Workshop Report 2023.11

Hi there,

welcome to the middle of the month and to the look behind the scenes.

Some unexpected work came of earlier this month when after a Wordpress update the Wordpress installation did not work anymore. Even after I got it fixed, I wonder why it even worked in the first place - or what exactly changed that it stopped working, since the bug was in the Apache webserver configuration itself, which I did not touch at least two weeks before.

Shadowrun & Splittermond Updater

Commlink 6 and Mondtor now both have an installation that is able to update itself like Genesis did. The updater in Genesis caused some problems - it did not verify if the downloaded file was correct, so sometimes it seemed to have the correct file, but that did not work and caused problems when starting a plugin - leading to Genesis to "forget" support for an RPG.

This time I wanted to do better and tried to use a third party updating library. And since I needed a different way to bundle the application, I found myself rebuilding the complete process of how a release is created. That took some time to get it right, but I am mostly done now. Only the final step - starting the application from the updater - is currently not working on OS X.

The real benefit - except the auto-updating - is that with the updater I am now able again to create test versions for patrons and test versions for the rest of the world. It is easier to switch between them.

Shadowrun

Since the last report, I released version 1.3.x of Commlink, which supports the augmentation book "Body Shop". While I am satisfied that piece of work is done, I now took some more time to look into the bugs that pile up. (I had the opportunity to play a Shadowrun 6 one shot for one of my in-person RPG groups. I used Commlink to generate archetypes and noticed several errors that I couldn't ignore.)

I have yet to decide which larger work item I want to take care of now that "Body Shop" is done. I tend to implement support for Infected - they are the next illustrations I ordered from AAS (with this Patreons money). But if you want to voice an opinion, this is where you can vote.

Splittermond

Mondtor suffered a bit from getting the major Commlink release and the two updaters out of the door. Well, the updater made it possible to bring the current work in progress to you Patrons, but not much more happenend in terms of progress on the app itself.
I am mostly stuck in the assistant and did not really work on the character screen yet. I have a nasty UI bug with skill masteries and specializations in the wizard which I fail to squash so far. I admit that is a bit of a downer and I have yet to find the motivation to keep trying. But don't worry - I will.

VTTs

Work on the Shadowrun 6 "Firing Squad" Roll20 compendium is nearly finished. There is some proofreading and minor editing (including errata) to do - and waiting for CGL to do some paperwork. 

Regarding Foundry I am a slightly negative mood. Both compendiums (Splittermond and Shadowrun 6 core rules) are being proposed to the publishers since more than a year and nothing happened. It is not that the publishers aren't interested, it is simply always either something more important to do or requires unexpected action noone is really familiar with. I can understand every single reason for the delay, but I am at a point where I stopped pushing.

Every now and than I get signals of potential progress, but nothing really changed so far.

That's it for now. Keep your fingers crossed that I will be able to tackle the Mondtor bug soon.