Triggers, triggers everywhere!

Hey everyone,

As you all know, I've been working a lot lately on The Forge, and unfortunately, on top of it being very tiring, it's also difficult mentally to stay focused on a singular purpose. I've taken the time to work on something else, and I'm announcing its release to you today.

Patreon

Let's start by mentioning something important. I've recently surpassed the 250th patreon subscriber and reached the threshold of 1000$/month revenue on Patreon. Wow!

The support, responses to my releases and love I've received from you all in the past few weeks was heartwarming and this makes a huge difference in my life, so I want to take a moment and thank you, again, for everything!

It is however a bittersweet achievement, because the truth of the matter is that the huge influx of new users is a side effect of the COVID-19 crisis that we're all facing. Many of you went looking for online methods of playing, since you can't meet with your groups in person, and I am glad that I could at least help with that.

Trigger Happy and Furnace  

While working on The Forge, I've setup a demo world and created a simple trigger system for it so players can move from one scene to the next easily, then Kevin (@Kevin- on Discord) has done an amazing job in using the triggers and creating an actual tutorial world with it.  

The trigger system I wrote slowly evolved, and I made it into a module called Trigger Happy, then I added advanced macro support in Furnace to allow async functions, early returns and running macros with arguments as well as calling macros from chat and handlebars support for chat as well. I've released updates to those two modules in the past couple of days.

This has been amazing, it felt really good to work on FVTT modules again, and I had a blast. It also looks like a lot of people are getting excited about Trigger Happy and are making some great macros and automating stuff. I hope to soon be able to gather all sort of useful macros and triggers into compendiums for people to use, as building blocks for elaborate traps and teleporters and other crazy things!

As usual, you can download Furnace from  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kakaroto/fvtt-module-furnace/master/module.json and I've listened to the complaints about people not knowing how to use it and it now has an extensive README that explains all of its features, which you can read here :  https://github.com/kakaroto/fvtt-module-furnace .

I've also released Trigger Happy, already at v0.4 within 2 days, which provides all sorts of advanced triggering mechanisms. It works really well along side Furnace's advanced macro system, and you can install it from  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kakaroto/fvtt-module-trigger-happy/master/module.json 

Its README file is even more exhaustive and it gives you all you need to build your traps : https://github.com/kakaroto/fvtt-module-trigger-happy/ 

Of course, it only started as a quick proof of concept, it doesn't have a UI, instead, you create your triggers through journal entries, and due to lack of time, I don't think I'll be able to enhance it too much for a little while. It will serve nicely though until Foundry adds its own core implementation of a trigger system.

You can checkout Kevin's work which showcases how Trigger Happy works on the Forge's demo page at : https://demo.forgevtt.com

Beyond20

For the next couple of days, I'll be working on Beyond20 and planning a release soon (this weekend most probably). One issue that popped up recently is the fact that D&D Beyond have started progressively updating some of their user's character sheets to use the new alpha version 3 of the sheet redesign. That's great news as it has some extra little stuff in there that will make things easier to use (such as a "Disadvantage" icon next to stealth skill checks for people wearing heavy armor).

Unfortunately, this has the side effect that it completely breaks Beyond20 on D&D Beyond for the few people that had their sheets updated to the alpha version. There's a trick for it (Using a signed out incognito window to make the rolls and keeping the signed in window for modifying the sheet), but I need to get the update to Beyond20 out as soon as possible.

The Forge

Finally, a little bit of news on The Forge. The project is going well, though with the number of people using the service, things had been bogged down a bit lately and I've scrambled to alleviate things. I want to move the server to a new location which I hope improves things, but I don't want to have any downtime, so I'm working on a progress migration of users when their table is offline only. I've moved the forums itself to a new server, and it now has the benefits of being IPv6 compatible and support HTTP2 which makes it run even more smoothly than before, and it also lowered the burden on the main server, giving me some more time to do the move slowly and carefully so it happens transparently for everybody.

I expect the move to happen sometimes during this month, and I'm working at the same time on these two critical features : 

- Systems and Modules installer with a package browser and instantaneous install without using up anyone's quota.

- Geo-distribution of servers, to allow high bandwidth and low latency to people in Europe and Asia.

That last one is quite a challenge, and it might not be the very next thing I do, but it's something that I'm slowly building towards.

That's it for me. 

Enjoy the screenshots above, and see you in a few days when I post about the new Beyond20 release!

Stay safe, and happy rolling!