Hey everyone,
First phase of the Story Teller features has been implemented. I’ve started with redoing the UI, so I can actually have something to test the feature with, and that involved changing the entire website UI for the game listing and game setup pages to use the new (to me) Vue.js library which makes working with a reactive interface so easy to use.
The UI now supports the ability to have multiple games, though you can’t make use of that feature quite yet. You’ll notice two toggles now, “Game Manager” and “Automatic User Management” (in the Configure Players sidebar) which is how I named the two major Story Teller features. The options are disabled and can’t be enabled yet, not until I finish implementing the features in the backend and testing them properly to make sure it’s working without a hitch.
I know that I’ve said before that it would take one to two months to do these features, but to be honest, the last month has been crazy with all sorts of administrative tasks that have made progress on this slower than I would have liked.
The good news however is that I now have a good system in place for doing daily backups of everyone’s worlds. This is something that I’ve been working on for a while and evaluating the solutions available and I’m finally happy with one backup service that I’ve subscribed to (after I thoroughly vetted and reviewed them) which handles the hard parts of that process.
This doesn’t mean that if you delete your data, I can recover it for you, so don’t expect that, you’d still be responsible for backing up your games on your own. It means however that in case of catastrophic failure (a comet slams into the datacenter, or a dragon melts it with fire, or a hag causes all the drive to start spinning in the wrong direction) and all drive data is suddenly lost, then I can recover everyone’s worlds from the backups. Recovering from the backups would overwrite every user’s data at once, which is why recovering a single world is not possible and it would only be used in the extreme cases to recover every account. I don’t expect to ever need it, but it’s good to know that it’s there.
I’m still working on the game management support. That will be where it would map every Foundry world to a Forge game url. Once I’m done with that, I’ll add the automatic user management, where you’ll be able to auto-join your games without having to go through Foundry’s join screen, and once you invite a player to your game, their Foundry user gets automatically created, etc…
I have some more exciting ideas planned, so we’ll see how it all goes from here. I’ll keep you posted on the progress, and thanks for being patient with me, I know a lot of people can’t wait to see these features available!