Changelog

Hey there, it's been a minute since we've had a new post here and I wanted to do a longer write up. There's been a slew of changes since late last year that, while have been communicated to the Discord, have not been posted in our Blog. So I'll do a summary of a bunch of things to catch us all up!

Changelog Blog

I'll work to keep this updated, but more than just strict changes. You may see posts here closer to what folks in the Discord might see as well - to keep parity and to give more context to work on Role.

Audio and Video Updated

At the end of last year, we moved to a new tech stack for our audio and video. It was necessary to make this migration to replace an older set of technology that was potentially going to shut down, but also so that new features can be built more easily. While you may not notice that the migration happened - which is, frankly, a good thing - we made a few other changes as well:

• [New Feature] User Volume. When you click on another user’s name in a room who has their mic turned on you will now see a User Volume slider for them. Now you can adjust their volume, or anyone else’s in the room, without affecting what others hear. It’s just for you.
• [New Feature] Hidden video. There’ve been multiple requests by folks asking for a way to turn on their cameras but then hide their own video, or hide someone else’s video. Now you can. When a user has their video turned on, you should see a new “eye-con” on the tile that lets you toggle between the video being shown to you or not. This doesn’t affect your video being turned on at all or theirs. Just whether it is visible to yourself.
• Fixed an issue where the network quality indicator next to a person’s username would always show no matter what. Now it only shows if it's anything less than max.
• I heard some issues with the size of the user’s video tiles when in speaker mode or showing an asset so I've increased the size of them a bit to give a better experience.

Long Standing Chat Bug Resolved

• [Bug Fix] Loading Chat Bug. This one has been a long time coming and I appreciate your patience. When you see a chat loading forever, it was because it was being "closed" after a long period of time has passed. Unfortunately this impacted too many of you and left room chat locked down. The fix itself is a bit convoluted but suffice to say that the next time you go into that room you will see the chat start to load again and you should see a message with "Your chat is still loading!" show up. Depending on how many messages there were, it may take longer than others; let it cook. The spinner and message will eventually go away and you should see your messages! If you try to scroll up and there seems to be a bounce effect forcing the scroll back down, it's still loading the rest of the messages (probably dice roll messages) so some extra patience while it finishes loading but it should be fine to start typing again!

Miscellaneous Changes

• Added support for .webp format images.

What's Next - Sheets 3.0

So here's what's coming next; this will be the main large portion of changes coming to Role pertaining to Sheets. This section is a long one, with lots of context.

Sheets (aka Sheets 2.0)

One of the most important pieces to any game is the Sheet. Each person in a Room can have one or more Sheets and they hold information about characters, health pools for bosses, notes for a story and more. These are sources of truth for many of you in all your games.

Ian and I have gone through a lot of feedback around Sheets and wanted to summarize some of the most common points here:

• Current Sheets, especially long Sheets, are hard to navigate
• Elements, and the space between them, take up a lot of Room
• Trying to get to a specific Element can be tough, and having to jump between multiple Elements makes it even harder to be in the moment.
• Making minor edits on individual Elements is time consuming, especially when you are already in a Room

We’ve also received requests for certain features or changes to Sheets as well:

• Quick search on a Sheet and faster navigation on sections
• More layout options for Sheets
• Give Elements like Dropdown more functionality in a Sheet
• Allow for more customization on Sheets

With all of these in mind we started brainstorming on how best to level up sheets. We have a bunch of things we want to accomplish, so I’ll be presenting them here in chunks. This first chunk called Sheets 3.0 represents what we aim to implement in our first series of changes:

Sheets 3.0

Sheet migration and Elements refactor

To unlock new options for Sheets, we need to move in a new direction with the base framework for Sheets. In a similar vein, Elements need to be upgraded as well, bringing more control and responsiveness to them. This will unlock new feature opportunities and help improve performance for Sheets

Groups are being removed, Sections are now Groups

Group as an Element is very powerful and unlocks lots of possibilities, however because it is an Element, it creates limitations to what can be done at that level. We are remaking Sections giving them duplication and nesting possibilities similar to what Groups have today. For now, we will allow Sections to be nested 1 level deep; if this becomes something that be handled well and in a performant manner, we could revisit that specific limitation.

Responsive Sheets

Sheets will gain some new layout options. With Elements being more responsive, this will allow for multiple columns worth of Sections sitting next to each other. In Rooms, you’ll be able to expand to a number of columns wide and sections will snap and fill to those columns. Outside of a Room, as you drag the Sheet container wider, the sections will get wider and develop new columns as you hit certain thresholds.

Quick Sheet Search

Sheets in a Room will have a search bar for quickly jumping to an Element you need to get to, helpful for much larger Sheets full of detail

Permission Prompts

When a player joins a Room, they’ll be prompted to allow Room Hosts to Edit their public Sheets. We aim to give all players in the Room the agency to choose who they want to see and change their Sheets, same as you might do in an in-person game. Adding more context clues for players in the Room should help mitigate issues that can come up in the future like a Host needing to make edits to a Sheet when a player is unavailable. We will pay attention to how these are used and received and make more changes if needed.

Element Updates and Changes

Element descriptions hidden by default in a tooltip. Descriptions are one of the things that tend to add a lot of unnecessary vertical space in a Sheet and, unlike labels which are indicators for what a field or Element is, descriptions are pieces of optional context which are particularly important for new players. Once the player is accustomed to their Sheet, they will become less reliant on these.

