A bit of a catch-up

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since the last dev-log. The recent work has been chiefly on bugs and general stability, which hasn’t made for the most stimulating logs. Regardless, let’s have a quick catch-up.

Life stuff

I’m currently in the middle of moving house. I’ve tried to make sure this doesn’t impact my work too much, but as the new place is ~3.5 hours away, I occasionally get bitten by things I need being wherever I’m not :P

One thing that is good news for TaleSpire is that I can finally get a decent internet connection. That means it’ll be easier for me to work on the servers and also that I’ll start to be able to do dev streams again.

Windows 11

We have heard your reports of dll issues with Windows 11, and we are looking into it. Due to being mid-way through my move, I’ve held off on this as the VM image I needed would be painful to download at the old place, but at the new place, I only have my laptop, which isn’t powerful enough to run the VM.

I’ll be set up in a week and a bit, and this will become a high priority.

HeroForge

HeroForge work was on pause for a little bit while I beavered away on bugs, but I’ll be picking it up again very soon. My goal thee is two-fold. First, I need to work on bugs, and second I want to add categories to help organize the minis.

HeroForge already provides the asset-pack information to us, so we need to update our server to pass this to the clients and then add some UI to browse the categories.

Polymorph

Polymorph is going well. Ree has recently been working on the UI component we need to make polymorph feel good, and that is a list where you can drag elements in and out.

This is one of those things that seems very simple but makes me very excited. For polymorph, this will allow you to drag creatures from the library to your creature to add a morph, but we can do more than this:

• We could allow dragging dice rolls onto players to send a request for a roll from a player
• Or drag a set of dice into chat to include a roll in a message.
• We could allow dragging a location into chat to share a specific position on the board without bookmarks
• And how about per-player or creature inventories

In short, there are many things we can do with this UI element.

But making generic UI elements that feel good and work well is surprisingly tricky. There are a lot of fighting concerns. Usually, what is best from a data point of view is at odds with what feels great. All in all, I’m relieved that I wasn’t the one having to make it, so hats off to Ree.

With that piece of the puzzle nearing completion, I can now jump back into testing the polymorph feature.

Network issues

We are still having issues with the third-party service we use for real-time communication. For those who don’t know, we host servers to handle the long term persistence of your data and transmission of messages at a campaign level, but almost everything that happens in real-time play (moving minis, dice sync, building operations) is handled by a service we pay another company for.

As you’ve felt in the last six months, reliability has been less than we hope for, so we are facing the fact that we will probably have to handle this ourselves.

We think this is feasible as our community (as staggering as it is) is relatively small compared to some games [0]. However, this is still a lot of work and will take time away from other features.

Honestly, this sucks. But we think it’s the only way to guarantee you the experience you deserve in the long term.

I started researching early this year, anticipating this eventuality, so I know where I need to start. We’ll keep you posted as this develops.

Tactical rulers

The rulers were also on hold due to a behavior (bug?) in the UI that we needed to work out. As we’ve been working on all the other things, this got paused. We want to pick this up again ASAP.

That’s the lot

Alright folks, that is everything for today. Thanks as ever to all of you. Not just for your feedback but also for sharing all your creations on the discord and beyond. They are endlessly motivating to see.

Have a great one.

[0] And our requirements are not nearly as harsh as those for genres like FPS.