Beta 13 Released
November 22, 2011
Beta 13 was released last night, a bit earlier than expected, so that I could address a couple issues reported by beta testers.
Learn more about EpicTable Beta 13 at the EpicTable Support site.
Looking Ahead to Beta 13
November 7, 2011
Now that beta 12 is out there, I wanted to give you a look ahead towards beta 13. I’m planning to take a break from drawing and memory issues and knock out some, easier, very visible stuff.
Grid Improvements
There are a few bugs reported against grids–notably that changes to the grid don’t get broadcast and that grid visual settings, like color, aren’t saved. Additionally, I have some support for hex grids that I’ll put in place while I’m tampering with grids.
Annoyances
I hate that the tab renames don’t get broadcast to the other participants. I’m going to stop the hate.
Automated Reports
These are the result of the "Report this to EpicTable Support?" dialogs that come up when something bad happens. These have been really helpful, and I’m glad people have been sending them. Every release, I fix a couple of the things that have come in this way. However, I’m getting to the point where the easy stuff has been addressed and the ones that come in now are more difficult for me to reproduce. Tragically—necessary for your privacy, but tragically—there’s no email address or other identifying information sent. That makes it impossible for me to hit you up for more info, even if you’d like me to do that. I’m thinking about an “opt-in settings” page, where you can opt to share your email address with me, so I can contact you about your bug report. Maybe I can contrive to ask during the report and let you choose to apply that response to future reports. That way, you don’t have to go looking for the opt-in page.
What About The Sync’d View Feature Requests?!
This is the request to let the GM sync the players’ views to his. There was a lot of conversation on the forum about how this might work and whether the GM could “force” players to his view. I haven’t forgotten about this. I’ve resolved to implement the feature. Plenty of people want it—including me. It will probably be shortly after beta 13, just because I think it’s going to take a bit of work, and I don’t want to hold up this other bug work while I work on this new feature. I think this one merits a short spec (maybe fodder for my first doc section!) and prototype, so I can get some feedback before it’s too far along.
Beta 12 is Available
November 5, 2011
Head on over to http://support.epictable.com/entries/20647537-beta-12-released for details about the latest beta release.
Testing Beta-12
November 4, 2011
Beta-12, after many interruptions, is nearing completion. I have a candidate build that’s gone through its first round of testing. I’m going to test installs and then post it. If I don’t find anything tragic, you’ll have it in a couple hours.
Beta-12 isn’t a big feature release. It has some memory-related fixes that should help those on lower-end machines, some minor fixes to issues that were reported against earlier betas, and a set of fixes for the drawing tools–most notably issues with drawing when scrolled and/or zoomed. The memory fixes are what took all the time–well, that and taking my 3-year-old daughter to Disney World.
When Beta-12 goes up, I’ll write another post with links to the download and change notes.
Beta 12 Coming Soon
September 15, 2011
I’ve been quiet lately, because I’ve been hard at work on beta-12. I’m not the best marketer, I’m afraid. When there’s an issue I’m working on, I find it really hard to break away from the code and chat about EpicTable. I’ve had a breakthrough of sorts with a memory issue, though, and thought I’d celebrate by posting.
The theme for beta 12 is “synchronization improvements”. A couple of the beta test groups have reported issues with objects disappearing mysteriously or object moves getting communicated to the players but not to the GM. The causes of these seem to fall into two categories:
- Issues related to rejoins (deliberate or automatic)
- Issues related to memory consumption
The first of these is somewhat random—except when it’s related to the second. Deliberate rejoins are when a participant restarts EpicTable and joins the same game. Automatic rejoins are when one participant’s EpicTable gets disconnected and rejoins automatically. You won’t necessarily even know about this unless you’re looking at the log or if the rejoiner is the host and thinks it has to rebroadcast the game state to everyone. This kind of rejoin can be caused by network errors. It can also be caused by high memory consumptions causing errors.
The high memory consumption is something I’ve observed on a few people’s machines. If you’re using a lot of maps and handouts, it’s not unusual to see EpicTable taking up 500-600MB or more. Clearly, this is undesirable, and it was surprising to me. Of course, I suspected very large maps were to blame, but by and large, I saw people using maps that were pretty reasonable in size.
Here’s what I was missing. I thought the maps were “small” because I was looking at the size of a JPG or PNG file. So, I thought I had a leak. When I got a memory profiler on it though, I found that I didn’t. I had a huge amount of “unmanaged memory”. It turns out, the images used to back maps have a large unmanaged memory component. This is because, unlike what you see on the file system, map images in memory are uncompressed. Save one of your maps as a .bmp instead of a .jpg and join me in recoiling in horror. Add three or four tabs with maps in them, and you can pretty quickly take up a lot of memory. That was why EpicTable took so much memory. What I’m doing now, and what I have proof- of-concept-quality code for right now, is releasing all the map images except the one in the current tab. When you change tabs, the map image for that tab is loaded and the last one is released. It had been the case that, once loaded, a map’s backing image stayed around. This change greatly reduces the incremental memory cost of adding a new map.
