Trotting right on through March, and spring is inching ever closer! Today in Community Corner we have further explanation of the inner machinations of our app, specifically that big update from last week, a new podcast episode, marketplace goodies and a new Wizards of the Coast module! Strap in, folks... Developer Spotlight Upgraded the Looking For Group listings to update faster and to have no downtime Compendium Page footer now redirects to category lists if one exists Changes game type name from Basic Fantasy RPG to Basic Fantasy RPG System to help prevent confusion Bugfix to rare issue where an image wouldn’t display because its randomly generated key had a reserved word inside it Miscellaneous back end fixes, including better analytics, better error handling, and new admin tools to make development easier Hi Rollers, Steve K here. Before I continue with my promise from last week to break down our design decisions from our 3 Million User update, I wanted to talk briefly about the LFG change that went out this week. Previously the index that drives the LFG search was updated every 2 hours, and during the few minutes that the index was being rebuilt, searches in the LFG only returned partial responses. That’s no longer the case and in addition we’ve increased the regularity of the update to every 30 minutes. Over the course of the last few months, culminating in the 3 Million User update, we completely overhauled how heavy mostly back end processes operate on Roll20. The largest most glaring issue was with patching very large epic modules, such as Storm King's Thunder, Curse of Strahd, or Tomb of Annihilation. Previously we had only done patches to smaller games, or if we had patched a big module, they'd only been small changes, such as changing the position of a token, updating some text in a handout, and giving an NPC one new attack. However, at the end of last year we had some pretty serious patches involving changing dozens of characters as well as updating tokens on every single map. This created a patch that our existing patching system consistently failed to execute before timing out. This wasn't a unique problem to patches, running too long was a problem plaguing some other very heavy activities such as copying large games, doing backup recoveries of very large games, including addons into your game, and a series of administrative tools that would regularly fail in their intended use. It was obvious to the team that we needed to create a channel for these longer running server intensive tasks, that would have enough time and resources to be guaranteed a successful finish, but tightly controlled to insure they couldn't negatively impact the performance of the site. Our solution was to create several queue buckets that would catch particular jobs and store them until there were system resources to complete their heavy request and guarantee that the job would complete. The second piece of the puzzle was to engineer a system to gather and pass information to the end user. If we were going to place users into a queue we had to make this state obvious, include were in the queue you were, if the process had started, and when it had finished. And we needed to pass along all of this information in real time without users needing to refresh the page to be informed. With these two pieces in places, largely thanks to the great work of Roll20 developer Nathanael Winget, every heavy task we were having issues with started to flow along smoothly in our new queue system. All of them except patching. Even after the queuing system, creating specific channels for patching, and passing along information, the patching process for those epic games was still much too long, during which users were locked out of their game while the patching updated the game data. We had designed the patching system with a focus on safety, to change as little as possible. This meant that if a token's HP was being updated, instead of overwriting the entire token and resetting it's location, AC, aura, vision, or a thousand other details the GM might have changed, we granularly went down through the token's data updating at the lowest possible level. However, that meant that if we were changing hundreds or even thousands of properties, those tiny adjustments one at a time just wasn't efficient enough. All credit to Roll20 developer Jeff Lamb who found the solution that let us efficiently batch these requested changes in a way that sped up the patching process to be as much as %10,000 faster. I'm really proud of the final result and the team that made it happen. Steve K. Roll20 Lead Developer On the Marketplace Each week, Dean - our Licensing & Marketplace Coordinator - presents some of their favorite packs submitted by our independent artist community: Save Vs. Cave Moon Temple by Gabriel Pickard Gabriel Pickard's Moon Temple pack is awesome. After reading Artemis over the weekend and being greeted with this the next morning, all I could think about was how one would infiltrate and sabotage these structures. Wandering Monsters Deck: Wilderlands by Nord Games Nord Games makes super useful card decks - and the same holds true for all 4 of their new releases filled with Wandering Monsters to throw into any of your games. Cudgel's Dangerous Dungeons Volume 2 by Cudgel's Maps and More I'm a huge fan of simplicity. These dungeons offer just that - dungeons, danger, and the opportunity to not fret too long on building the perfect map - it's all done for you. Roll20 What's Up Episode 2 is Out! Did you miss Trivia, Ceejay, Jeff and Alex musing on player types, party dynamics and Tucker's Kobolds? Lucky for you episode 2 is archived on Twitch here Don't forget to mark your calendars, either, as the show will air every Tuesday, 3PM PST from here on out. Like what you see and hear? Send us your comments, stories and questions to <a href="mailto:podcast@roll20.net" rel="nofollow">podcast@roll20.net</a> - when we have enough we'll start a Q&A section in the video! WOTC Highlights Are you ready to ward off the apocalypse? Well here it comes anyways! The Elemental Evil has stirred, and it is time to traverse through fire, flood, wind, and stone in this epic adventure from Wizards of the Coast. Princes of the Apocalypse , our latest WotC module, takes players from levels 1 through 15 on a multi-month journey that only the most cunning will survive. The module contains hundreds of pages of carefully converted content, more than 20 battle ready maps, enhanced with Dynamic Lighting and support for Advanced Fog of War, complete character sheets and tokens for every NPC and monster with simple click-to-roll skills, actions and spells, new spells and player options etc etc etc check out the full list here ! You can buy the module and enjoy it all in person right here on our marketplace! Go out and save the WORLD! -Alex