Update on Beta 1

January 11, 2011

Just a quick update, folks. Beta-1 is in full-swing and has me incredibly busy! Lots of good feedback–suggestions, bugs, none of them genuinely concerning, though one issue was pretty crippling and unique to one user, so it was good to find that now.

Beta-2 is coming up, and once it’s out (this week?), I’ll release the next set of beta invitations. Again, I apologize for the wait–but I was right to roll out slowly–the participation has been great, but a little overwhelming. Between the alpha and beta-1 users, there are a total of 24 people with beta invitations. Had there been 200, I’d never have kept my head above water.

Things I’ve learned.

  • I need a couple moderators (this is in the works as we speak)–I can’t keep being the sole organizer of the forum and get any coding done.
  • I need a public-facing knowledge base and issue/feature tracker, not just a forum and not just my private bug tracker. This is still a research topic.
  • I have to stop putting off fixing the forum breaks that resulted from the last forum software upgrade.
  • You guys have tons of good ideas. It’s the right time for the beta.

Stay tuned for beta-2. Those of you with certain treasures obtained at Gen Con, look alive.
In the meantime, here are some video tutorials I’ve started accumulating. Look for these to find their way to a prominent place on the site sometime soon.
http://www.screencast.com/users/EpicTable/playlists/Tutorials
— John

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alpha 15 May Be the Last Alpha

December 19, 2010

Saturday night, my gaming group took Alpha-15 for a spin. There were a couple issues related to…well, related to my coding on Alpha-15 until 10 minutes before game time. Despite that, EpicTable pretty much stayed out of the way and just let us play, which is my heuristic for beta worthiness. I’m addressing those couple issues, and then I have some mapping work to finish. At that point, I’ll transition to beta.

One concession I’m making to time–I’m going to start the beta before the vision-related tools are integrated. I know, for some of you that’s going to be a downer, and I won’t feel bad if you want to wait for the vision support. There’s a lot of functionality that’s in pretty decent shape, though, and starting early with people who aren’t as concerned about vision will give me a gentler beta ramp.

I’m going to start reaching out to folks over the next few days to gauge interest in beta 1. Stay tuned.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alphas 13 & 14

December 12, 2010

I’ve been hard at work on EpicTable, trying to make good on that prediction of a Fall beta. (Hey, I have until the 21st! )

We tested out Alpha 13 and 14 today/tonight. Alpha 13 fixed the character transfer issue from Alpha 12, and it reintroduced some long locked-down UI customization capabilities like changing the visibility of the chat, character portrait bar, and dice tray, dragging panels to secondary monitors, etc.

Brennen, who’s on a smaller display, has been needing that auto-hide feature for the various EpicTable panels, and immediately noticed that the panels were slow on his machine. That was this morning (um…Saturday morning, that is) on Alpha 13. By this evening, Alpha 14 was born, and its auto-hide panels are considerably snappier.

I have a few things I still want to take care of before the beta, but some of you die-hards are apt to hear from me before I’m officially past my Fall deadline.

For those of you interested in the kinds of things going on in the alpha tests, the release notes for the alphas are actually here on the site: http://www.epictable.com/whats-new/

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alphas 11 and 12

November 21, 2010

Due to a variety of work and family conflicts, my group had a longish break between tests. (And yes, I know, if that happens again, I should pull in some of you folks who have offered to wade into the alpha fray. )

I had my own set of conflicting priorities, though, so the extra time didn’t hurt. I posted Alpha-11 to my group on the 19th in anticipation of testing Friday night. However, Friday night before the test, I fixed some things related to handouts. So, I quick spun up an Alpha-12 while the guys waited patiently, and that’s what we ended up testing.

Here are some highlights of the delta between Alpha-10 and Alpha-12:

  • I fixed “Brennen’s Terrible Scrolling Problem” – scrolling stopped prematurely on Brennen’s small(er) laptop screen than on my test screens.
  • I eliminated the “Tribble Notes” – notes that cloned every time they moved.
  • I fixed an issue with the installer that was causing it to not update an existing installation.
  • I fixed some things with character edits and character portrait transfer.
  • There are better “wait” screens now than there used to be, for things like waiting for the game organizer to join, retrieving game resources, etc. There’s still not as much feedback as I’d like, but it’s better than it was. For the trivia fans out there, the splash screen is actually the same image used for the EpicTable banner we had in the Gen Con booth this year.
  • There’s a nice self-extracting exe for the installer now, so there’s no need to go through the hassle of opening a zip file, wondering if you should extract the files first, and then wondering whether you should run setup.exe or the .msi file. There’s just a single exe. You run it. The product installs. Simple.

The really good (from a glass half-full perspective) things to come out of tonight’s test:

  • There are things wrong with character portrait transfer that just aren’t misbehaving in my lab. (The glass half-full part about that is that I wouldn’t have found this without the alpha testers, and the rest of you would have been hit with it in the beta.) This is curious–since the server is central, it doesn’t really matter much whether two clients are in my house or across the world from each other. So, I don’t yet have a satisfactory explanation for why character portraits work so well for me.
  • Something’s not right with the auto-updater. I wonder if my installer “fix” has anything to do with this….

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alpha 10

October 30, 2010

Last Sunday, Brennen and I took Alpha 10 for a spin. We verified that the dire problems of Alpha 9 were fixed, tried out a new self-extracting installer in development.

The self-extracting installer was something I did as a break from other things, and it’s complete in Alpha 11. I only spent on hour or two on it, but it’s really motivating to me to do “finish work” like this. The gist is that the setup.exe and MSI are bundled into a single, self-extracting executable, so there’s no wondering which file to run, unzipping to temporary directories, or anything like that. Not 100% necessary, but consistent with the ease of use goals of EpicTable.

