Character Sheet Backend Changes

Hey folks! More awesome and exciting news! We’re making some updates to the way Character Sheets work on the backend. These updates will not have any user-facing changes, but allows us to do the following: Support Character Sheets in the mobile app beta Improve Character Sheet deployment Character Sheet changes will deploy automatically after being merged (no more waiting till the next Tuesday. Yay!) Faster fixes for breaking changes Utilize better caching services for Character Sheets Additionally, this will allow for some exciting new possibilities down the road, including but not limited to: automatic versioning, designated ‘beta’ sheet versions, and much more! These changes do impact how we're serving the data for all sheets. As such, there is the potential that HTML, CSS and Translations might not work in the VTT exactly the same way as the previous system.  We've been testing this internally for a while, but with 800+ character sheets, we can't check them all ourselves. To help verify these new updates, we would love to have the community review your sheets to test these backend changes as well. Please test and give us any feedback, issues, or comments you have! Starting now, these changes are available for testing on the Dev Server . To test, create a Custom Sheet Sandbox game on the  Dev Server , or create a normal game on the Dev Server , and add your sheet via Custom Character Sheet code, or select it via the Character Sheet dropdown.  As you go through and test, here are some things to specifically look for: Is your sheet displaying correctly? (html, css, etc.) Are translations showing up normally? Are any missing? Are you noticing anything strange occur with sheet workers, roll templates, etc.? If you notice anything in your testing, please respond in this thread with the following: A description of the problem and reproduction steps if possible The name of the Character Sheet A link or name of the game you were testing with Thank you for your assistance in making Character Sheets better! As always, happy rolling! :)

ᐰndreas J. said: 1. Can you give some form of rundown or speculation on what kind of things might not work as it used to, give some examples you've found so far? 2. Does this mean sheet authors have a guaranteed spot on the mobile beta, if they choose to apply for it? 3. Is there a timeline for when this update is going to come? The Translation stuff is next week, but I sure hope this is on the dev server for a good while and waiting on feedback from sheet authors. 1. Probably the thing that has the biggest potential of being different is special (non Unicode/non ASCII) characters. While we've resolved all of the issues that we've actually observed, there is still the possibility that some characters aren't converted correctly, or at least are not converted in exactly the same way as they currently are. Outside of this, we’ve also purposefully left the rest of the suggested testing a bit open-ended. Due to the nature of the changes, we would rather have you do more free form testing so we can catch any weird edge cases or one-off type things. We don’t expect any, but we would rather be thorough in this case. 2. At this time, no. We are developing tools to help sheet authors get their sheets mobile ready, but we're not quite ready to talk about those yet. 3. This update will be on the dev server for a minimum of 2 weeks, possibly more depending on how many issues are found.

Vince said: Character Sheet changes will deploy automatically after being merged (no more waiting till the next Tuesday. Yay!) Currently authors submit by Monday, pulls are merged to the master repo, then it takes a day or two to see the results on the the main servers.  So, will the pulls still be processed weekly but sheet changes go live at the time they are merged, or are we going to see daily merges that go live at the time they are merged? Thanks We will be increasing the frequency of PR merges. Not necessarily daily, but they will be more frequent than the current merge schedule. And yes, the changes will go live automatically as PRs are merged (usually within a few minutes).

Richard T. said: This is off to the side but while we're on backend stuff, wondering if there's going to be more support for character sheets' ability to use <video> and broader @keyframe support.  ᐰndreas J. said: Richard T. said: This is off to the side but while we're on backend stuff, wondering if there's going to be more support for character sheets' ability to use <video> and broader @keyframe support. 1. Or other sheet-related suggestions, like display the character's Avatar or bio description from the Bio tab? 2. What will the mobile-based adaptions entail, will we get access to new hmtl/css/js options to use in sheets? 3. From the mobile trailer teaser, the 5e sheet looked to be a complete redesign, but I'd assume that's not actually needed for things to work? Q: Does this mean sheet authors have a guaranteed spot on the mobile beta, if they choose to apply for it? A: At this time, no. We are developing tools to help sheet authors get their sheets mobile ready, but we're not quite ready to talk about those yet. Oh, I would have thought roping in sheet author among the early testers would be a smart idea, if there is any "closed" beta stage. These are all awesome ideas! However, we’re going to save most of these discussions for later down the road. We want to focus this thread and discussion around the backend changes only.  To answer the broad point though, yes, we are looking into additional tools and offerings for Character Sheets, especially around responsive development. We'll definitely be reaching out to the community and sheet authors for feedback and thoughts when we get closer to time.

Hey Folks, we're looking into the character sheet images being broken right now. We'll try to provide updates as we have them. EDIT: This issue should be solved as of 10:30 AM Pacific time.

Correct, a hotfix earlier today fixed the reported issue on Traveller 2d of not being able to switch between tabs. This will likely address several of the other reported issues. Please make sure issues are still happening before adding them to this thread, as we are actively working on reported issues. Please be as specific as possible when describing issues, as the devs may not be familiar with the sheet in question.

Specifically, the latest hotfix addressed an issue where only the first set of sheetworkers were actually being used. So, if a sheet used multiple separate script tags, only the code within the first set of tags would actually be running. This issue should be fixed now.

Also, to further clarify, the backend changes were indeed pushed live on Monday. We apologize for the lack of messaging around this, for various reasons we had to change our release plans rather suddenly, because of this we ended up dropping the ball when it came to communication.