TaleSpire Dev Log 388

‘Allo folks.

Yesterday I continued working on the update UI and some details with Symbiotes that drag us that last little distance towards release.

Symbiotes has to be the most feature with the most creep we’ve ever had. It started with “let’s just get a web-view in here,” evolved to “let’s add a basic API in here so creators can interact with TS” to a place where we were really drilling down into the details of the programmer’s experience, writing extensive documentation, and making something we can truly support and grow over the years[0].

I’m much happier with this result than I would have been with the original plan, but I regret how much time it took. However, we are wrapping up the last few outstanding things:

• Finishing the v1 UI
• Prodding the legal folks to get the TOS updated.
• Fixing little bugs and annoyances as testing reveals them

We have also been chatting and working with other creators to be sure that the first version is helpful for real projects. I’ll talk more about that another day.

Anyhoo, back to what I was actually doing.

First off, I expanded the manifest to support icons for the symbiotes. The manifest is a file you write to tell TaleSpire about the symbiote, including what features to inject.

Here is a sample manifest:

As you can see, I was focused on icons. We currently support a couple of kinds:

• A 64x64 pixel icon which is used for the symbiote in menus and such
• A smaller, greyscale icon that will be used for notifications

We can add more size options in the future as we need those, whether for nicer integration in mod-stores or higher DPI displays. But for now, this will work just fine.

I also fixed a bug in the formatting of talespire:// URLs generated by symbiotes. Let’s take a second to talk about that feature.

You folks probably have already seen that external programs can do certain things via talespire:// URLs. Importing boards, setting the dice tray, and so on have URLs that integrate with TaleSpire. It’s super helpful, and we wanted you to have that too, so we allow you to generate a URL specifically for your symbiote like this:

You can then put whatever text you like after the final slash (as long as it’s a valid URL) and it will be delivered to your symbiote when the URL is processed.

The console you are seeing is part of the dev tools in Chrome. When you enable dev mode in the Symbiote settings, you can connect to and debug your symbiotes trivially. I’ll talk more about this in another dev log.

Right! I gotta get back to work, so I’ll stop writing for now.

Ciao.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

[0] Not just supporting more features but supporting entirely different kinds of symbiotes.