In beta 19, as released Friday night, there was a bug in the chat window that affected whispers. Essentially, each player could only whisper to players who’d joined later, and as a result, no one could whisper to the GM, and the last person to join couldn’t whisper to anyone!
It’s fixed now, and you can download the new beta 19 (1.0.19.3) now.

If you’ve already downloaded Friday night’s beta 19 release, you can just install this latest one over top. If you’ve not already downloaded beta 19, just pretend that this never happened.

Below are some of the highlights of this release.  For a full list of the fixes and enhancements in this release, check out the what’s new page. 

Just give me the beta! If you just want the beta download, without all the discussion of what’s in it, go ahead and jump down to "How do I get the beta?"

Features and Fixes

Give another player control over a character

Prior to beta-19, you could only speak as and only edit characters you introduced. Now, the GM can reassign control of a character. This enables scenarios like:

• The GM creates a set of pre-generated characters to pass out to players.
• A player is absent and one of the other players will run his character.
• A player’s going to run an NPC (because his paladin just charged bravely into the jaws of a purple worm)

Giving another player control over a character

You’ll see a list of players, including yourself. The player list is pretty bare bones right now, but it does the job. Select one and hit okay. EpicTable will transfer control of the character to that player. This means that the character will appear in his character gallery and will be added to the list of available characters in the persona selector of the chat window. Likewise, if control is taken from a player, by assigning it back to yourself or by assigning it to another player, the character is removed from his gallery and his chat persona selector.

A few rules about how this all works:

• Only the GM or game organizer (which are, for now, the same person) may reassign characters.
• The GM always can speak as any character and control any character, so he won’t notice any change to his gallery or chat persona selector.
• Characters can currently only be controlled by the GM and one player. This was done, not so much out of a desire to constrain players as to avoid overwhelming them with characters to choose from. There’s an open feature request to allow any player to speak as or control any character. I plan to implement that feature, but only after 1.0 and when I can make it configurable.

Response to Auto-Reported Errors

There were a number of errors reported via the automated reporting tool (thanks) that I’ve fixed. These had to do with:

• Character portrait handling in the chat window
• Character portrait handling and in the character editor
• Allowing the user to remove all the chat windows

What Didn’t Make Beta 19?

Map Issues Under Zoom

I’ve worked with some of you on map issues–especially snap-to-grid and map (mis)behavior when zoomed. Something’s clearly gone wrong with zoomed maps. They’re very sluggish. What’s more, positioning a token while zoomed has issues that are more than just sluggishness (though that certainly doesn’t help). I’m somewhere between embarrassed and reassured to be able to say that I know maps didn’t always behave this way. My group used maps under zoom a fair bit and didn’t see this problem until recently. Regressions are really embarrassing, but the glass half-full perspective is that this worked before and there’s probably some small, stupid, easy to fix thing behind this. Getting maps working properly under zoom again is my top priority. I almost held beta 19 up for it, but the other fixes were all in the final stages of testing before I became aware of the map issue, and it’s worthwhile getting the resource handling fixes, in particular, out to people.

Edit: I found the source of the sluggishness. It has to do with a change to how I draw the background. It was introduced when I added scrolling of texture-backed maps and tabletops. Looking into a fix now. In the meantime, you’ll find that image-backed maps and tabletops perform far better than texture backed maps. That also helps explain why my group missed it at first–we were using maps from a Paizo adventure path a lot, so we normally had image-backed, not texture backed maps.

Map Drawing Weirdnesses

I’ve observed some of the oddest things with a couple of the beta test groups…. There are some map drawing issues that are spectacularly bizarre. I actually have some theories about these. They’re next in line behind the zoom issues.

How do I get the beta?

Download the full EpicTable installer and run it. (No need to uninstall first.)

To those of you who have already installed the beta:  My apologies–the auto-updater won’t work for this release.  My goal is to distribute updates automatically, so you don’t have to visit this site to know that there are updates.  Sadly, the approach I’d been using for that has turned out to be less reliable and less flexible than I’d hoped.   I plan to replace it before the 1.0 release.  In the meantime, I’ll continue to distribute updates in installer form.

Thanks for your participation in the beta!

– John

Below are some of the highlights of this release.  For a full list of the fixes and enhancements in this release, check out the what’s new page.  Just give me the beta! If you just want the beta download, without all the discussion of what’s in it, go ahead and jump down to "How do I get the beta?"

