TaleSpire News

This is a cross post from our dev logs that are posted over here: https://bouncyrock.com/news

Heya folks,

I’ve been hiding away recently, so let’s briefly remedy that with a dev log.
[h2]Seats[/h2]
Seats are progressing well enough. Two factors have made it a little harder than anticipated.

First, I hadn’t considered Steam needing five days to review the build before we could put it live. So that immediately took a work week away from us.

Next was that my design for managing seats had a critical flaw. Luckily, in discussion with @Ree, I realised that one of the aspects I thought was mandatory was not, so we got to go back to a more straightforward design.

The behavior now is expected to be as follows:

• Whenever a person who owns seats enters a campaign, their seats are attached to that campaign.
• The seats stay there until they play a different campaign (at which point their seats move to that campaign) or they are kicked/banned/remove-themselves from the campaign.

At that point anyone using the unpaid version of TaleSpire can join the campaign and use one of those seats. When they disconnect from the campaign, they immediately return the seat to the campaign.

That is a lot of words, but the TLDR is “person with seats goes into a campaign, then a person using the unpaid version can join.” If all goes well, it should feel very simple.

The backend portion is rapidly coming together, so a big shout-out to @borodust there. We’ll be testing that early next week. I’ve been on the TaleSpire side doing UX, and that is bumbling in the right direction.

We are now expecting to ship a Beta in the first week of April. It’ll all depend on whether Steam says we need to change anything before we can put it live, though.
[h2]Creature Mods[/h2]
Holy cow, folks, over one THOUSAND creatures already?! That’s insane.

We are blown away by your response and feel VERY sheepish that we can’t start working on all the things you have been reporting.

Here are a few things that are on our minds:

[h3]Search is rough[/h3]
We want to look into what we can do here. We know we will have tagging in the future, but even before that, some searches are skipping items you’d think would match.

[h3]Content policy[/h3]
We don’t support mature content on the official repository right now. We need to look into whether we would want to allow the tagging of some mature content, what our policy around that would be, and how players would control that from inside TaleSpire.

Also of critical importance is whether that would affect the age rating of TaleSpire as a whole. We are not willing to compromise that, so if it would, we’d need to look into other approaches.

We have always known that there would be plenty of stuff better served by community-run repositories, so we need to get moving on the API, too.

[h3]Mod packs[/h3]
Being able to bundle mods into packs is very much something we intend to support in the future. We’ve got some things to work on first, but it won’t be forgotten.

[h3]TaleWeaverLite improvements[/h3]
We definitely need to get back to TaleWeaverLite and make it easier to make mods. Two things that have been mentioned that we definitely want to look into are:

• 
  Allowing you to specify which channels and files you want to use for which texture map. This means you don’t need to pack your AO, roughness, etc., into a texture before importing it into TWLite.
  
• 
  Adding support for emissive textures. So you can have (fake) glowing parts of your creatures.
  

[h2]Wrapping up[/h2]
That’s all for today. It’s time for a weekend. Have fun folks

With this release, bringing new creatures into your stories has never been easier.

With three clicks, you can not only add a community-made creature to your campaign but also ensure it is downloaded for all your players, automatically and totally for free.

We’ve known for a long time that any VTT or game like TaleSpire must provide deep, robust ways for the community to grow beyond its own limitations, and we are delighted to be taking one more step in that direction.

Community-controlled content ensures your stories and ours will continue to grow well beyond the scope of what Bouncyrock could ever make alone.
[h2]How do you get started?[/h2]
The best way to dive in likely depends on your role.
[h3]Game Masters[/h3]
If you’re a GM, the best way to start is to open the Community Mod Browser and click around! You might also find these guides helpful:

• “Using Community Made Creatures” This guide shows how to use the Community Mod Browser to add creatures to your campaigns.
• “Playing in Boards with Creature Mods” shows how you and your players will be notified about missing content and how TaleSpire can fetch it for you.
• “Adding creatures from .tsMod files” It’s possible to skip the online repositories entirely and just use local files. This guide shows how.

[h3]Players[/h3]
While you can’t add creatures to the board alone, you can browse what is available. You might find something you’d like your GM to add. We also have a little guide showing available settings and how to fetch missing creations: “Playing in Boards with Creature Mods.”
[h3]3D artists[/h3]
You are the stars of the show here. Once you’ve had a chance to check out the Community Mod Browser, we’d recommend the following guides:

• “Making Creature Mods” This guide introduces TaleWeaverLite. This is the tool used to take a 3D model and package it up as something TaleSpire understands.
  
• “How to upload your creatures to the official repository at mod.io”: This guide shows you how to upload your creations to our official mod repository, making them available to the whole TaleSpire community.
  
• “Adding creatures from .tsMod files”: Maybe you have creations you would like to share with your friends, but not the whole world. This guide shows you how.
  

There is also a growing gang of friendly folks on our Discord helping each other make creature mods. You can find the discord here, and the channel you want is #creature-modding
[h3]IP rights holders[/h3]
We at Bouncyrock believe adamantly about the rights of creators. If you see your work being misused on our official repository, please file a DMCA report against that mod, and it will be handled.
[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
SEATS! The “seats” feature ships at the end of March, allowing any TaleSpire owner to purchase seats so their friends can play without having to buy TaleSpire themselves. The seats will be cheaper than full copies and reusable, so if you run two campaigns of four players, they don’t need eight copies; four seats will do the job!

After that, we are considering taking a month to work solely on bugs. Adding the features for you folks is fun, but TaleSpire must still be solid enough to rely on.

After that, we have plenty of ideas, but we’ll save that for the next community chat on the 12th of April. Hope to see you then.
[h2]Wrapping up and thanks[/h2]
This is a big, scary milestone for us. There is still a bunch to do to make it live up to our ambitions, but it feels great to be this far along.

While we’ve got you here, we want to give a big thanks to all of you for supporting us and getting the word out there about TaleSpire. Seeing your builds and hearing about your campaigns is such a motivator to have when we sit down to start work each morning. So thank you!

As always, you can find us on the Discord server, and feature-requests and bug reports are very welcome over at feedback.talespire.com

Happy building!

Good morning creature creators!

Today’s patch is focused on the behavior of the Community mod browser. We have:

• Fixed a bug where scrolling back and forth could apply the wrong icons to an item in the mod list.
• Made slightly better UI for mods that are missing but that have become unavailable from a repository.
• Fixed how the stand-in icon and hourglass behave.
• Fixed an exception that could occur when scrubbing the list fast when the description box is open.
• We also now remember the scroll position per category. Before you’d end up scrolled to odd positions, which was confusing.

More news coming very soon.

Ciao.

Hi folks,

Today's update to the creature mod beta includes:

• Fixed a couple of issues around reloading local mods when they are modified. This means you can now replace local mods that are in use.
  
• Less lag loading icons of in-build assets
  
• Fixed a case where unlinking HeroForge assets wouldn't work properly
  
• Mostly fixed how the asset database handles the same ID being in multiple packs.
  

The next bugs in the firing line affect how the community mod manager works. With those squashed, I think we will be ready to take this public. It'll be far from perfect, but we can iterate our way to success!

Seeya in the next patch.

Hey folks. Yeah, it's annoying, right? I thought we'd have them out earlier in the week, too.

What happened was that we started seeing people having real issues setting up the modding tool, so rather than using the package update system Unity provides, I'm knocking up something basic instead.

It's a slow, annoying process, but we'll get this to you as soon as we can.

I hope your week isn't too stressful.

Peace.