Despite our recent issues, it's been a great month for those of us here at The Forge- and it's all thanks to our users! We'd like to thank everyone for their kind words, through the good and bad parts of February and early March.
If you'd like to watch back on the developer update livestream, you will be able to catch it here. Otherwise, read on!
Jana Enters the Battle
Jana joins The Forge as our social media manager. She'll be taking over Zlatan's social media duties, while Zlatan will be transitioning to project management. We hope everyone wishes Jana a warm welcome!
The Great Service Disruption of February 2023
Mid-February was a hard time for both our users, and us. The Forge suffered from constant service issues, with difficult loading times during peak hours, and in some cases complete server inacessibility. We're not happy about these issues.
We go into detail about these issues here, but in summary one of our service providers (DigitalOcean) completely and utterly dropped the ball on us. Service issues resulting from their mistake lead to cascading errors and other service issues. In the end, we managed to resolve it, but only by performing an emergency migration of each game to OVH.
We have continued work to make our servers even hardier, and to complete our transition to OVH. While we're not happy about the reason behind it, we are glad we have transitioned to OVH sooner rather than later. We hope that our users will enjoy the increased stability and performance of our OVH servers.
Mad Cartographer Interview
MAD Cartographer was one of the earliest adopters for creatingz content in Foundry VTT, and have done (and continue to do) a great job of it! The maps and adventures are extremely high effort, and aren't afraid to utilize community modules to produce some amazing effects. Since we're such huge fans of his content, we decided to interview the man behind "The MAD Cartographer".
We'll be releasing his interview Friday (March 1oth). We encourage our users to keep an eye out for that!
Web Socket Improvements
When you're a curious person, sometimes you get nerd sniped. This happened very recently with our CEO, KaKaRoTo. In a pique of productivity, KaKaRoTo was able to experiment with web socket compression for Foundry VTT, and managed to get Foundry VTT fully functional while using it!
What does this mean exactly? Basically, it means that:
- Users with slower connections will be able to load Foundry VTT a lot faster, and users with fast connections will load it at about the same speed.
- Very large worlds will load much faster.
- And it means much less bandwidth usage for everyone.
In all, a win-win! Thanks to The Forge's infrastructure, we'll be able to roll this out for our users in general. These improvements will also be coming to Foundry VTT in version 11- meaning improvements for everyone!
If you're a technical person, you can read about the testing done in this GitHub issue.
Bazaar Creator Page
Do you like a specific creator on our Bazaar Marketplace? Maybe you purchase a new package that you really enjoy, and want an easy way of finding more content from that creator.
Our Bazaar Creator pages can help with that. Each Bazaar Creator can now set up their own Bazaar Creator page, which you can find through a direct link, or by following the link in content that they've uploaded on our marketplace. We like to think it'll help creators show off their stuff, and help users find content from the creators they love. You can find our page here, and our recent interviewee MAD Cartographer's page here.
FoundryCon
The developers of /r/FoundryVTT are hosting a virtual conference for Foundry Virtual Tabletop! GMs and players will be hosting games and playing games for free. We think more games are fun, so we'll be sponsoring the event, alongside other groups like Foundry Gaming and The Rollsmith!
We encourage our users to check out their website on how to get involved. We hope that our users on The Forge will take part!
AI and The Bazaar
This has been a "fun" (not) debate in the greater TTRPG community. If you've been following social media closely, especially on Reddit, you might have noticed very strong back and forth on this subject.
From our point of view, ignoring the debate over the ethics of AI and models such as Stable Diffusion, we have to be cautious about what we allow on our marketplace. There is unclear legal precedent on how these models were trained, and we want to minimize the possibility of users purchasing a package on our marketplace, only to see it pulled from circulation due to a ruling in the US, or elsewhere.
As a result, we will not be approving packages submitted to the Bazaar Marketplace that contains content generated by Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or other similar models. We will have a full blog post about this very soon.
Profile Tabs
The polish continues! This month's polish comes with further improvements to the Account page. Users will now see more tabs, and should find what they're looking for a lot easier. We hope you enjoy!
Bazaar Showcase
We showcased the following Bazaar packages during our livestream:
- Post-Apocalypse Vehicles Pack 1 by PeaPu: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/peapu_post-apocalypse_vehicles_1
- Duergar at Large Vol. 2 by DumbHumanDrawn: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/dhd_duergar_at_large_vol2
- Cascade Pools by MikWewa Maps: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/mikwewa-cascade-pools
- And a free module- Boss Bar, currently developed by The Ripper: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/bossbar
Conclusion
And that's it! To follow us for further updates, here are our social media links:
If you want to follow us for regular updates, here are our social media links:
- https://twitter.com/ForgeVTT
- https://forge-vtt.com/discord
- https://reddit.com/r/ForgeVTT
- https://facebook.com/ForgeVTT
- https://patreon.com/kakaroto
- https://forums.forge-vtt.com/