Reveal Yourself:  Improved Error Reporting

EpicTable has always had an automated error reporting mechanism, but one of my frustrations has been that the error reports were a little too anonymous. 

Anonymity is fine, but prior to this release, you could not supply contact info or any details about what was happening when you encountered an error.   A lot of times, that was okay—there’d be a smoking gun in the error report and I’d find and fix the issue without needing any additional information.  Every now and then, though, I’d get reports where the error was down deep in the .NET Framework code, and it would have been really helpful to follow up with some questions.  Plus, if someone’s having a problem, I like to make contact and see what I can do to help.  I’ll jump on a Skype session with you and join your EpicTable game, or whatever helps—but if I don’t know who you are, I can’t do that. 

Now, with Beta 18, you have the option to provide a name and email address, as well as some descriptive text.  As always, you’re free to report issues anonymously, if you’d prefer.

Beware Guests Bearing Images:  Stability Fixes for Image Retrieval by the Host

I resolved an unusual image access error.  You may have seen it and then written it off, because it would normally occur only once for a given image and only if that image was added by a guest participant (i.e., not the host) and had to be fetched by the host.

Another unusual one also involved images fetched by the host.  This one could actually cause EpicTable to become unresponsive.

Background and Object Image Updates

One of the most versatile features of EpicTable is the ability to put an image on the tabletop—any image—it doesn’t have to be a character token or a map or anything—just whatever you want.  I use it all the time for dungeon dressing or as an alternative to a handout.  

When you hit the image button, you’re prompted for an image to use:

It’s only when you want to change it that a couple bugs came into play. 

1. If you changed the image of an object, that change wasn’t broadcast, so no one else saw it…which kind of takes the zing out of your changing that image of the peasant’s hearth into one of the throne room of Asmodeus. 
2. If you edited an image used as a background or for an object on the tabletop, EpicTable would still show the original version of the file, even if you re-selected the image.

Happily, both those scenarios are taken care of in this release.

Let Go of My Token!

Changed select-on-duplicate to only do so when the duplication of an object was initiated by the local user.  It had been the case that duplicated objects were automatically selected for all participants.  However, this led to scenarios where different participants would “steal the selection” when they duplicated objects or added entirely objects to a tabletop.  This made it difficult for multiple participants to work effectively together on setup—you’d be moving something and suddenly drop it because the selection was stolen and given to another object.

Cleaning up Sticky Italics

There was an odd little bug that caused text objects on the map or tabletop to stay forever italicized once you changed their style.  This made everything put on the tabletop seem curiously enthusiastic and upbeat.  As of beta 18, you may now resume being dark and foreboding.

How do I get the beta?

Download the full EpicTable installer and run it. (No need to uninstall first.)

To those of you who have already installed the beta:  My apologies–the auto-updater won’t work for this release.  My goal is to distribute updates automatically, so you don’t have to visit this site to know that there are updates.  Sadly, the approach I’d been using for that has turned out to be less reliable and less flexible than I’d hoped.   I plan to replace it before the 1.0 release.  In the meantime, I’ll continue to distribute updates in installer form.

Thanks for your participation in the beta!

– John

Below are some of the highlights of this release.  For a full list of the fixes and enhancements in this release, check out the what’s new page. Just give me the beta! If you just want the beta download, without all the discussion of what’s in it, go ahead and jump down to "How do I get the beta?"

Image Swap Fix

I think I’ve finally tracked down the source of the “Red X” (or the source of most of them).  You’d sometimes see this in the chat window, sometimes when dealing with handouts, occasionally when changing backgrounds.  The essence of the problem I found was in EpicTable’s “Image Swap”.  EpicTable doesn’t make you wait for everything to be downloaded.  It uses placeholder images (like the hourglass or the horned helm guy) while it downloads the missing images.  When it downloads an image, it swaps it with the placeholder image.  There was a race condition there, which made it possible that the placeholder would be disposed of before the new image was in place, and if the screen happened to get painted at that moment—BAM!  Red X. 

I can’t promise that the Red X is gone forever—it’s a generic response to memory issues.  So, if you just plain ran out of memory, you’d get it too, and there’s not much I can do about that, aside from making sure EpicTable isn’t taking more memory than it has to.  You should, however, see the red X become very rare.

