Heya folks, it’s the 100th log so whilst I haven’t got any special dev news I’d just like to thank all of you for checking out these little updates and TaleSpire as a whole. I could easily wax lyrical on how much your feedback means and how it has helped us work out what TaleSpire needs to be, but I’ll spare you that for now. Regardless, Thank-You!

Now back to the snooker,

Today I’ve been working on the prop system. I’ve pushed the fact we are prepping large system refactoring out of my mind and am hacking in a version of prop support for the alpha.

The first version will go something like this:

• Tiles will stay pretty much how they are, snapping to the tile grid and rotating in 90 degree increments
• Props will be a special kind of asset which can be snapped onto attachment points on tiles
• Tiles will have many attachment points. These (for this version) will be authored in TaleWeaver when making the tile asset.
• Props will not obstruct line of sight or effect fog of war
• Placing a creature in the same space as a prop will cause the prop to temporarily ‘dodge’ out of the way (springing back afterwards)
• Props will be rotatable in finer steps (currently things 22 degree steps so 16 per revolution)
• Props rotate around the normal to the surface the attachment is on (really it’s that they rotate around a vector defined by the attachment but the common case is normal of surface)
• Props will become children of tiles in the scene so will show and hide with whichever one they are attached to

The code I’m writing for this is real ugly but I’m just gritting my teeth and plowing on as getting a playable version will allow play testing which is way more valuable than holding of until after all the other things I want to change.

As this is a slightly larger task we aren’t putting out a midweek update so we’ll have to see what we have for the weekend.

Seeya around

Good evening folks.

Not much to report today I was mainly working on a redesign to how tiles, props, pathfinding and zones work, so pretty fundamental. This stuff has been rolling around my head for a month or so but today a bunch of ideas arrived pretty fully formed which was nice. I’m not going to go into detail yet as I’ve still got to work on how I want to identify tiles across the network and how to handle multiple people placing tiles in the same place in the new approach.

Tomorrow I have a day off but I’ll be back around over the weekend (hopefully with the next little update) and I’ll keep working on these ideas alongside the regular feature work. We aren’t rushing this fundamental stuff as it’s more important to me that the alpha is a picture of our intent before the kickstarter, rather than trying to nail down final versions of various internal systems.

Ciao

Today has been fun.

I fixed a bug that appeared when editing the lineup in initiative mode. Each creature added would recreate the whole list which, whilst it technically worked, it looked bad. This was a simple ‘reused the elements which were there previously’ fix. So that was nice.

One of our lovely gang in discord then pointed out that when you first spawn dice they have a nice spin which is an effective randomizer, but when you pick up rolled dice they don’t spin. Now then you throw we do add some random angular momentum so the result should still be random, however it didn’t feel great so I’ve added the spin on pickup too.

Lastly I’ve done most of the work to add a way to control the volume of sound effects in the same fashion as music and ambiance. I’m still hunting down a bug where this new volume is not applied correctly but it’s nearly done.

My goal for tomorrow is to get an update out so if I don’t get the effect volume stuff done in time it’s no big deal, we’ll probably have another update at the weekend anyway.

Peace folks.

Good [time adjusted] evening to you all,

Today I’ve been keeping busy with bug fixes and some small workarounds. These changes will be out in the next update (hopefully wednesday or thurday)

• We now show the name of the selected creature along with the player name in the GM UI
• We clear the history panel when switching boards
• Fixed a case where, if you controlled many creatures and clicked on their image in player mode it might focus the wrong creature
• Fixed an ugly exception that would occur if you disconnected after having used the turn based mode
• Fixed a case where the first GM joined after other non-gm players and the gm would be put in cutscene mode
• Tweaked the number of tiles updating per frame. We still get ugliness in large, multi-floor boards but this makes it a tiny bit more playable whilst we find a better solution.

We also pushed out the next 900 invites, so thats 1900 in two days which feels nice.

Now to get fixing so we can get another batch out!

Peace

p.s. I’m not going to get much done tomorrow as the machine I use for streaming and testing has died so I need to sort that out first.

After the big asset drop on the weekend it’s time for a small asset update, we added a little side-table that you can find in props.

In the world of new features you can now make a board in a campaign the default, this means that whenever someone joins the campaign they arrive there first.

