Release 2023.3

Posted 17 September 2023 by Darragh Van Tichelen

The focus of 2023.3 is experimental features: mods and a new concept called ‘character’ being the most prominent ones. More on these below, they are still very much in early iterations, but instead of just holding the dev branch hostage until I’m satisfied I’m already pushing these out as is.

Part of the reason for this is also that there are some bugfixes in this release that I’d like to get out as soon as possible.

Campaign Sorting

We’ll start of with a small quality of life improvement that was long overdue. The campaign listing can now be sorted alphabetically or by most recent interaction. It will default sort on most recent activity.

There is not much else to say, it’s a small change but it’s a nice one.

Lighting & Vision

Making circles great again

The code handling vision works with vertices and edges. Circles don’t really fit into this model out of the box as a circle is an infinite set of points.

Historically this was “solved” by just using the bounding box of the circle when used in vision related code. Which results in pillars and other things on your map being represented as squares in the vision system.

This is ofcourse not really what you want and so most people have been using the polygon tool to fit this need.

The polygon tool is a very versatile and powerful tool, but sometimes you just want to use a damn circle. And when PA shows a circle as a possible shape to draw, you expect something at least close to a circle and not a square.

So tl;dr circles are now approximated by polygons based on the size of the circle for all things vision related. It’s not a perfect fit as that would be computationally expensive, but it’s a lot better than a square.

Triangulation Crashes

The aforementioned vision code using vertices and edges is based on a triangulation algorithm. Although rare, it can happen that something hard bricks in this code and leaves the game in an unplayable state.

One of these rare edgecases was miracously encountered by two different people recently, even though the particular edgecase has existed for multiple years. This is addressed in this release and should no longer happen.

Cheating Auras

Apparently when you have an aura enabled that has both normal and dim values set to zero and it’s a vision interacting aura, it would just light up the entire map.

This is no longer the case and the aura will now behave as if it’s disabled.

Assets

Some small changes to asset removal logic have been made.

Removing an asset from the asset manager will not remove the actual asset from disk if there are still shapes using that asset.

Consequently, when removing shapes in-game an extra check is made to see if the related asset can be removed from disk.

Experimental Additions

As mentioned in the introduction, this release contains some experimental additions. It should be noted again that each of these are still in early iterations and are subject to change.

Mods

I’m only a single person and sometimes I get requests that I just don’t have the time to implement or feel like they don’t belong in the main codebase, even though they could be interesting. Mods are a way to allow others to implement these features.

I’m not very familiar with offering modding capabilities, so this is very much a learning experience for me as well. The current implementation is very barebones and I’m sure there are a lot of things that could be improved, but we need a starting point and so it’s here!

For more information on the modding API, what it exactly entails and some examples, check out this PR on github.

DataBlocks

this is purely technical information and not really relevant for regular users

Another new concept that is introduced with mods are “DataBlocks”. This is the system that is currently being proposed to offer mods server side data storage.

Mods are purely client-side so they cannot interact with the database directly, nor can they interact with any server side code directly. Instead they can store and retrieve arbitrary data in the form of DataBlocks.

Characters

“Characters” are a new concept that is currently being explored and is adjacent to the ‘templates’ concept.

Templates offer a way to create variants of a particular shape with information pre-filled. Once dropped on the map they are however completely independent of each other. Typical usecases for a template are monsters. You have a template for a goblin and you can drop as many goblins as you want on the map and their hp and ac are already configured. You however don’t want modifications to 1 goblin to alter the other goblins once they are on the map.

Characters are the complement to this. They represent a unique instance of a particular shape. Modifications to a character are remembered. You can remove a shape that is linked to a character and later drag&drop the character back on the map and it will be in the exact same state as when you removed it.

Creation

You can create a character from the right-click context-menu on any shape as long as you have edit access to it.

Actions

Once a shape is linked to a character, it will be listed in the Characters section in the left side-bar. As usual the DM will also see all player created characters, while players will only see their own characters.

When you click on a character in this listing, your camera is moved to center on the particular character.

Additionally as a DM you can drag and drop the character as you would do with an asset. This will teleport the character’s existing shape to the place you dropped. If there is no shape currently associated with the character, it will instead be created at that location with all it’s previous data.

Future

The idea is to provide more functionality to this concept in the future. In particular the notion of character sheets that could be set-up through mod interaction is something that is being explored.

Another idea is to allow players to create characters from the main dashboard and then link them to a campaign. This way players can create their own characters up front with their art and stats already filled in, without having to go through the DM all the time.

Varia Fixes