have a target schedule for when I might be able to get to it. I'll probably look at it within the next month though.

- After my D&D group had vanquished the BBEG last time, and my own lack of free time, I haven't had much of a chance to actually play D&D in months, which is quite a shame considering how much I love this game! I've however prepared a short adventure (set in Barovia, as I knew the scenario already) and did a one-shot with a group of friends... which ended up being a two-shot... and might have been a three-shot if they hadn't missed a big chunk of the map. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I'm going to be doing this regularly now, I've posted an LFG thread on the forums, so if anyone is interested in playing with me, let me know!

- I unfortunately haven't had much time to do any of my creative writing. The last time I wrote something was in January and it was a short story, which I've since sent to a couple of magazines for publication, I received 3 rejections so far, and one was personalized (a good sign!), I'm hoping to have more free time by the end of the year and hopefully be able to go back to writing stuff and getting back to the novel I wanted to write. We'll see!

That's about it for me. 

Again, thank you to everyone who supports me and allowed me to survive this year and pursue doing what I love. Thanks for all the love I receive from you, and for your patience and understanding!

My next post should be about the Beyond 20 release, so.. see you then! 👋