Hey everyone,
Today is a big day for us. We've taken down the Beta tag. Now before you start telling us that there are plenty of bugs to be fixed and features to be added -- trust us, we know. We're not signaling that we're done improving Roll20 by any means, just that we've reached a "version 1.0" level. For more details about what it means for us to "launch", check out our blog post on the topic: <a href="http://blog.roll20.net/post/31726725487/roll20-goes-live" rel="nofollow">http://blog.roll20.net/post/31726725487/roll20-goes-live</a>
Now, in addition to "Launch Day", there's a new update out today, with some great new goodies:
Dynamic Lighting Preview
We're releasing a preview version of our dynamic lighting system to the Dev Server. This means that if you've got a Mentor account, you can test it out, play a game with it, and generally help us whip it into shape.
This is not us witholding something that's finished just to make Mentors feel special. For example, it really hardly works in Firefox at all right now if you don't have a GPU-acceleration compatible setup, and if you zoom to anything other than 100%, the map becomes instantly unusable. So this is *not* ready for prime time. But we do want to get it out to those of you who have shown us your support via Kickstarter and/or subscriptions, to help us start gathering feedback early in the process. For everyone, though, we present this new video to whet your appetite a little further:
<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=WJe4q_MQU-Y&hd=1" rel="nofollow">http://youtube.com/watch?v=WJe4q_MQU-Y&hd=1</a>
This is the start of a new process for us with major features: getting it on Dev so we can gather feedback, but keeping anything that's not battle-tested and ready to go for "real" off of our main server. That's part of "losting" the beta tag -- we want to make sure that the main server is always stable and relatively major-bug-free, so you can rest easy knowing your games will always be available and work properly when it comes time to actually play.
Updated Help Docs
We've totally overhauled the help docs, adding more than 15 new pages and thousands of words. So if you haven't already, now's a great time to check out our Help and Documentation site: <a href="http://help.roll20.net" rel="nofollow">http://help.roll20.net</a> .
We've also rolled out updated versions of the GM and Player Overview Screencasts, so give those a re-watching if you want to make sure you know about all the new stuff we've added in the last month or two.
Foreign Language Support
We've begun the (long) process of translating Roll20 in non-English languages. We've enlisted the help of the community (special thanks to the folks who volunteered in this thread: <a href="http://community.roll20.net/discussion/2282/call-for-translators#Item_20" rel="nofollow">http://community.roll20.net/discussion/2282/call-for-translators#Item_20</a>). So you can now choose a different language from your My Account page. A lot of strings still need to be translated, so if it's not translated yet you'll still see it in English. But we'll continue to work with our volunteers to get things translated as quickly as possible.
Quotas Enforced
Beginning next week, storage quotas will now be enforced. You can view your quota from the My Account page, and you'll receive an error with an explanation if you try to upload something to the tabletop and your quota has been exceeded. Keep in mind that things from the Marketplace (both free and paid) don't count toward your quota. You can increase your quota by signing up for a Supporter account. So please take the next few days to either upgrade to a Supporter account or delete items from Your Library to clear up space.
Status Page
Part of our "launch" is an increased commitment to stability and reliability. We think we've gotten the major bugs worked out that were causing us downtime issues a few weeks ago, but in addition we want to be more communicative and transparent about when downtime does occur. So we've launched the new Roll20 Status page: <a href="http://status.roll20.net" rel="nofollow">http://status.roll20.net</a>, which shows you not only the current status of our servers, but also historic information, so you can judge for yourself how we're doing.
(Note that there will be some scheduled downtime, such as the downtime on Saturday night, that is inevitable as upgrades are needed).
Plus of course our regular smattering of bug fixes:
- We continue to fight the randomness battle, and have put in even more functionality to ensure a nice random rolling environment for your dice rolls :-)
- When rolling d6's with the 3D Dice, it should hopefully be less likely to "shake around" for a long time.
- Dice engine fixes, including re-fixing FATE roll formatting, and allowing decimals and % operators in dice rolls.
- You can now "tint" tokens, there is a Tint setting in the token settings pop-up. Note that tinting very large objects (such as maps) has not been thoroughly tested, so it may result in poor performance (let us know if it does!)