Handout Sharing Fixes

Handouts had a couple problems:  First off, they often failed to display correctly when first downloaded.  The placeholder image was displayed, but then it wasn’t correctly replaced when the real image was downloaded.  Second, handouts were sent to the players immediately when you added them to the handout gallery—before you’d even shared them.  That made it impossible to load handouts before you wanted to show them to your players.  That’s all fixed now.  Handouts aren’t shared until you share them (which you can do by right clicking on them in the gallery and selecting “Share”).

Summing a Single Dice Pool

An issue with the dice builder is fixed.  It had been the case that adding a sum to a single dice pool had no effect.  It works fine now.

Map / Tabletop Token “Sync” Issues

Several people have reported issues with map/tabletop tokens becoming out of sync between players.  I’ve resolved several issues that I believe account for many of the problems.

Resizing an object from the top or left

Resizing an object from the top or left was an because doing so actually moves the token (changes the position its upper-left corner). This side-effect of movement on a resize wasn’t accounted for previously, so after an object was resized in this way, its position was incorrect from the perspective of the other players.

Updating an object’s position via Format tab

Updating an object’s position from the Format tab wasn’t broadcast. That resulted in the updating participant having a different view of the object’s position than all the other participants.

Snap-to-Grid was improperly applied to incoming object moves

Snap-to-Grid was improperly applied to incoming object moves. Say I had snap-to-grid on and you had snap-to-grid off. Now, you move an object such that it doesn’t fall within a grid square. When that move broadcast to me, my EpicTable snaps it to grid, and now we’re out of sync with respect to this object.

Move by offset prevented self-correcting

Broadcasting object moves as offsets from their current positions kept them out of sync if anything bad happened. This wasn’t really a bug itself, but it kept the map/tabletop from being self-correcting.

Remaining issue with DPI settings

Just a word of warning:  There’s still an issue with people in the same game using different DPI settings.  If you change your default DPI settings in Windows, textures and objects render in the wrong positions.  For instance, if you bump your DPI from 96 to 120, the rendering of all textures and objects will be about 20% off to the top and left.

Lock Objects

You can now “lock” objects on the tabletop or map.  This prevents their being accidentally moved or resized or even selected.  This is great for when you have something that’s essentially part of the scenery or if you have image objects text objects that you’re using as a make-shift character sheet.

New UI Themes

By now, you’re probably familiar with EpicTable’s default theme, “Adventure”.   While this is great for fantasy and pulp games, it’s not always as visually appropriate for horror or sci-fi.  You Shadowrun folks, in particular, made me feel the need to add new themes—not that any of you complained, but I just couldn’t quite bear to see you playing Shadowrun with the standard theme.  “Dark Future” is for you.

Adventure	Horror
Sci-Fi	Dark Future

How do I get the beta?

Download the full EpicTable installer and run it. (No need to uninstall first.)

To those of you who have already installed the beta:  My apologies–the auto-updater won’t work for this release.  My goal is to distribute updates automatically, so you don’t have to visit this site to know that there are updates.  Sadly, the approach I’d been using for that has turned out to be less reliable and less flexible than I’d hoped.   I plan to replace it before the 1.0 release.  In the meantime, I’ll continue to distribute updates in installer form.

Thanks for your participation in the beta!

– John

http://www.epictable.com/downloads/EpicTable-1_0-Beta-17.exe

Steps to a Character Sheet

1. Find an image (PNG or JPG) that you want to use as a character sheet.  You can often get these from game PDFs.
2. Create a tabletop for each player.
3. Set the background to the image you selected.
4. Use text fields, image objects and drawings to fill in your sheet.

A Picture An Annotated Screenshot is Worth a Thousand Words

What’s Ahead

Character sheets will become fully supported.   That’ll mean…

• fields that you can lock in place or group with other objects
• the ability to clone a whole sheet so you can just have a template sheet that you clone for each player
• a gallery of Xs and check marks and similar things
• probably, more types of fields than just text and image—probably checkboxes and lists, even though you can get the same effect today with images and notes
• eventually, data-driven and calculated fields

		EpicTable Screenshots VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

These are also up on flickr and facebook.  One could reasonably ask “why here and facebook and flickr?”  Mostly, I just can’t decide how best to present them. I really like the way the Windows Live galleries integrate effortlessly into the site. EpicTable already had a facebook presence, but I like the way flickr presents them better, and I can’t leave well enough alone.  Count yourself lucky that I haven’t provided a link to these on my screencast.com site too.

It’s the same set of screenshots, so your choice:

• EpicTable screenshots on flickr
• EpicTable screenshots on facebook