Buff Elements will gain a + and - option directly on them which allow small increases or decreases within a Room

Dropdown functionality improved, giving players more things they can do with them. Selecting an option can bring in a new Element or a new section to a Sheet, revealing new options for a player while in a game and new possibilities for Sheet creators.

[NEW] Image Element - Users will be able to add this new Element to Sheets that will give them the ability to upload an image at-will to their Sheet.

There’s a lot here and hopefully my comments for each change will explain enough about what they each entail.

Now, given all of that, there are subsequent features and changes we’d like to implement but will not be part of the first chunk known as Sheets 3.0. Instead, these will be done in a more free-form , follow up manner once the first batch of changes are completed. These are also still in discussion, so they may change in form by the time we get to a productionized version of them.

Sheets 3.1

• Sheet compact mode (toggle which reduces vertical padding and other visible Elements)
• Sheet “Edit Mode” (allow bulk editing of a Sheet from inside a Room)
• Asset Linking (clicking on a certain Element in a Sheet will reveal an asset in the Room)
• Pop out Sheets (Responsive Sheets in a new window)
• Sheet-to-Sheet Communication (allow a player’s actions to trigger something in another player’s Sheet)
• New Elements
• Other import/embed options for 3rd-party Sheets
• Additional Element functionality (similar to Dropdowns but for other Elements)
• Additional Sheet Customizations
• Pinning Elements to a Sheet header
• Offline Sheets for mobile support

Even beyond what’s been stated here, there are other exciting opportunities that we’ve discussed and hope can come to fruition soon enough. This is a large undertaking, so please bear with us as we work to bring the next generation of Sheets to Role. If you’re in the Community Discord, feel free to drop a comment if you have feedback or questions, or if not then send an email to support@playrole.com; while we cannot promise to do all things and implement everything, we do listen to the feedback that comes in.

Anyway this has been a fairly lengthy post so I'll cut it here but suffice to say I am very excited to work on this next set of changes. Please reach out if you have any questions, and as always…

You can play with us!

-– Role

Role is back to full power and then some!

• We officially launched our patronage subscription model. Learn more here.
• Audio/Video features have returned to Role!
• We've launched our integration with Owlbear Rodeo. Hosts can use OBR right in their Role Room without needing a new tab. All players can see and access your OBR rooms without even needing an OBR account!
• We fixed a handful of bugs throughout the platform.

Dear Role Players,

In early December we were informed that our video provider would be shutting down their service. We are working on integrating a new service provider for audio/video calls, but in the meantime we are disabling the ability to create or join video calls. This affects the following features:

• Joining audio/video calls
• Screensharing
• Streaming music to players

These features are disabled temporarily until we can integrate with a new service provider. We understand that this is a major interruption for many game rooms and we are doing our best to get Role back to full power as soon as possible! Any questions, feel free to email us at support@playrole.com.

Best,
The Role Team

• Fixed an issue preventing sheet templates from being deleted from your dashboard.
• Fixed being able to unsave sheet templates that comes from a product you haven't purchased.
• Fixed properly showing "Duplicate" button when previewing a sheet template if you have already saved it.
• Fixed loading custom dice from sheet templates coming from a game.
• Fixed sheet templates you searched for showing up as if you had saved them already.
• Fixed crash that sometimes happened when signing out while viewing a product page.
• Fixed incorrectly redirecting you to the wrong page when signing in.

• First pass at dashboard performance improvements. Games, rooms, sheets, templates, assets have been optimized to load more quickly.
• Added a filter panel to the store. This let's you find new games based on product type, price, complexity, or average session length.
• Added new sections to the store: Bestsellers, Free Quickstarts, and Role Exclusives.
• Fixed unnecessarily showing the new user Room First Time Experience if you are joining a room. We now only show it when you are creating your first room.

Custom Dice

You can now create custom sided dice from within a room and within the template builder!

• The Dice Roller in a room now has a new option in the top right to access Dice Settings. This is only visible to a Room Host.
• Hosts can toggle which dice are available in the room, as well as set the default color.
• From within the dice settings, hosts can also create custom sided dice for use by everyone in the room.
• In the Templater Builder, you can add custom dice to the template. These dice are usuable in a Dice Pool element as well as when creating an Element Link to the Dice Roller.

Search

We've updated our search to begin moving it towards a global search. When searching you will now see games available on the platform, products that are for sale, as well as templates published by the community.

Bugfixes

• Fixed dice with default color having a border after they are rolled.
• Fixed being able to update the color of an element's dice link.
• Fixed updating card settings from overwriting all room settings.

We've updated your dashboard to our latest design patterns!

• Updated UI for Rooms, Sheets, Templates, Assets.
• New Games page under My Stuff shows you your purchases core and supplement books.

• Fixed an issue with screen sharing on certain browsers.
• Fixed a crash when attempting to login with invalid credentials.
• Fixed a crash that sometimes happens when loading the chat.
• Fixed FTE issue when checking for a publisher name.
• Fixed allowing creators to edit templates that are assigned to their publisher account.

• We've updated the Room creation flow for new users. You'll now be prompted to search for a game and we'll help you pre-populate your new room with materials.
• We've added support for our store to handle preorders for upcoming titles.

• Fixed Slots and Clocks having a mismatch in the count vs how many items show up.
• Fixed Buff graphic correctly expanding when it's set to take up 2 columns.