Dec 13, 2023

December 2023 Developer Update

4 min read - Published: a year ago

Hello Forge users! The fierce winter holidays are upon us. May your gifts be bountiful, your time off long, and your homes warm and cozy.

If you'd like to watch back on the developer update stream, you'll be able to catch it here in a few hours from the blog getting published. Otherwise, read on!

Pax Unplugged

The Forge was at Pax Unplugged this year! DestinyGrey, Rughalt, and KaKaRoTo attended this year, toured the convention, and got to meet all sorts of creators and other folks within the Foundry VTT community.

It was a lot of fun, and we learned a lot about so many different aspects of the TTRPG and board game industry. We're definitely going back next year.

Year in Review

We've gotten out a lot this year. As just a sampler...

  • We've made vast improvements to our asset library, with UI improvements, better management, improvements to uploading, and much, much more.
  • We made vast improvements to The Bazaar, with implementation of tags, faster searching and loading, and much more.
  • Speaking of The Bazaar... we started a blog interview series where we interview various creators and community figures associated with The Bazaar, and Foundry VTT in general. We encourage everyone to give these interviews a read, especially our recent interview with Vicnedel.
  • We've polished up the website in too many places to name, and in our Beyond importing.
  • We've been forced to confront the unpleasant controversy over AI, and deal with all of that on our marketplace.
  • And we were forced to deal with the even more unpleasant controversy regarding the OGL situation, a situation that resulted in a total victory for the community.

This year has been turbulent and busy for The Forge. Yet at the same time, we've improved our platform's stability and usability so much. We look forward to next year, with so much more planned for 2024.

The Forge is Hiring

We are happy to announce that The Forge is now hiring. We are hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer, as well as a Senior Software Developer. Both positions are well-compensated, and are entirely work-from-home. As a reminder, we are still a small business, and still a self-funded startup. By joining us, you'll get to make actual, meaningful structural change in our code. We would love to bring you on board, and get your expertise in doing this.

To apply, go ahead and email us with the details noted on our Jobs page, or use the easy-apply function on LinkedIn.

Improvements and Polish

There's a lot to put here, so here's a few bullet points:

  • We've fine-tuned our rate-monitor warnings, reducing their agression. This was basically a warning we made that warns users when their games are pinging our servers too much due to software issues, resulting in game slowdown. This warning should only show up for users with drastic server issues now.
  • We've fixed yet more bugs in our import wizard, further improving import from local Foundry VTT instances.
  • We've improved the stability of our game scheduler during peak times. You might have noticed far fewer slowdowns on our service recently- this would be why!
  • We improve how packages are displayed on The Bazaar, better showing package dependencies. This should make what you will have installed far more transparent when viewing a package.
  • Finally, we no longer display broken package links in the update menu of The Bazaar. Huzzah!

Updates to our Terms of Excellent Service and Privacy Policy

In case you missed our emails, social media and Discord announcements, and website notifications... we've finally updated our Terms of Excellent Service, and Privacy Policy.

In all honesty, not much has truly changed, despite their drastic makeover. Both agreements just better outline what they mean to say. The Terms of Excellent Service now better outlines acceptable usage on our platform, and unexceptable usage on our platform - and how we might address the latter. The new Privacy Policy now better spells out your privacy rights. Rest assured, we do not, have not, and still will not sell your user data.

Don't believe us? Feel free to read through the new agreements. In fact, we insist! You can check out our new agreements, and their older versions here.

Next Game Session

We showed this off in our last livestream, but we finally have our "next game session time" feature out, allowing you to schedule your regular session time and warn your players in advance. This will automatically convert to their time zones as well, helping you defeat the ultimate enemy to any RPG adventure- scheduling.

Feel free to check it out on your game configuration page.

Bazaar V2

We've made yet another polishing pass on The Bazaar. Bazaar pages will now load so much faster. We've also improved the look and feel of Bazaar creator pages. For users with premium package installation problems in the past, you'll be pleased to know we've patched out a few more minor issues where we might have interrupted their install in the past. Searching is also a little easier on The Bazaar as well. This is coming just in time for...

The Holidays and Winter Sale

We've put up holiday decorations on website, to celebrate the many different holidays happening this year. But decor isn't the only thing we're doing to celebrate the holidays- we'll also be running a winter sale. During Boxing Week, from the 26th-31st of December 2023, several winter-themed packages will be on sale, along with a sale on subscriptions.

This will be the last sale for quite a while, so we encourage getting a hold of these deals sooner rather than later. Check it out!

Bazaar Showcase

During our Bazaar showcase, we showed off the following content:

Conclusions

And that's it! If you want to follow us for regular updates, here are our social media links:

Author
Destiny