Status updates and news

Hey everyone!

It's hard to believe but it's been over a month since my last post. Time flies incredibly fast and I wish I could give you all more frequent updates (feel free to comment on whether or not you feel it's necessary).

Let's start with the big update news first before I go into the details and my usual monologue.

Updates

I've released Beyond20 v2.1 and Beyond20 v2.1.1 in the last few days. You can read all about it in my public post here.

In other news, I've made an update to nearly all of my Foundry VTT modules with some new features and bugfixes to most of them. I'm glad to have that out of the way now, as I've been meaning to do some of these features for a while.

Finally, for those who are also users of The Forge, the Bazaar feature has been added and is automatically enabled on all accounts. More details about that later. I've also updated my Feature Roadmap in the forums so you can keep track of what's happening there.

I've been waiting to post an update on Patreon because I'm a "low traffic kind of guy" so I wanted to finish updating all the modules and the extension and even R20Converter (which I will work on next week) before I posted one big update instead of multiple small patreon posts. 

For the specific details, I don't need a section about the Beyond20 release, as I just posted an article specifically about it which you can read here. So we're jumping right to the Foundry modules details. 

Foundry VTT Modules

I have released in the last few days an update to the following modules : LMRTFY, Furnace,   PopOut , Trigger Happy and Polyglot.

Some of those received multiple updates in the last few days, and I'm just going to bundle the changelogs into a single list.

Here are the changes that each of them had : 

LMRTFY  (Let Me Roll That For You) :

The big change to this module is that now by default, it will let you send roll requests based on the token that your player is controlling. This should get rid of the issue people had where they'd want to ask people to roll for all the characters they are controlling or if they switch characters often. I've also improved the interface so you can hover on the avatars and see the name of the actors, and made it stop refreshing needlessly when interacting with some other modules.

• Add support for requesting rolls based on the player's controlled tokens
• Change user selection text from "Controlled Character" to "Assigned Character" to decrease confusion
• Change default behavior from "Assigned Character" to "Controlled Tokens"
• Prevent re-renders of the requestor for non useful user updates (token hotbar)
• Allow the ability to send a message to a player without requesting rolls
• Add a tooltip on each avatar to tell the name of the monster and the player assigned to it
• Add German translation
• Add Portuguese translation
• Add attributions in the README for the translators
• Save the roll reason/message as a flag in the chat message that the roll makes (by @tposney)
• Added a 'attach' field to the socket data that can be used by other module to attach random data as flags to the chat message from the roller (by @tposney)
• Added new 'controlled tokens' sentence translation in portuguese 

Furnace:

This is mostly a bugfix release, especially with regards to some issues that related to text drawings. The nice new features is that now you can have a text drawing autoresize to fit the text inside it (useful if you can't get the aspect ratio correctly after you resize by mistake for example) and the ability to drag&drop a roll table into the macro hotbar and it will generate a script macro to roll that table for you.

• Fix not being able to use text drawings after panning the canvas
• Fix signica/modesto fonts missing from text drawing font list
• Fix measure distance macro in compendium
• Add a "resize text to fit" option in the text drawing's HUD
• Fix issue with potential conflict of handlebar helpers (fixes a conflict with obsidian module)
• Added portuguese (brazil) translation
• Added QoL which creates a macro when a roll table is dropped into the hotbar
• Fix `this` attribute in macros to refer to the macro itself when advenced macros are enabled (by @Stan)
• Added portuguese translation
• Fix error in 0.6.5 that says "invalid command" when executing a /macro in chat box
• Fix error when using {{macro}} in chat which returns an empty string

Trigger Happy : 

Other than bugfixes, this update adds a toggle for the GM to disable triggers and adds a compendium of journal entries that provide examples and step by step guides and links to various tutorials on how to use Trigger Happy. I know that's going to be very helpful to a lot of new users.

• Add a toggle to disable triggers for the GM 
• Place a captured token at a more appropriate location rather than the center. (@tposney)
• Fix bug where triggers executed twice when naming the journal entry "Trigger Happy" within a folder named "Trigger Happy"
• Add a selfWhisper trigger option to have chat messages sent to the one who triggered it
• Add journal compendiums with instructions and examples on how to use it
• Updated README to include links to dndpopulationme's video tutorial and step by step instructions

Popout:

This is a simple update with a bugfix and a nice new feature

• Add the ability to popout the sidebar directories
• Fix issue with spacebar not working when editing a character's name 

Polyglot:

And finally, the last but not least, Polyglot. This is the one release that I got most excited about because I finally got to implement a much requested feature (which was actually quite fun to implement). You can finally select text in a Journal Entry and set its language to whatever you want. It will get scrambled automatically by other viewers (i.e: not the owner of the journal, regardless of what they speak) based on whichever token they had selected at the moment the journal was opened (there is no refresh of the content as you select different tokens, unlike chat messages).

