Hello everyone. We hope everyone who watched the eclipse in person got a clear view of it. And we hope that everyone is also enjoying the rain showers of April, which brings May flowers and the warmth of summer.
If you'd like to watch back on the developer update stream, you will be able to view it here. Otherwise, read on!
Hiring
We are almost done with our most recent hiring phase. By the next livestream, we hope to have both a new QA person, and artist ready to announce.
In the meantime, we can announce that we have hired Etienne as a new developer for The Forge. Etienne is an experienced world traveler (almost a real-life adventurer!) with extensive development experience across a wide variety of roles. He's also a long-time member of the Foundry VTT community. We expect great things from him, and can't wait to see what he'll make for us on The Forge.
Into the Wilds Volume 3- Urban Edition Kickstarter
Tom Cartos is releasing an awesome run of physical battlemaps in an ongoing Kickstarter (as of the time of this post), which you can take part in here. We love promoting when our Bazaar Creators release a major project. And this is no exception!
If you run in person, this book of battlemaps is perfect for you. This Kickstarter project come with ready-to-go physical battlemaps of various urban settings, along with various stickers you can use to place down assets on the map. On our end, we love it when creators are able to bring the digital maps that have brought us so much joy on our marketplace, and into the physical, "real life" space.
Interview with Vaank from Dungeon Archive
The Forge recently interviewed Vaank, the main creator behind Dungeon Archive. Dungeon Archive is a mapmaking company/Patreon, with a huge emphasis on modular content. Vaank had a lot of professional insight behind drafting and creating a battlemap, which we'd recommend reading about below!
Ilijana Ivaniš
Captcha
As you might have noticed when logging into The Forge, we've recently implemented a captcha system into the login page. This was due to an unfortunate incident where someone maliciously created thousands of new Forge accounts.
This was bad for two reason. The first is that we are relatively sure they were doing this to test stolen credit cards, which we immediately moved to stop. The second is because it resulted in thousands of account creation emails getting sent, most of which were to bogus email addresses, resulting in problems with our email provider.
We are soon releasing an update to add our own implementation of a captcha, which should be easier to get through than Cloudflare, while still allowing us to protect our service from these kinds of malicious actors. Thank you for bearing with us during this transition!
New Game UI
We've made a few improvements to the new game UI. It should be easier to find systems and worlds that you can use now. Make sure to check it out!
Collapsible Sidebar
We've also added a collapsible sidebar into the Assets Library, as well as within The Bazaar. We hope this is helpful for users, especially for those with smaller screens.
Bazaar Improvements
This release marks phase three of the Bazaar. This update added a lot, including some minor improvements for Bazaar Creators, but the most important for our users are the improvements we've added to finding cool new content.
The default sorting on The Bazaar now increases the placing of new popular content, which should help in finding cool Foundry VTT modules, as well as fun premium content in general. All hail the algorithm!
We've also improved the search functionality. Now, searches can work off of descriptions, as well as titles. Having trouble finding a module because of their weird names? This should help a lot in finding the right package for you.
Livekit and The Forge
Users who regularly use our Livekit services might have noticed a recent spate of outages on our Livekit servers. We were not happy this was happening, but it was difficult diagnosing the cause
Fortunately, our technical team was finally able to resolve the issue with the server configuration, and make adjustments to prevent this from happening again. After a bit of a polishing and follow up, it seems to be successful! We're continuing to monitor the situation as well as adding new measures in case it happens again. We hope everyone enjoys the improvements to Livekit server stability.
Ongoing Polish
And of course, we maintain our effort in cleaning up and smoothing out the wrinkles of the Forge user experience in general. As usual, there are too many to name, but here are the big ones:
- It's now easier to restart your game server after installing a module, which should make enabling that content in your games a lot easier.
- We've also made it so installing from manifest via the Bazaar UI is a little clearer.
- We've fixed an issue involved with copying and pasting images into Foundry VTT journals.
- And much more!
Bazaar Showcase
We showcased the following packages during our developer update:
- Space Knights - Fighters by The Planet Hoppers: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar#package=TPH-SpaceFighter
- Adversaries - Pirates - Pack 1 by Forgotten Adventures: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/FA_Adversaries_Pirates_01
- Ruins, Rubble, & Magic by JB Media: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/ruins-rubble-and-magic
- And finally, a free module! PF2e Workbench by XDY: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/xdy-pf2e-workbench
And that's it!
Thanks for reading through everything. As usual, you can follow us at the following social media channels for more news and updates about The Forge.