This week we improved the chat, added extra formatted text options to help organise your campaign, and polished the World of Darkness character sheet's new header fields and extra fields.
For a change of pace from the last few weeks, this week's blog post is about Force of Nature NPCs.
Chat
- (Community Suggestion) The chat new has a "new message" sound that plays whenever a new message arrives. This makes the chat much easier to use if you have it open in some other screen or tab.
- Chat rooms can now be grouped and their position within the group can be configured per room. This helps make the chat more organized, and helps your players more easily find what they're looking for.
- If you configure two rooms to be in the same position in a group, they will be ordered alphabetically. This makes it easy to organize things gradually, since you can just give all rooms groups and they will be grouped but keep their normal ordering amongs themselves.
- Temporary rooms can now be created in a specific group, and will be ordered at the bottom of that group. By default, they will try to go into the same group as the currently opened room.
- Chat rooms new have an optional "Location" field that can be used to link from the room to a location on the wiki. This helps with creating chat rooms that represent locations in the game world.
- If the chat room does not have an image set it will use the location's image if available. To use the location image, the link must be a green link and the location itself must have an image.
- Chat rooms now have a proper default image that is used instead of the striped grey box.
Text
- Improved the
[show]block:- The list produced by the show block (just
[show]or[show:list]) no longer shows each item's synopsis behind it. This makes longer lists much more readable, as they are "real" lists of links to other pages instead of walls of text. - Additionally the list is now automatically put into three columns of there are 12 or more items in the list. This helps with keeping pages navigable by preventing one of the lists from becoming a long ribbon of links.
- There is now a
[show:details]option that display the link and the synopsis for each item. This allows you to get a more "meaty" list of a smaller number of items, helping you to fill out pages that are mostly "groups of things" in some way.- In the future, this display might be enhanced with a small image or other pertinent information such as the applicable schemas or tags.
World of Darkness
- Abilities with zero ranks can now be configured to give "+1 difficulty", which is used in some edition of the system. This also helps with campaigns that operate with house rules about 0 dots in an ability.
- Fixed a major issue where abilities were reset when changing default abilities in the game system configuration. This has been fixed, and none of your data will disapear when changing the game system configuration.
- Energy types, header fields, and extra fields now show legacy values when they have been changed in the game system configuration. This helps with updating your sheet to the new configuration, as you can still see the old values.
Wiki
- Clarified how RPGpad uses the old 'Description' field by renaming it to 'Synopsis' and adding a short explanation of what the field is used for. This more clearly indicates to all players where and how RPGpad will display the field so everyone knows what to expect from the system.
Fixed Bugs & Technical Improvements
- Fixed an issue where the "Log out" action in the menu on chat pages would not alway log you out and instead opened a new tab. This has been fixed, and logging out now works correctly on the chat page.
- Fixed an issues with the ordering of the characters overview. The per-player groups were originally in order of "first character name", which meant that the ordering was a tad unintuitive. The player groups are now listed in alphabetical order, and the characters for each player are also in alphabetical order.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the "Room is empty. Join room?" message shown in an expanded empty room from showing up for newly created rooms. This has been fixed, and the room now correctly shows the message regardless of when it was created.
- Fixed a bug that caused pages with links to chat rooms to error. This has been fixed, and for the time being links to chat rooms will somply link to the chat itself.
- Slightly adjusted the default themed image that is shown for things that have no own default image (not to be confused with the "empty" image) to no longer resemble the drag handle styling we use.
- Improved security of RPGpad by applying a better same-site policy to session cookies to harden the system against CSRF attacks. This helps protect your account and campaigns.
