We have a LOT of information and tasty announcements to get through today, so let's fasten those seatbelts and enjoy the ride~ Developer Spotlight API Update Access to Fog of War Access to Card Deck functionality Bugfix for imgsrc property Compendium polish Significant speed up response times Improved list sorting New Tabletop Audio track "Carriage Journey" New developer tools and underlying architecture for future features Bugfix: Default page settings no longer have issue with square grid measurements Hi Rollers, Steve K here. This week we're wrapping up polish and support for features from the 3 Million User update. This came in two main pieces, the Compendium and the Roll20 API. The Compendium changes were mostly a polish of how sorting works. For the majority of situations alpha-numeric sorting works perfectly, such as monster names or spell schools. This starts to fall short with mixtures of letters and numbers such as ranges for spells. With traditional sorting you'd end up with 10ft and 100ft being sorted next to each other before 20ft. It also fails for complex numbers like CR which has entries like 1/2 or 1/4 which aren't obvious numbers to simple sorting systems. It completely fails when you get to attributes that have arbitrary orders, such as size for monsters, tiny before small before medium, etc. Our solution was to create a system that would hopefully dynamically predict the correct order, but when that failed it would have the ability to give the list an arbitrary set of sorting values we could predict. For mixed cased alpha and numeric entries like Hit Points I.E. "16 HP", our system makes the assumption it's the number that's important to sort by, takes the numeric value and sorts it as a number rather than a string. This means that "160 HP" isn't sorted next to "16 HP" but after 159. While the API has access to almost all of the objects and attributes in a game, there was a substantial section of tools that users could make use of in the interface but were either impossible or needlessly complex to recreate in the API. The biggest offender was the card deck system. Deal a card from the deck, putting it in a player's hand, shuffling the deck and so much more are easy to do from the application because they made use of internal Roll20 processes and functions that the API did not have baked in. This update was our attempt to expose those processes, without API scripts having to recreate them from scratch. We modeled the new functions off of in game play to try and make them as intuitive as possible, while still working inside the internal architecture of the deck system. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on these features, and until next time, happy rolling! Steve K Roll20 Lead Developer Roll20 Dev Server and Roll20 Wiki Outage 4/3/2018 Attention Rollers! On Tuesday April 3rd , we will be moving our development server (Dev Server) and official wiki to new hardware causing them to be down for several hours. While the Dev Server is down, you will not be able to access any of your games that live on it. If you have a game scheduled for next Tuesday, please make sure to temporarily move your game off the Dev Server and onto the main one by Monday. Here's a quick how-to: Go to " My Games " under the " Games " tab. Click on " Copy from Dev " in this right hand section: 3. Choose the game you wish to copy. 4. Press the " Create Game " button! You should be ready to go in no time! We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. Community Highlights Character Sheets: The more Star Wars sheets, the better in our book. This new Star Wars 30th sheet has a nice retro look and we couldn't resist it. API Scripts: Do you love exploration but hate dealing with hex maps? Hexploration, a new script to help automate exploration on hex maps, is the answer to your prayers! Give it a whirl and see how fast you can get through the roughest terrain! On the Marketplace Each week, Dean - our Licensing & Marketplace Coordinator - presents some of their favorite packs submitted by our independent artist community: Numenera Deck Bundle by Monte Cook Games This week was wild for Marketplaces releases. To start off, we launched all of the card decks for Numenera, The Strange, and Cypher System. As a MCG mega-nerd, I've been using most of these cards for some time, and they are endlessly useful across games and systems. I'm super excited to see them on Roll20. Welcome to Shadetown by The Cyclopean Publishing Company Although it's not filled with side eye and baditude like it's name may suggest, Shadetown is a super impressive debut from The Cyclopean Publishing Company. Even better, it's well suited for just two players (a GM and PC) for when you realize all your other friends are chumps except for that one special not-chump. Moderns, Vol. 1 by Monster Grin I want to be all of the women in this pack. I also like that this guy is just named "hat dude". I'm sure we all know someone whose defining personality trait is that they own a hat. Great for when you want to get inside that guys head to discover if they're really THAT boring - or if a unique, emotional, thoughtful bundle of neurons exists behind those sunken, anxiety dulled eyes. Roll20 What's Up Episode 5! Join the gang minus Jeff (he was busy) but with our very own Wingit as a special guest in Episode 5 ! This week we talked about TTRPGs in media and how far their image in the public eye has come!Don't forget to mark your calendars, either, as the show airs every Tuesday, 3PM PST. Missed a previous episode? No big deal, we have them all together on our Twitch Collections page. Do give us a follow so you know when we're going live with all our regularly scheduled shows, as well as some... well read the next section... As always feel free to 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! Blades in the Dark Twitch Miniseries starts Monday! You may have heard on Twitter already but the very awesome BronzeGirl will be GM-ing a Blades in the Dark miniseries next week ! This will happen on Monday, April 2 at 2PM PST on our Twitch channel ! Follow us on Twitch and you'll get a notification when we go live! Join us in giving this wonderful GM and her stellar cast a warm welcome! Get ready for the Butchers of Brightstone ... We hope you have the best weekend and are excited for what we have in store for you next week! -Alex
