Spectatorship and Improvements to the User Experience
Good Morning, Adventurers!
We have been hard at work fixing and improving upon the system, and I am here to gleefully detail our progress.
As I am sure a few of you have already noted, we have a shiny new loading screen which brings every visitor directly to a full-window map. No more are the days of the 600x960 pixel applet! In addition, we have dropped our login page for what we feel is a much more excitingly direct experience. Now, everyone - regardless of whether or not they have a Game Master’s account - can view the world’s progress. Of course, only Game Masters can update the map and view private objects, but we felt that there was something lost without players having the capacity to join in on at least some of the fun! If you look to the account dropdown menu, you will see that we have plans to eventually implement a party system, further improving upon the player experience, but for now we hope that this will do.
Chris has also quickly done a once-over of the basic UI. None of this is final, and there is much work to be had before we feel that we can call our interface “done,” but we hope to get your feedback every step of the way so as to deliver with a product that is what you want, not what we think you want.
I have also begun to create map links to areas of the codex, allowing users to access basic information on key locations (ie, Emsaffir, or the Ruins of Avalyse) simply by clicking on them in the map. At the moment, every such location is marked by a pin - click the pin, and you will be brought to our glossary page. In addition, all links from within the map now open in new windows. If you experience difficulty with this, disable your popup blocker. We are still working through the bugs, but currently the popup blockers on some (but not all) browsers catch our links. Still, we felt that this was preferable to needing to reload the map every time you wanted to return from a link.
Beyond this, we have been doing lots of behind-the-scenes work. I have personally re-written the entire code for the event log, opening up new doors for custom-filtering the content. My next set of tasks involves putting this to work, developing an object-subscription system (teased at with our menu up top).
As always, we remain committed to bringing you the best, most epic living campaign system ever created, and welcome any and all feedback on our forums. We want to build this with you, not for you.
May the dice be ever in your favor, ~ Namy / Technical Director