There are other, fairly minor, things in beta-12, like some bug fixes for automated error reports that have come in. I’m hoping to sneak in a surprise or two, but I really want to get beta-12 wrapped up this weekend, so we’ll see.
Thanks to all of those who have taken the time to report issues to me, open support tickets and gather diagnostics for me. It’s really helped.
– John
Gen Con 2011 Report
August 10, 2011
Hi everyone,
Brennen, Jeremy and I are back from Gen Con, and I’m hard at work on getting EpicTable beta 11 out the door. Beta 11 is what we demoed at Gen Con, and I’m pretty excited about a couple of the new features we were able to get in:
- ad-hoc drawing tools, allowing you to draw freehand on your map or tabletop
- lots of options for customizing your “plain” (until now) text objects on the tabletop
Look for details in the next couple days.
Here’s another exciting piece of news. We sold pre-orders at Gen Con! The beta has reached a point where it’s stable enough for our weekly game, so while it probably has about 3-6 months of beta left, I felt like EpicTable was finally ready for some limited, pre-release sales. So, we were offering special pre-release pricing on EpicTable demo at our booth. Don’t worry forum folks–I wouldn’t sell to convention goers without giving you guys a similar opportunity to pick up EpicTable before its official release. (Details on that later.)
Look for some new faces on the forums. I let loose the 3rd wave of beta participants, and of course, the pre-order folks have access to the beta.
Finally, if you couldn’t make it to Gen Con, you’re not out in the cold. I’m going to get a virtual demo booth going, and we’ll run a set of demos. Whether you’re in the beta currently, or just curious, you’re welcome to visit the booth. I just have too coordinate with my three year old boss, who was at home with her Mom while I was at Gen Con….
Day 2 of Gen Con
August 5, 2011
It’s 2-something AM and the end of a long day at Gen Con. Actually, this is the earliest my day of EpicTable work has ended in the last two weeks….
The EpicTable Gen.Con booth is #2142. Stop by if you’re here!
We have three people working the booth this year, which helps. We’ve been pretty busy doing demos, which has been awesome. Lots of really positive feedback. I’m particularly happy that the things people like are the same things I think are important about EpicTable.
EpicTable on iTunes!
July 13, 2011
I’m absurdly pleased to be looking at EpicTable in my iTunes window.
As of today, EpicTable tutorial screencasts are available on iTunes, so you can subscribe and not lose sleep over missing any. 
I’m pondering whether I can turn this into a rationalization to buy myself and iPad….
New Video Tutorial: Flaming Sword Damage
July 10, 2011
In response to some questions about dice pools and captions, I’ve created a short video demonstrating using the dice roll editor to build a dice roll with multiple dice pools and multiple captions: Flaming Sword Damage
Beta Newsflash: Beta 8 Stops Zombies!
July 3, 2011
In last Friday’s game, out group discovered an unfortunate side effect of a new feature. Prior to beta 7, one couldn’t drag a private character to a map. Why? Because he was private, meaning no one else had that character. If EpicTable encountered a character token and the character wasn’t shared, EpicTable would just get rid of it. This was confusing, especially if it happened to the GM that was getting rid of things (because the GM saves the game). So in beta 7, I started letting tokens referring to private characters exist on maps and tabletops.
But then….
We found that it was possible to get into a cycle of infinite retrieval when multiple tokens on a map referred to the same character. To hit this issue, you had to drag a private character to the map and then do that again, or duplicate the token before everyone retrieved the image for it. The more players you have and the more times you duplicated or re-dragged the token, the easier it was to make this happen.
This never happened to anyone prior to beta-7 because you couldn’t drag private characters to a map back then. (Or rather, you could, but since they were private, no one would retrieve them and things got confusing but non-lethal.)
In our Friday night game, Brennen dragged a private zombie (a zombie for money…) to the map and started duplicating the token to throw a horde at us. (Okay, maybe not a horde, just a group, but it seemed like a horde to our characters.) At that point, everything slowed down. One or more of us had entered a cycle of endlessly updating the zombies. This hammered away at Brennen’s machine, making it lag relative to the other players’. Very nasty stuff, though a rather nice load test of the messaging layer, which it seems can run at a rate of at least 5 ZUPS (Zombie Updates Per Second) indefinitely…or until Brennen’s machine is brought to its knees.
After that session, I dropped what I was working on for beta 8 and turned my attention to these zombies. I’m happy to report that my group tested beta 8 last night, and its issue with zombie updates is fixed.
Beta testers: Look for a forum announcement for beta-8.
Others: Please stay tuned.
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