The Dire Problems, as you might recall, were the Ever-Changing Background and some weirdnesses with rich text notes. Both have been eliminated. You still get backgrounds, now you just don’t get them every two seconds. ;) Rich text notes no longer cause mysterious “drag and drop registration errors”.

We did find a couple things of interest. Brennen was having scrolling problems that I couldn’t duplicate for the life of me. He uses a laptop with rather less screen real estate than I’d imagined, and runs at a lower resolution than I do, so we spent some time trying to get my secondary monitor setup to mimic his. I still wasn’t able to duplicate the problem that night, but later, I found I could duplicate it on my own laptop, so…something about laptops is more nuanced than just screen size and resolution. That’s what I’m working on now. At least now that I’ve been able to duplicate it, the bug can’t hide for long.

Running at this resolution has really made me thankful that there’s so much ability to customize the layout in EpicTable. (I need to record a video of that….)

Alpha 11, targeted for this week, will have fixes for these two issues from Alpha 10, a fix to character portrait and handout sharing, and the finished self-extracting installer. There are probably some other things I’m forgetting, but I need to leave something for the Alpha 11 post. ;)

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Field Report: EpicTable Alpha-9

October 3, 2010

EpicTable Alpha-9 is a good example of why I’m releasing alphas (almost) weekly to my gaming group to stabilize things before giving the rest of you a beta.

I was pretty excited about Alpha-9. It had a lot of improvements and fixes–things you can work around but would never want to release. Everything was working really well in my testing–though granted, the alpha releases get very little–and I was looking forward to wowing my group. Our Monday game night rolled around and BAM! Three really nasty things hit us that didn’t occur in my own lab.

First, rich text notes, when sent over the network, resulted in a scary looking message about “drag and drop registration failure”. Hmm…. Second, Bryan found that he could crash Brennen’s EpicTable by editing a note at the same time Brennen did. Fun. These two were both relatively easy fixes and were due to the same cause. You developers out there are probably guessing that this was caused by simultaneous access to the note by the GUI and the incoming change notification, and you’d be right. It was a little more nuanced than that, but in essence, that’s what happened, and that’s fixed.

The third and final nail in the coffin of this build: The Miraculous, Ever-changing Background. If you changed the background of the tabletop, you kept changing it. Forever. And everyone told everyone else about the background change. Forever. Okay, so I’m not entirely incompetent. I had mechanisms in place that were supposed to prevent that. They…um…just didn’t. (I deleted my long-winded explanation of what was really going on, and instead, put that in my bug database. If you’re interested, let me know.)

So, why am I going on about the tragic Alpha-9 release? It’s to illustrate the distinction I’m making between alpha and beta, and to help explain why the alpha is closed and I’m making the beta contingent on the alpha’s stabilizing. The Alpha-9 problems were difficult to reproduce in my environment but outright killed our Monday gaming session. I know how tough it is to keep a gaming group going, and I don’t want give you a evening-killing bug. I’m sure there will be issues that come up with the beta, and I know you guys will be helpful and gracious as we work through them together, but I’m going to be respectful of your gaming time and do what I can to prevent evening-killers like Alpha-9 getting into the beta.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Alpha 8

September 15, 2010

No, you didn’t miss anything. I haven’t started the beta yet, and the alpha is really just my own gaming group. However, I thought I’d give you an update on how things are going. I don’t want to rub salt into any “give it to me now!” wounds you might have, and that’s part of why I’m just now telling you that I’m on my 8th alpha build, but I know you’re curious, so….
Read more

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Absurdly Pleased by EpicTable’s Windows Conformity

August 29, 2010

Sometimes, on a project of this scope, done entirely in spare time, the little things matter more than you’d expect. In alpha-7 (yes, I’ve subjected my gaming group to 7 builds of EpicTable), the setup failed to install some resources. Technically, all the previous setups failed to do that, but since everyone had been just auto-updating since before there was a setup, no one noticed. In fixing that, I couldn’t help but be absurdly pleased with EpicTable’s new logo, sitting there, looking at home next to all my other apps–looking better than some that didn’t have the hi-res icons used by Windows 7.

There was a similar moment when I was installing and Windows presented its less scary setup warning–blue border instead of yellow, and “publisher verified as Realityforge” instead of “unknown publisher”. Signing the setup and other binaries lets Windows ask you if you care if Realityforge installs software, as opposed to that shady-looking ne’er-do-well, “unknown publisher”.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Refining the Message (Promises, Promises)

August 17, 2010

There’s nothing like giving a couple hundred demos to help you refine your message.

Exhibiting at Gen Con was very instructive. Over and over, for four days straight, I got to ask people what games they were playing and talk to them about how EpicTable could help them do that online or face-to-face.

Over the last couple years, my understanding of EpicTable and online RPG gaming has deepened and evolved. The core of the message remains the same however: ease of use, game system neutral, and gaming group friendly. Read more

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Blog  

Screencasts from Gen Con 2010

August 12, 2010

For those who couldn’t make it to Gen Con or didn’t have time for a demo: don’t worry—I haven’t forgotten you. I’m posting the videos that were playing in a loop on the big screen at the front of the booth. Sit back, pretend you’re walking around the exhibit hall, and take a look.

These are all very short, meant for people walking by, not sitting at their computers. They also have no sound, since you wouldn’t hear it well in the aisles of the exhibit hall anyway. I’ll likely record something with more depth and some audio later, but for now, I didn’t want you guys feeling left out.

For your one-stop-shopping convenience, I’ve also included links to the previous dice roller videos, portions of which were used at Gen Con.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Blog  

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