Welcome Home

Happy Friday, everyone! We have a couple big updates for you this week.

You may have already noticed the new “Home” button on your sidebar. We are incredibly excited to release this feature for everyone and even more excited to implement some of the requests we’ve been hearing from you all.

On your new home screen you’ll find two (free) ready-to-play adventures for Pathfinder Second Edition and for Scarred Lands (OGL/D&D 5th Edition compatible) -- give them a try this weekend!

If you’ve been waiting on official content from your favorite publishers, we have some exciting news for you. In addition to the adventures released today, Astral is working to release official adventures for Star Trek, Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition, Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, Carbon 2185, and lots more.

If you’re a publisher and want to digitize your adventures for play on Astral, get in touch with us at [email protected].

Embedded Rolls In Beta

In addition to the changes in roll syntax last week, we made additional improvements that let you “embed” dice rolls.

For example:

• {500 + !(1d10) * 25} - Calculate higher level D&D starting gold. Embedded rolls allows you to do complex math on roll results, like multiplication, division, modulus, and more.
• {!(1d20min8) + WisMod} - The rogue archetype feature Ear for Deceit allows you to treat insight checks with a roll of 7 or lower on the d20 as an 8. This is before the modifier, but the min flag applies after the modifier. To add the modifier after the roll happens, roll the die as an embedded roll.
• {!(1d20 + {Modifier}) <= Stat ? 'Success!' : 'Epic fail! :('} - Many systems require you to check the result of a roll against some threshold.

Prior to this change, the above rolls would have thrown errors as it was not possible to make calculations on a roll before it was rolled. The above examples should now all work in beta!

We are actively monitoring and listening to your feedback, so if you’re a beta user, please let us know what you think or if you run into any issues.

Only a Couple Weeks Left

All the amazing benefits of Pro are still free until the end of the month. 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!

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Changelog

Enhancements

More requests from the community were addressed this week:

• Home Screen
  • Easily create characters, maps, and games from one convenient location
  • This will be expanded based on your feedback, let us know in the forums or Discord!
• Sidebar improvements
  • Small user interface tweaks made to the sidebar that make different color themes look much nicer
• Decrease bandwidth usage across site
  • Deprecated unneeded calls to the database when navigating to different pages, saving potentially seconds on each page load
  • Moving a character consumes at least 10x less bandwidth which should make changes nearly instant for everyone
• Added a Knowledge Base article on useful art resources - check it out!
• Added additional error message for WebGL crashes caused by large maps
  • We will continue improving the experience for extra-large maps
  • My maps are too strong for you, traveler

Fixed

Thank you to everyone who reported issues this week.

• Characters could be moved while being deleted, resulting in some unexpected behavior
• Selecting a character could occasionally result in a duplicate character appearing in the sidebar (though the character wasn’t actually duplicated, it was rendering in an odd way)
• Duplicating a character without a name now works as expected
• Characters created from a template would occasionally have 413 health
  • Yes, really
• Players could use the multi-select tool to highlight nothing, which would result in a blank screen until their character was clicked again
• Assets from certain packs were failing to render properly
  • We investigated and resolved an issue with our cache that was returning improper asset information
• Character actions with checkboxes could potentially break chat
• Game timelines now fetch more posts on load so that games with long historical timelines will see everything
  • We are looking to prioritize a ticket to add a “load more” button for timelines in the near future
• Changing a cover or profile photo would sometimes fail after two or three updates
  • You can now update your cover and profile photo as many times as you want
• Multiple Reroll or Explode flags were not properly trigger rerolls/explosions on the extra dice
  • For example, 10d6rr=3rr=5 would not trigger a reroll if one of the extra dice rolled was a 3 or 5
• A lone fumble would not cause the inline roll to be colored red if it was a dropped die as the result of a dice pool or reroll
• Negative modifiers were not being handled properly when subtracted from dice results
• Fixed an issue where certain message contents could cause the chat pane to go blank

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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.

Drawing Tools

We’re continuing to prioritize and work on drawing tools. Thank you to everyone who has left their feedback on the forums or reached out on Discord over the past week!

We are still actively listening to your feedback and look forward to delivering the first iteration of drawing tools in the coming weeks.

• Feedback: Drawing on the map
• Feedback: Quick to draw "Sketch" maps

Please leave your thoughts and comments in the threads above.

Call for Video Editors

We are looking for a freelance video editor to help us redo our homepage video and possibly help us prioritize instructional videos for YouTube.

If you or someone you know is passionate about Astral and has video editing chops, please let us know in Discord or by emailing us at [email protected].

📣 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