&{tracker} doesn't work for new campaigns

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a new campaign
2. Drop a token on the canvas, give it a name and select it
3. run "/roll 1d20 &{tracker}

Expected behaviour:

• You should see a d20 roll in chat, and the result should be added to the turn tracker under the name of the selected token

Actual behaviour:

• Nothing happens

If you open the turn tracker manually, or manually add a turn to the tracker from the right-click menu, things start working and from then on &{tracker} seems to work ok. As such the bug is pretty minor, but it can cause significant confusion for new users, and I guess it could be indicative of a more serious underlying problem with the turn tracker not being correctly initialised, so I thought it was worth reporting...

Did you open the turn tracker before rolling? If you do not have the turn tracker open it is not active so there will be no rolling for it.

Pat S. said:

Did you open the turn tracker before rolling? If you do not have the turn tracker open it is not active so there will be no rolling for it.

Hi Pat,

1. That statement is actually false. If you have the turn tracker shut and you do &{tracker} in a roll in the chat, a turn will normally appear in the turn tracker even though it is not currently displayed. I've just tested this to confirm.
2. Whether or not the roll actually ends up in the turn tracker, it shouldn't suppress the chat output for the roll (which is what this report is about)

Cheers,

Lucian

Then I was mistaken when I tried it out on my test campaign and stand corrected.

Pat S. said:

Then I was mistaken when I tried it out on my test campaign and stand corrected.

.... unless, if you tested it too and it was otherwise than my experience, the problem is actually non-deterministic and the behaviour of the turn tracker varies in unpredictable ways - which is far from impossible!

I was able to replicate this, and I'll add that I was still unable to initially use &{tracker} even after opening and closing the (unused) Turn Tracker. Log:

TypeError: r is null app.js?1469151925 (line 42, col 389)

Thanks for the bug report; the Devs will drop by.

Thanks for pointing this out. Like you said, it's super easy to work around, but could be very confusing for someone starting a new game, even if they are not a new player. We were just forgetting to set the default value for that object. Due to some other checks, it would also only happen if you tried to add the token with the tracker window closed. Which is why we've never seen this happen to someone else, or at least why it's never been reported because people would assume the tracker window just has to be open first. Either way, super easy fix, should go live tomorrow.

Thanks Phil - glad it was an easy one. It came up as a bug report for my 5e Shaped Companion script. In the Shaped Sheet initiative rolls are sent to the tracker by default, so it was more likely that someone would run into this without having initialised it. In fact, I'm kind of surprised that no one ran into before - perhaps they did and then  couldn't reproduce after opening the tracker so didn't think anything more of it.

I'll try and make sure I find something really twisted, non-deterministic and impossible to work around next time to restore the balance ;-)

Yeah, I'm sure it's exactly like you said. It doesn't work, player looks into it further, now it works fine like it never happened.

I'll try and make sure I find something really twisted, non-deterministic and impossible to work around next time

*wimpers* please don't, it already scares me when I see your name in a new thread...

Since this one looks like it's fixed now, I'm going to go ahead and close this thread. I'll see you back on here in another week or so with the next crazy bug you find.