• Add support for scrambling messages in journal entries!!!
• Add setting to disable scrambling of messages for GMs
• Add setting for the default language to select
• Fix bug with old messages appearing in the chat log when a token is selected
• Optimize the re-rendering of messages when switching token selection

The Forge

I'm not going to talk too much about The Forge, considering that I've dissociated that project from Patreon, I want to keep Patreon for "my hobbies" and I now consider The Forge as my actual full time job (and long term career plan). But I know that a lot of you are interested in it and some of you may be subscribed there as well. So if you haven't been following, I've released The Bazaar recently which, I had originally planned to be a full fledged store for Foundry systems and modules, with screenshots, reviews, searchable keywords, etc.. Kind of like the Play Store, Steam Store or PSN Store, if you know what I mean. A rich and dynamic UI. Unfortunately, I didn't actually do that, because I managed to integrate it directly with Foundry's own installer UI. So yeah, it doesn't have the cool UI, but it at least serves one of its other primary purposes : When you install a system or a module now, that install does not take any of your Data Quota. This finally makes the 500MB limit make more sense, and it also had an unexpected (and so cool and essential to me now) side effect : when you install a system or module, even those 700MB audio bundles, the install is instantenuous! So yeay, for another Forge optimization :)

You can read more about The Bazaar here and you can also check out my Feature Roadmap to see what I plan on doing and in what order here.

A little reflection (feel free to skip the rambling of an old man... I'm not really old though)

Oufffffff, I'm tired! I've been working non stop for a long time now, and the exhaustion caught up to me. Thankfully I've been able to slow down my pace (both because I made the decision to take my weekends off now, but also because I'd started procrastinating or zone out and be unproductive) and I hope to be able to find a good balance between work, hobbies and life.

I also feel like I've put too much pressure on myself, and I'm too scattered. I have all my FVTT modules of course, which I need to keep updated, but even if I don't push out regular updates to them anymore, it's still always in the back of my mind that I need to give them some more love, and I need to answer questions about them on Discord and help people who don't know how a module works, etc.. It's not a lot, it's not often, but when you count all the modules I have and consider their popularity, all the little things add up to a lot of time. You then add the same for Beyond20, R20Converter and The Forge, and I realize that a big chunk of my day is spent reading/answering Discord, emails, forums and whatever else there is... and at the end of the day, I'm feeling pretty useless. 

I keep feeling like I'm not doing enough, but there's not much more I can do when you consider that I spend over 12 hours per day (down from the 16 hours average in the past few months) working, so I think it's more of a mental block maybe. Too many projects means that inevitably, there's a few that aren't getting updated, so I feel like I don't do anything.  For example, the last release of R20Converter was in January.. Yes, I've done 13 small bugfix updates of it since then, but I want to actually spend some days working on it and improving it rather than just fix a bug from time to time.

Of course, there's also this exhaustion that made me drop down in productivity. When I released Beyond20 on June 6th, I remember saying "next week, I'll work on R20Converter", and also "I'll do another Beyond20 release the following week to fix the issues people have mentioned from the v2.0 release" and here I am, a month later, still unable to find the time to work on R20Converter and having been forced to work on Beyond20 (due to the D&D Beyond update which broke it for everybody) rather than me just flowing naturally into it as expected after a couple of weeks. There's just too much stuff to do and too much to get to for me to do everything that I want to do, so whatever I achieve, I always feels like it's not enough. But hey, this time, for sure, I'll work on R20Converter next week.

I'm feeling much more secure with regards to the Forge, I mean, it's been pretty stable for a few months now, but there always seemed to be like there's something urgent that needs to be taken care of. But I released the Bazaar and I'm happy, the pressure finally released. I know there's more I want to do, but I finally managed to convince myself that all those features don't need to be ready for "tomorrow". Yes, I always feel like people are disappointed that things they want specifically aren't moving fast enough, but it's just a feeling I have, everyone I actually spoke to seems to be impressed by The Forge (which makes me very proud honestly) and happy with its current features. Yes, you want more stuff, but you've all been very patient with me, and encouraging and mostly understanding that things don't happen overnight. So I want to thank you all for giving me all that and helping me push through my own feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.

Alright, that's enough ranting from me (for now...). I just wanted to thank you all for being patient with me and continuing to support me. I will work a bit more on myself in the foreseeable future, where I want to be able to balance work (The Forge), other obligations (R20Converter, Beyond20, FVTT modules), hobbies (Netflix, writing, food (lol) ), life (family, friends, paperwork, groceries, etc..) and give myself the time to rest as well so I don't burn out. 

And so, yeah, this is a very long way of seeing "sorry if I don't get to the feature you wanted in a timely manner, I'm doing my best, please don't be disappointed".

That's it for me, enjoy all of the releases, I'll keep you informed about my progress on other stuff when I can!

P.S: oh yeah, and next week is my birthday, so yeay!

Thanks for reading :)

Youness.