From the Burrow

TaleSpire Weekday Update

2019-04-11 23:35:09 +0000

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.

side-table

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.

default board

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.

TaleSpire Dev Log 96

2019-04-11 00:12:49 +0000

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

TaleSpire Dev Log 95

2019-04-10 00:05:32 +0000

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

TaleSpire Dev Log 94

2019-04-09 00:15:02 +0000

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

default board

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.

TaleSpire Dev Log 88

2019-03-30 00:33:38 +0000

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.

names

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/

TaleSpire Dev Log 87

2019-03-27 23:04:15 +0000

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 :)

TaleSpire Dev Log 86

2019-03-27 00:42:28 +0000

Evening all. One of those annoying logs today as it doesn’t have a conclusion.

I finished up the site which allows you to check if you have been sent and invite to the alpha. I then pushed a new staging server for final testing and saw ssl issues, but not good log as to what the issue was. I assumed I had just messed something up in my recent changes so tried a commit from the other day (which was previously working).. same issue. I tried a bunch of things but I’m just getting the same bloody unhelpful error.

I’ve got some other things to work on tomorrow so I’ll focus on this on Thursday.

Aggravating to not have more data to share but thats the way for today.

Peace

TaleSpire Dev Log 85

2019-03-26 01:06:23 +0000

Tiny update tonight as I didnt realize how late it had gotten here.

The main thing of interest today was that I set up the backend code for checking if you should have recieved an invite code. This is gonna be helpful in the next wave of invites.

I just need to make the webpage for this now.

Goodnight folks

TaleSpire Dev Log 84

2019-03-21 22:21:42 +0000

Turns out that the issues with the server images was simple after all.

Back in january I tweaked the images to include the amazon agent so we could get memory usage info in cloudwatch. When I did that I must have left some files from an old build around. Later on, when the newer code was pulled and extracted, it didnt replace what was already there and we ended up running this weird frankenbuild when we had old code and a new db schema.

Dumb but fine. I then fixed up the server side code for storing the default board. I’ll push that to live tomorrow and then soon we’ll work on ingame UI for this. I expect we’ll add a marker to the entries in the board panel.

Ok, time to sign off. Peace

TaleSpire Dev Log 83

2019-03-20 23:45:37 +0000

We’ve had a lot of good days of progress so it was about time for an annoying one.

Today I was looking to push some server side changes to allow GMs to set a default board for a campaign, this would be the one that you join automatically when launching the campaign. However when I pushed the code to a new staging instance I was getting and instance with the update to date database schema but the code from back in January.

It seems that earlier in the year I must have messed up our staging server machine image. This means that tomorrow is going to have to be looking into that and fixing that up. The initial creation of those images was a pain in the ass and I expect this to be no exception.

Ah well, that’s just how it goes. It’ll be fixed soon enough.

Let’s see if I get it tomorrow,

Goodnight

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