I’ve been hiding away recently, so let’s briefly remedy that with a dev log.
Seats
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.
Creature Mods
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:
Search is rough
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.
Content policy
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.
Mod packs
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.
TaleWeaverLite improvements
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.
Wrapping up
That’s all for today. It’s time for a weekend. Have fun folks
TaleSpire Release - Creature Modding Leaves Beta!
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.
How do you get started?
The best way to dive in likely depends on your role.
Game Masters
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:
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.”
3D artists
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.
“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
IP rights holders
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.
What’s next?
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.
Wrapping up and thanks
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!
Today, we are landing improvements for both the main build and the Beta. Let’s get into it.
For the main branch, we are fixing a long-term bug where HeroForge creatures with small bases didn’t work. Cheers to the folks in the community who reported that one.
On the Beta side, we have a new build of TaleWeaverLite, and it’s significant enough that it gets its own post replete with a clickbait title.
Heya folks, with creature modding in Beta, we can give some love to other fixes and features again. In this patch, we have the following little fixes:
We now only show the build plane pin on the vertical slider if the build grid is enabled.
We've fixed a bug in the slab uploader where the error reason was stated incorrectly as "".
Squashed a bug that caused the slab upload error UI to not be closable
Fixed an issue with photo mode where it would not show its UI when it was opened for the first time.
Made sure the info message that gets copied into the clipboard if a slab is too large to be copied (>30kB) now shows the actual size of your selection instead of always 0kB
Fixed a Symbiotes API bug that affected interacting with slabs
See you in the next one!
First creature-modding patch
It’s not even a day since the Beta started, and we have already had some lovely folks trying things out and uncovering some bugs.
This fix tackles two of them.
A case that stopped some creature meshes from loading properly
Creatures not hiding when they should (line of sight, gm hide, etc)
This is available on the creature-mod-beta branch now.
A lot changed behind the scenes to make creature mods possible, so we expect plenty of bugs[0]. To that end, we are keeping this in Beta for two weeks, so we all can kick the tires and see what breaks.
After that, we will open the floodgates and release it to everyone!
If you find broken stuff, please let us know on the bug-tracker. We will also be around the Discord if you want to ask questions (I’m @baggers over there).
This feature was a heck of a side quest, and it is only the start of what we want to do when it comes to adding assets to TaleSpire. We are super excited to see what you talented folks do with it.
Have fun!
[0] I found three while making the guides :|
Creature-modding Beta arrives on Monday
Heya folks,
We have wanted to give you the ability to add your own creatures for a long time, and so we are thrilled to say that on Monday that feature arrives in Beta.
The creatures themselves can already be made using our TaleWeaverLite plugin for Unity[0].
You can drop those mods into a folder, and TaleSpire automatically finds them and makes them available.
But that takes an entire mouse click.
UNACCEPTABLE!
Instead, TaleSpire can automatically find and fetch mods from repositories hosted online[1].
At release, we will support fetching content from the official mod repository on mod.io, but the code behind the scenes is ready to support community-hosted repositories as soon as we finalize the API. If that interests you, keep an eye on our dev-log for future updates.
We will be live on Twitch tonight at 22:00 CEST to catch up with the community, so please drop by if you have questions!
A big thanks to the community for their patience and support as we built this feature; the path is so often more windy and gnarled than expected, and having such a chill group behind us has been immensely reassuring.
Onward to Monday!
[0] Both the plugin and the Unity version required are free.
[1] The default option is to show you what content is missing and give you a one-click install. However, you can also choose to trust all content from a given repository, at which point TaleSpire will simply fetch and install it for you.
Return of the dev streams!
It's been too long since the last dev stream, so let's kick 'em back off and make them a regular occurrence while we're at it!
At that time, you'll be able to pop into our Twitch channel and join us live. We're planning to talk a bit about what we've been up to and what's next, and having some Q&A with anyone who shows up to chat.
Don't worry if you can't make it live; the stream will be available as a VOD on Twitch and over on our YouTube so you can catch up on all the latest updates and discussions at your convenience.
We're excited to catch up with you all. So - grab your calendars, set those reminders, and join us for the very first of hopefully many.
Stay creative, and see you soon!
Asset position patch
Something in yesterday's build went a bit screwy, and the positions of some random assets got messed up. This patch resolves that.
A big thanks to the folks who spotted and reported this.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Early Access Content Pack 29: MegaDungeon Expansion
Greetings Everyone!
We are kicking off the new year with a small pack of assets before getting stuck into the next larger sets. Since the MegaDungeon was released, we’ve been watching your feedback (and your amazing builds!), and these are some pieces derived from that feedback. This pack features the following new assets:
Stone demon face with open mouth prop
Iron Maiden prop (Openable)
x4 window variations of the straight, diagonal, corner, and curved corner walls
x4 tower stair sets oriented in the opposite direction
Cave-in prop
We've also tweaked the Dungeon Cellar tileset textures to revert back to a more desaturated stone color and reintroduced more of the mold.
As always, keep the feedback coming. For now, we're going to shift our focus away from the darkness below and look to the stars as we begin construction of the MegaSector!
Thank you, once again, for your continued support of the project!
