Release 2023.1
The first release of 2023 features mostly a collection of bug fixes along with some smaller improvements here and there.
Changing the asset of a shape
Once you dropped an asset on the map it becomes a shape and when you needed a different asset you had two options:
- drop the new asset on the map and copy over all properties from the old shape and then remove the old shape
- add the new asset as a variant
The first option is clearly quite cumbersome and error prone and the second option is basically abusing a feature for something else.
That’s why this release adds the long overdue option to just swap out the asset that is being used by a particular shape. A simple button is added to the properties view of the shape.
Modal stacking & closing
When you have multiple modals/dialogs open, it can sometimes be a game of moving them around so that you can interact with a specific one. This is because the modals had a fixed order.
New in this release is that now the most recently focussed modal will move to the top, like you’re probably used to in other programs.
Additionally you can now close the top-most modal with the escape key.
Note that all of the above mostly applies only to modals that can be opened for extended amount of times (e.g. shape settings, DM settings …) and not to modals that require immediate interaction (e.g. prompts for action)
Spell tool changes & fixes
The spell tool has had some problems for the entirety of its existence.
One of those issues was the potential confusion between size and range.
The former denoting the actual size of the spell itself, while the latter was used to show how far a certain spell could be cast.
The range was only configurable when you had selected a shape before starting the spell tool, so that a range circle could be drawn for that specific shape.
Additionally the range would default to 0 in that case, which was meant as a selfcast option.
In practice this turned out to be confusing, sometimes players wanted to just cast a random spell at some specific location but because they had their character selected, it was locked to themselves without much clarity as to why and you had to either deselect yourself or change the size to some non-zero value to actually get to do what you wanted to do.
That’s why this release removes the range input field and instead if a shape is selected, a ruler will automatically be drawn between the cursor and the selected shape. This conveys the same information without having to input anything and without the confusion of selfcast locking the shape.
Additionally a bunch of bugs related to the spell tool have been fixed:
- Using the spell tool with a selection was actually broken in the last couple of releases
- The fill colour did funky things if the border colour had < 1 opacity
- Right clicking to draw the shape, was opening the context-menu
- Once used, the select tool was not being properly activated
- The ‘is public’ label in the spell tool UI was wrongly attached to the range input box
Initiative state
Initiative never had a real concept of “active”. You could have the initiative UI open or closed regardless of whether something is actually happening with initiative.
This hampers some things, for example the Initiative setting “lock vision” is in a semi-broken state due to this because there is no official start or end of initiative, causing this feature to be always on when enabled, requiring manual actions to fix some things when initiative is over.
This release adds a first draft of a new “initiative active” state. It is entirely optional, but the “lock camera” and “lock vision” client settings will only work when this system is used. This allows vision to actually properly revert when initiative is over, without the user having to do things.
The DM will be able to start and end the initiative (see quick access toggles below for more info). By default the initiative UI will open on all players’ screen when initiative is started. This can be disabled in your client settings if you dislike this.
There are still some kinks/oddities to work out, but I want to see how people enjoy this new thing and get a feel for it myself.
Varia
- The shape edit dialog now properly says “Edit Shape” instead of “Edit Asset”
- A minimum height has been added to the dice tool UI so that there is no awkward jump when you first click a die to roll.
[DM] Quick access toggles
A new addition to the UI for DMs is the addition of two toggles below the toolbar. These are meant to quickly toggle certain features that are otherwise hidden behind layers of setting windows.
The first one is a toggle to enable/disable the “Fake Player” vision mode. Until now this setting was hidden in the DM settings, which made it very unwieldy to actually use.
The second one is a toggle to start/end the new initiative active state as mentioned above. Clicking it will start initiative and open the initiative UI. Clicking it again will stop initiative and close the UI.
This is something new I’m trying out, so let me know what you think. Currently it’s just using some letters to signify what it does (i.e. FP=Fake Player, INI=Initiative), which I’m a bit conflicted on. An alternative to look into are icons, or full words, but that can be fleshed out at a later point.
If there are other suggestions for settings that you tend to toggle, let me know and I might consider adding them here if the feature is well received.
Fixes
[DM] Fake player
Along with a new way to quickly toggle this feature, the Fake Player mode also got fixed so that it no longer shows the DM layer while enabled. The DM layer is not visible to other players, so showing it in Fake Player mode could give conflicting messaging on what players actually see.
Shapes
A variety of fixes for shapes in general were made.
- Since a recent release, badges started to become transparent by default, which was an unintended change.
- Displaying a tracker value on top of a shape was not working if the tracker was part of a variant setup and shared with all variants.
Multiple cases of clients being able to edit properties of a shape they don’t have access to locally were fixed. In all of these instances the change was only reflected locally in the client and was never sent to other clients as the server rejected the changes.
- Most tracker/aura properties were locally editable
- The “is defeated” and “is locked” properties were editable by using the respective keybindings to toggle these properties
UI
Prompts
Throughout PA you occassionally encounter a prompt modal, a UI element that requires some input to continue. Sometimes only certain values are permitted (e.g. only numbers) and the code can pass a validation function to check if the input is valid. These validation checks were not always properly cleared, causing some prompts to reject input that was valid.
Token directions
The UI to show the direction of off-screen tokens would always trigger even if it was hidden behind some other UI element (e.g. the sidebar menu)
Floors
The floor UI that appears when clicking the bottom left floor icon was not moving when the sidebar menu was opened.
Select Tool
Resizing
When a shape is rotated and you tried to resize the bottom right corner specifically, the entire shape would do some strange size changes. A bug in the calculation of the center of the shape during this operation was causing this faulty behaviour.
Unlocking
Unlocking a shape would often snap the shape to the mouse as if you were dragging it.
Asset Manager
Two bugs related to the right-click context-menu were resolved, both related to scrolling.
When scrolling in the asset manager, any open context-menu would no longer be aligned. The context-menu will now auto-close when you initiate a scrolling action.
When opening the context-menu after scrolling, it would appear at a wrong y-value (where the item would have been if you hadn’t scrolled). This made it so you couldn’t interact with some shapes as their context-menu would be off-screen.
DM Settings
kicking the DM
As a DM you can kick anybody, including yourself. It was possible to kick yourself if you were the only DM in the campaign. This left the campaign in an unmanageable state. This is no longer possible.
Invite URL on subpath
When the server is hosted using a subpath (this is not the default), the subpath would not be included in the player invitation URLs.
You were able to circumvent this particular bug by including it in the server’s publicName config, but this is not intended.
If you did do this, you should remove the subpath again from the config as it will now be automatically included in the invitation URL.
Other fixes
- Templates were only using the first character of the provided template name
- Groups: Adding multiple shapes to group always prompting group question even if no groups are present