Plans and stuff

Hey everyone,

I wanted to write a little update on what I've been up to and what I plan on doing next. First of all, the last couple of weeks were spent working on the outline for my novel, and it's starting to take a good shape. I think I've found and fixed the issues I was having with the storyline and I'm happy with that. I'm not done yet with tweaking the plot but it will mean that I'll be rewriting a big chunk of what I already wrote, so I'm not too happy about that, but I think I can salvage most of those chapters for later use. I also think that I've found a really good first line for starting the prologue, which is more interesting than what I had before : "It was her sixth birth day, and she couldn't wait to be born." Hopefully, it has a more significant impact and draws the reader in more quickly into the story.

Now onto the more interesting stuff (for you FVTT users). I've made the repository for the Furnace module public (available on github) and I've added my first Quality of Life improvement to it : Split Journal, which is a feature that allows you to split a journal entry into multiple entries, see video above. It's been very useful for separating each room in a scene into its own journal, making it much easier to find, especially since players don't always navigate from one room to the next in a sequential manner.

I have also been working on the update to the drawing tools. I've made the code changes to convert the drawings from the furnace module data into the core data, but I haven't pushed those changes yet because I've been trying hard to 'upgrade' the core drawing implementation to make it match all the feature set that I've done already in the Furnace, but I've found that task to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. This is also why I've come to this conclusion: The Furnace's drawing tools will replace the core drawing tools! 

More specifically, I want to add an option for Furnace users to decide whether they want their drawing tools to be from the Furnace or from the core. In either case, you'll only have one set of drawing tools, not both at the same time as it is currently done, and the drawings will be the same regardless of the tools used (you could switch from furnace or core drawing tools and won't lose your drawings). 

Before doing that, I need to work on my implementation so it is up to par with the core features, the biggest change is having the ability to add text on any drawing.

Some more news, I've released R20Converter 0.5 earlier today (yeay!) and one of the new features is the ability to convert a campaign into a module where all the scenes, actors and journal entries are available in Compendium packs. This should allow you to selective import a character, handout or a scene into any other existing worlds you may already have. One issue however is that unfortunately, the FVTT compendium system is rather limited in usability: you can't "import all" and you can't have folders inside the packs, for example. I plan on changing that with my next update to The Furnace.

The plan is to have each individual folder from existing campaigns be converted into its own pack (since packs do appear as folders in FVTT, that makes sense) and give them a hierarchy so you can have a pack inside of another pack. I want to change the Compendium display so it would display something like this (this is a non-functional mockup) : 

This way, you can import all of the scenes or all the actors from one module, or navigate the journal entries per folder to import just the ones from a specific chapter. It could be useful for the SRD Monsters as well, as they could be separated into folders by CR for example.

I'll also probably want to add some more QoL improvements there, things such as "auto-import actors" when importing a scene with NPCs/monsters that you don't have, or a way to re-assign tokens from imported scenes to the actor with the same name (currently they get set to "Represents: None").

So, that's the plan for the stuff that I'll be working on next! Hopefully it's exciting stuff for everyone!

Thanks for reading,

KaKaRoTo.