We also fixed some bugs:

• One that stopped atmospheres syncing correctly
• One which stopped the invite box working correctly in the main menu
• And one where a creature’s radial menu would stay visible after the creature was deleted (making it very easy to get exceptions)

We are currently tracking another annoying one where creatures which should be visible and in line of sight are not showing. If we can fix this tomorrow then we will push out an update just for that then.

Thanks for following our little spire.

Heya folks. Today I spent a good chunk of the day continuing through the errors dumped yesterday. I’m about a third of the way through and have already got a good list of bugs we didn’t have previous reported on github. Most of the these are bugs that would have occurred without the game dying so will have manifested in annoying ways.

Yesterday I mentioned that one bug we wanted to squash was the one causing atmospheres not to sync properly. This has no been fully worked out and I’ll be finishing off the fix in the morning. Hopefully the rest fall just as easily.

Ciao

Only a quick one tonight as it got late whilst I wasn’t looking and I should get some sleep :)

Today I pushed the server changes to support default boards to production. That went smoothly and the feature is working well internally, we should be able to get that to you this Thursday (if all goes well).

I then exported all the errors that have been automatically reported to our server and I’ve started going through them. I’ve already found solutions to a couple of bugs but there naturally are many more. One particular annoying one that has been reported is that sync of atmosphere settings can stop working.. that sucks and so I’m hoping to see something that might give some clues to what happened there.

Until tomorrow.

Peace

Yay it’s good to be back to dev logs again. Today I prototyped the default board feature. This lets you pick the board that players automatically join when they join the campaign. It doesn’t make for an exciting gif but here it is anyway! WARNING: CODER GRAPHICS, NOT FINAL LOOK :p

I’ve also been doing a bit of a survey of the game as it stands today and looking at what the data in our system looks like. We are going to need to make things faster whilst also making boards much bigger so now is a good time to be seeing what patterns have appeared and what could be changed to be able to leverage your PC more effectively. This is all pretty arm wavy but I expect I’ll do a brain dump on this sometime this week as many features we are (slowly) working on like large boards, new floor system and the new fog of war all depend on what we decide here.

Tomorrow I’ll also be fixing up the ‘percentage’ dice and trying to hunt down what has been causing the atmosphere sync issues folks have been seeing.

Until then,

Peace.

Heya folks, thanks for stopping by again.

Today was fairly productive:

• Fixed a bug where lit torches from hidden floors would be visible on load
• Fixed bug where picking an asset from the panel which was a member of a group would instead pick the first asset from the group
• Added a community requested feature where holding tab shows the names of the creatures

The ui layer currently showing the creatures names is going to be greatly expanded on in future for GM tools. Being able to reveal GM only assets, chests containing pre-prepared assets, GM notes etc. That’s gonna be fun.

@Ree has been working on a variety of things including the animation overhaul mentioned recently. A bunch of features will be possible with that for example more emotes, spell effects and death/ko states. Gah, cant wait.. it’s gonna be awesome when we all get to be on this full time.

There’s other stuff in the works of course, keep and eye out for another alpha update soon.

Peace.

p.s. Almost forgot. We now have a site to check if you have been sent an invite key. Check it out here: http://keys.talespire.com/

Today was an interesting mix.

I got around the staging server issue from yesterday by using a different subdomain..yeah I’m not happy with it either. I’m guessing that the certs weren’t cached and so every time I pushed a new build it was asking letsencrypt for new certs.. they have a limit of how many they will give out in a period of time so maaaaybe that’s it. However I was sure I had seen that before and it would error rather than giving something invalid. So I don’t know.

The correct thing to do would be to inspect the certs I received and see what was up with them. However this week we are really pressed for time so for now I’ll settle for dodging the issue rather than fixing it.

Because of that I was able to test the new ‘Check if I should have received an invite’ site. It works so, after a few tweaks to make it mobile friendly, we called it done for now. We will make it available to you with the next wave of invites.

Speaking of those we have been way behind on that, the content updates we were wanting to complete first have taken longer to complete as we have started prepping material for the upcoming kickstarter. This is also why we haven’t had a mini update this week (booooo :[)

After the above stuff I started doing some work on dice, there are some ownership and syncing tweaks I want to make.

I also added basic per-server request stats to our front end server code. This just means we get per minute info on what requests are made to the server in a format that should be easy to graph in cloudwatch. Super low tech approach but if it works for now it will be a boon.

That’s all for today. Back with more tomorrow.

p.s Oh I’m away from this Sunday to next Wednesday as I’m off to a programming conference. There will be a small gap in these dev logs but they’ll be back as soon as I am :)