Expanding System Support

Last week, we gave you a sneak preview of the upcoming roll syntax changes that would offer better support for the many different systems out there. We are happy to announce that we have completed the first round of improvements and have made them available to all our beta users today.

This updated roll support helps Astral support for 2d20 systems like Star Trek Adventures, as well as other systems & games like Tunnels & Trolls, One-Roll Engine, and more. The updated roll syntax can support and calculate automated rolls and success/fumble counts instead of needing to manually compare the separate dice, as the case has been.

Along with this improved system support, we have also released some touch-ups to the chat interface to make it more inline with our design goals.

Read more in the “Now in Beta” section below.

New Packs for Pro (or purchase)

Enjoy over 400 new assets this month, available immediately for all Pro users (free through May!)

Every month, Astral Pro subscribers get access to new content for their sessions. We work with Mythic Portal and the community to release content you really want (thanks for the requests for superheros!)

Becoming an Astral Pro subscriber unlocks other perks too, so if you are enjoying Astral and are in a position to help us offset our server costs at this time, then we are offering a 30% discount on annual subscription plans purchased before the end of May. Use the promo code PLAYATHOME during checkout to get a year of Astral Pro (originally $99.99) for just $70.

As always, thanks for being an Astralnaut. Game on!

Behind the Screen

We are continuing to work diligently to address some bottlenecks we have identified and encountered over the past few weeks. We are aware of a few areas of improvement for games and will be continuing to work towards making your sessions perform better, even for users on slower or older machines.

We are also continuing to investigate the cause of “permission denied” errors that some users have reported. The issue has rolled an 18 in Stealth, but we’re still on the hunt! This week, we made changes to our network infrastructure that should prevent these errors from recurring but if you see it happen once more, please report it using the bug reporter tool in Astral. After you report it, you can logout and back in to resolve the issue.

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Changelog

We continue to address reported issues and requests. As always, we are very interested in your feedback.

Enhancements

More requests from the community were addressed this week:

• Added Shattered - A Grimdark RPG to available character templates
• Made improvements to connectivity for online statuses and chat
• Added a "skip" button to skip the suggested onboarding steps

Fixed

Thank you to everyone who reported issues this week.

• Fixed issues related to players owning more than one character
  • Sometimes players would move multiple characters at once when only intending to move one
  • Players could not reliably change characters that were located in different maps
• Games reliably appear (or disappear) in the sidebar when creating, accepting, or deleting a game
• Fixed some issues where specific games could not be loaded
• Fixed a rare issue where dynamic audio could freeze the interface
• Fixed a typo and missing text in the "Rolls" map of the Advanced Tutorial

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In Progress

We continue to work diligently on your requests and feedback; please let us know your thoughts on Discord or the forums.

Site-wide Performance and Responsiveness

We continue to make progress on the performance issues related to high volume traffic. We’re monitoring some already implemented performance enhancements and will be iterating further on this in the coming weeks.

Enhanced Roll Syntax

Last week, we revealed the initial implementation of various new flags that enabled advanced rolls. There were some changes to those:

• The cs and cf flags (Critical Success and Critical Fumble) introduced in last weeks update have been renamed to cr (Critical Range) and fr (Fumble Range). This more accurately represents their function of changing the color of a die result
• The dp flag for setting dice-pool success thresholds has been replaced by the cs flag (Count Success), made available by the renaming mentioned in the previous point
• To complement the new cs flag, we have added a cf flag (Count Fumble), which will allow fumbles to be counted in addition to successes when paired with the new multi-flag behavior
• We’ve made some major changes to an existing pair of flags: rr and ro (Reroll and Reroll Once) now drop the dice that triggered the reroll, ignoring them when determining the total of the roll.
  • Example: 1d20rr1 used to, on a roll of 1, roll another 1d20 (and kept rolling 1d20’s until it wasn’t a 1), and then added the 1 to the total. So you could get a total like 21 if you rolled a nat 1 and the reroll was a nat 20. This behavior was inconsistent with the majority of reroll mechanics for games, and it also overlapped with the e (Explode) flag! rr>=10 and e>=10 had the exact same behavior
• We’ve added eo (Explode Once) as an explode-y analog to ro (Roll Once). If your 1d6 should explode on 6, but only once, this is the flag you want!

These flags are now available in beta! Go forth and construct your rolls, so that evil corporations can be stopped, marauding space fleets vanquished, and tunnels… can be… dug…?

Documentation coming soon, stay tuned for updates.

📣 We're Listening

We're continuing to look at the forums for feature requests, support tickets, and Discord to hear what you all have to say. Please don't hesitate to reach out and voice your feedback. Our table always has an open seat, let us know what you think.

That's all for now!

Thanks for reading and for being a dedicated Astralnaut! We look forward to bringing you more updates from the Astral Plane.

- Team Astral