(She’s talking about an issue with resizing EpicTable 1.1 character tokens that I showed her earlier.)

“Yeah….”

“Well, why aren’t you focusing on it?”

“Because I’m returning an email, ” I said with an amused smile.

“But you’re supposed to be focusing on fixing that drawing.”

(laughing) “I know, but this is a customer email.”

“But you’re supposed to be focusing, Daddy.”

Okay, admittedly, EpicTable 1.1 has turned into a larger project than I’d planned, but I want to know which one of you has resorted to paying my daughter to hound me about it.

I’d like to tell you that I just have lots and lots of friends named “Scot” and “chris”. Sadly, that’s not the case (for who could ever have too many friends named Scot or Chris?). It’s far more likely that there’s a bug in my participant tracking. If I were to guess, I’d say that the New and Improved Participant Tracker and the Old and Somewhat Inattentive Participant Tracker are furiously reacting to each other’s notifications, each engaged in an existential struggle, trying to be the guy in the know:

“Scot just—“

“Hey, did you hear Scot just joined?”

“Yeah—I was just going to tell you that. Chris joined too.”

“I knew that, oh and I hear Chris—”

“Before for you go on, I need to tell you: Scot and Chris just joined.”

“Sure, but did you know Scot joined too?”

I’ll get in there tonight after the kids go to bed and break that up.

Where does EpicTable 1.1 stand?

At this point, everything that I expect to work does work. There are just a couple things that need to be re-implemented in the new technology, and they’re fairly low risk things:

• Context (right-click) menus for objects on the map/tabletop.
• Grid drawing
• Snap and size to grid

A lot of this is already done outside of the view and it’s just a matter of reflecting it appropriately in the new view.

There are some things that I’ve been improving or adding opportunistically while I have certain parts of the code open. I really want to talk about a couple new things, but I don’t want to force myself into releasing them if they end up taking too long. I’ll put together a whole “What’s New in 1.1” to make sure I wring every drop of appreciation I can out of the work I’ve put into this release.

I was working on EpicTable 1.1 tonight, modifying the dice tray and the way dragging is handled. I have this neat little routine that creates a cursor from an object you’re dragging and the existing cursor. I use then when you start dragging an object, and ordinarily, I reset it to normal when you stop dragging. Here’s what happened when I neglected to reset it.

What you’re seeing there in the red circle is a custom cursor. It’s the result of dragging a d12, then a d20, a d4, a d6, and finally, a d8. It should look like a d8 with the little cursor arrow. Instead, it’s a d8 with a little d6, with a little d4, and so on, as long as you keep dragging dice. Not very functional or intuitive, as cursors go, but kind of interesting.

Speaking of version 1.1, expect it soon. I’m trying to get a build ready for a second internal test this weekend.

Long ago, a very wise artist/designer/musician, in between trying to coerce me into implementing playing cards, entered a feature request for drop shadows. I had them for some types of notes, but under the old technology I was using, it was just to difficult/time-consuming to implement drop shadows for everything. Now, though, with the new tech going into EpicTable 1.1 for other reasons, drop shadows are quick enough to implement that I can make good on this long-standing promise to “look into it”.

They do add a little spiffiness…. Notice that they’re not limited to rectangular objects like the 1.0 shadows.

It’s less obvious, but borders are at work here as well. The dark grey border around the image of the girl is EpicTable’s doing. Essentially, as I add the 1.0 objects to the 1.1 tabletop, I’m hooking up the Format tab, which in 1.0 is active only for text fields. This gives you access to borders and shadows and other visual tweaks to the objects on the tabletop.

Don’t worry—I’ll get on to more important stuff, like cards and vision/fog-of-war, but as I’m hooking things back up, it doesn’t take that long to add some consistency and polish that 1.0 was lacking.

They’re distinct partly because they’re used differently and partly because they were implemented at different times. The downside of their being distinct is that when I made text objects super cool, I couldn’t easily do that for rich text notes and notecards. Now, in the technology overhaul tabletops are getting for 1.1, I have to change these objects anyway. While I’m doing that, I’m taking the opportunity to unify these concepts. From a code perspective, these are all going to be the same thing. That’s good for you, because it means that all these note-like objects will get the same treatment that text fields have in 1.0. As you can see here, notecards get a significant boost in functionality as a result.

There will still be some out-of-the box presets for notecards vs. text fields, for instance, but you’ll have a lot of customizability, and you’ll be able to save your creations. So, if you love mint green notecards, you may applaud now.

Watch full-size video instead.

Here’s a screencast, where I’ll give you a preview of some of what’s coming in 1.1.
You can view it in-page, below, or see the full-sized version on Screencast.com.

I’ve been after DevinNight for awhile to finish up his latest token set, “The Frozen North”. Not only has he done so in time for the holidays, but he’s managed to work in some of those yetis I was pestering him for.

To celebrate, I’ll be running a holiday promotion. From now until the end of the year, anyone who purchases EpicTable will get “The Frozen North” token set FREE!

Check out the details and some previews from “The Frozen North” in the EpicTable Store.

Again, thank you guys for sending the automated error reports, creating support tickets, or pulling me into your games. I can only address what I know about. I have a really puzzling resource retrieval issue that I’m looking at tonight. I’d really like to get a fix for that in this release, but if it looks like it’s going to take much longer, I’ll finish testing what I’ve got and post an update. Stay tuned!