Going forward

The poll is now closed and the preference of having a default 5ft grid size as the baseline for effortless play has won by quite a margin. I am quite comfortable with the result, because even while there is a strong contender for the "compromise-solution" and the manual scaling after the import, the result is speaking for itself and is not just leaning slightly into another direction.

It's a good time to talk about general timelines in the development, expectations and realities for a moment:

Adventure module imports: Scene submissions

I have stopped the ability to submit scenes because there are a (sometimes multiple) submissions for 32 scenes in queue. I know that there are at least some of them already adjusting to 5ft grid, some are not. I want to work through the scenes first, adjust everyone to the desired 5ft grid, and then handle the submissions manually in order to not forfeit the hard work of the community - but it's not possible to get that automated by my tooling if the grid sizes don't match up.

Things to do:

• Adjust all maps to 5ft
• Manually process the submissions
• Re-open submissions and check if they are indeed for the new 5ft grid size or not

Extension update

Some might have seen the proposed change to the extension regarding spell import. I provided an internal database of all 515 spells on D&D Beyond which were queried and pushed to Foundry on monster import. So e.g. a spellcaster could cast Light, Mage Hand and Fireball, then those were queried by spell name, the Foundry spell item would be retrieved and imported alongside with the monster without the need to mouse-over over the spells or manually import the spells into a compendium first. 

It felt good, in a way, because we got stripped from the relatively low-effort character import route after D&D Beyond's change to provide only prepared spells in the character JSON data and it was in line with the Character import, which provides the spells alongside the other info, too.

The extension update was reviewed by Google and is ready for release. But after thinking about it over the weekend and talking with Mr.Primate about the matter, I have decided that I could not release it in this state. The spell database contains spell information about all spells, not only the SRD/ Basic Rule ones and even if it's great from a usability side, it's wrong from a licensing side: I cannot distribute data that I am not holding a license to distribute of.

Instead, I will go the cumbersome route: Improve the parser of the spells on the webpage and provide more hints to the parser in case if it does not do it's job as good as expected. The aim is to have the same quality on the spell parser than on the character import. It's the right thing to do.

Things to do:

• Go through all spells and see if the result meets the expected result
• Adjust the parser where needed by either adjusting the parser or by providing specific hints to the parser based on individual spells

The next two months

Some of you might know, too: A new player joins my family on the beginning of August. A map of Faerûn is hanging above the cradle (well it was my office before we revamped the flat in preparation of the baby and hey, I managed to convince my wife that it was a good to leave it there ;)). I will take two months off of my regular job (August + September) in order to support my wife and welcome the Little One into this world. 

This was made possible because of you wonderful people! I can't thank you all enough!

These two months will be wonderful and wonderfully exhausting at the same time, and I will definitely not be as available as usual. During these months, I will be holding regular feedback sessions on stream (I am planning once a week) to compensate the lack of responsiveness on Discord. Development will not come to a halt, but it will be needed to be more structured and focused from my end - which is a good thing in any case.

Furthermore, it's probably a good thing that our sleep cycle will be irregular. This will enable me to talk to so many of you which is normally difficult because of our different time zones ;)

After those two months, I am switching from full-time to part-time employment (80%). This will free one day each week I can dedicate fully to Foundry development, to continue to improve existing mods, starting the needed rewrite of Iconizer and Tokenizer and something I am playing in my head with for quite some time already (I think you might like it).

Things to do:

• Not getting mad at all the friends that try to unload all the "vital necessities for a baby" - I mean, come on, I haven't even heard about half the stuff they are trying to sell us.
• Food-prep in advance for the week after
• Cleaning all the rooms! 
• Comforting wifey who does a formidable job for the last months
• Grinning all day long because we are almost there, against all expectations

Alright, let's get back to work then :)

Stay lovely, 

Sebastian