Dice Tray and Video Optimizations

Who's excited?? We're excited! Welcome to our first big release of 2021. We've focused our initial efforts this year on tidying up the video experience, as well as refining critical parts of the dice interface. We hope you enjoy!

The New Dice Tray

Our goal is to always do our best to keep people front and center when you play on Role. To that end we wanted to find a way to display the Dice Tray without it needing to be a pop-up over people's faces. With this update the Dice Bar is now persistent at the top of your table. When selecting dice from the bar, or selecting a modifier from your sheet, the Dice Tray will now slide down into view. The video thumbnails of people at the table will rearrange themselves so that everyone stays visible allowing you to see them and your roll at the same time!

Video & Audio Improvements

• We've moved the camera and audio buttons to the top navigation bar and we've updated their designs to make it more obvious when you have a device turned on or off.
• If you enter a table that has a video call already in progress you will automatically be connected to it. Your camera and mic will default to off, but you will be to see and hear anyone that is already streaming.
• We've updated/fixed how and when we ask for device permissions. This should help resolve people running into the "Device not found" error.
• The grid of video thumbnails has better dynamic sizing so that we always display video streams as large as possible.
• We've tweaked some video and audio settings to improve overall quality and minimize the chances of videos freezing.

Misc Improvements and Fixes

• Added a loading indicator when initially opening the Role app.
• Changed "Table Menu" to "Settings" to clarify its intent.
• Moved our changelog into it's own page located at playrole.com/changelog.
• Added more info about us to our about page and moved it to our root domain at playrole.com/about.
• Fixed Fate dice not properly adding up for the people viewing your roll.

Coming Next

• Ability to manually add Buffs and References to your rolls.
• Ability to change your Display Name at a Table.
• Ability to give a sheet to another player.
• Shared sheets allowing multiple people to edit the same sheet.
• Text Chat!