STAR TREK 2d20
  1. #1

    Portrait & Decal selection

    The new selection modes are a welcoming change.

    - In both views the typical "folder" and "refresh" buttons are missing? Is this on purpose or just not finished? At the moment I see no easy way to add new decals or portraits (like before with the portraits)
    - The decal selection shows filenames as names (art subscription decals at least) which are hard to search and too long to display properly. If this could be chanegd to set decal names, this would be way easier to handle.
    - The decal selection shows no folders (or here bags), the portrait selection shows them, inconsistency.
    - Another inconsistency with "Clear", "OK", and "Cancel" with other windows showing also assets, might need a little clean up, e.g. do we need a cancel on decals but not portraits?

    Future:
    - A more advanced explorer-like (Windows, Linux, macOS) system for selections and things like these would be nice. I know this would be a very big change and I think this is already on the wish list. I just wanted to list it once more because it fits the changes thematically.

    Just to nitpick again (I'm sure you already know this ):
    - A way to unload/load modules would be very good. I and many others don't need all portraits & decals from all sources in every campaign loaded and so on.
    Last edited by Zarestia; November 1st, 2021 at 20:15. Reason: deleted word

  2. #2
    Comments/Answers:
    • The folder and refresh buttons were not included, because they can be accessed from the Assets window already. While they could be added, I'm not sure of using the extra space needed to support those. (i.e. extra line of buttons on both)
    • The decal names were chosen to allow decals to all be seen without nested folders/bags; but still be ordered by source (system/publisher_book_description_decal.png) and still be searchable in Assets by "decal".
    • The decal selection was deliberately set up to allow browsing of the images/decals/ folder within each module only; so it didn't make sense to show <ModuleName>/decals/<Files> as a three level nested setup. It made more sense to make the decals a flat hierarchy.
    • The portrait selection was previously grouped by folders/bags; so I left it that way. Slightly different UIs, but for different purposes at difference times for different users (i.e. only GM sets decal.)
    • For the decal selection, the OK and Cancel buttons were added for decal selection to allow seeing the decals in a large format on desktop before "accepting", because the decal graphics are "much" larger than the thumbnails. This allows the GM to browse and see the results before accepting the change. Also, the Clear button is required, otherwise there is no way to turn off decals completely.
    • For the portrait selection, the portraits can be set by players, and thus are copied internally to a campaign specific file location. Unfortunately, there is no way to know what the source asset of a portrait was once selected, so OK/Cancel buttons did not make sense because I have no way to recover the original asset source once set. Also, the portraits in the selection window are roughly the same size as the final portraits, so there's not a difference between thumbnail and PC portrait.
    • There are no current plans to try and make a sidebar folder browser for the UI. It is beyond the scope of what we're trying to accomplish at this point.
    • The problem with unloading/loading modules is that it becomes like FGC, where the assets have to be tracked and managed by module creating additional overhead, as well as assets being "hidden" from users by default so that you have to "find" the module with the assets you want. It's not currently on our list to look at, and I'm not sure I would want to go back to the old way.


    Regards,
    JPG

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Moon Wizard View Post
    Comments/Answers:
    • ...
    • There are no current plans to try and make a sidebar folder browser for the UI. It is beyond the scope of what we're trying to accomplish at this point.
    • The problem with unloading/loading modules is that it becomes like FGC, where the assets have to be tracked and managed by module creating additional overhead, as well as assets being "hidden" from users by default so that you have to "find" the module with the assets you want. It's not currently on our list to look at, and I'm not sure I would want to go back to the old way.


    Regards,
    JPG
    Thanks for the insight!
    1. Of course, I would expect something like this not in the near future, as everything is an iterative process.
    2. I don't think loading / unloading per se is neccessary if the current implementation (with just the art subsciption) would not be rather slow and a bit easier to handle (there are some wishlist items with suggestions)

    Anyway, I'm already happy with the continious changes we got and I'm sure FGU has just begun taking it's own path after shedding FGC.

  4. #4
    Is there any way to include decals with the ruleset .pak itself, or do I really need to create a separate "Ruleset" Assets.mod, and publish that?
    I saw for example in the Test channel, there was a module for Call of Cthulhu, with decals assets

    I am asking this because I feel like if I have to create a totally separate module just to have the default decals for the ruleset, and if I wanted that to be published to every user downloading the ruleset from the Forge, I imagine that everytime I publish a new version of the .pak, I would have to also republish the .mod, otherwise people would not download it? Or the other option would be to publish a totally separate forge entry only for the decals, which does not seem very nice.

    Maybe I am misunderstanding this, so I do hope there is a way to add default decals in the .pak?

  5. #5
    There is no way to add decals in the ruleset (.pak) files. This is not something that the client has ever supported; it only allowed icon asset registration which led to the proliferation of a huge number of extensions just for decals. This change is meant to make that go away, now that any user content graphic can be used as a background decal.

    The expected behavior is to add a "<ProductID> Assets" module containing any tokens or images you want to include with that product. It can be more than decals, but decals must be in the images/decals/ folder.

    There are several examples of using DecalManager.setDefault function to specify loading the default decal from the matching asset module. (See SFRPG ruleset for example.)

    Regards,
    JPG

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