(To check out these changes for yourself, pop on over to https://character.gallery)

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Regardless, I’ve got a bit gift for everyone today: the biggest update to Character.Gallery to date.

While I was going through my notes for this update, I discovered that I started working on this update back in February of this year. That means that I’ve been working on this update off and on for about 10 months. When I made the blog post for the last update, I told you that the next update would have accounts and a new character wizard. I am happy to report that I did not break that promise.

There’s been a lot of changes, so let’s get started!



New Features

Accounts - You can now make an account, and save your characters to it. Changes you make to a character saved and loaded from an online account automatically update, and the website keeps a full version history of every change made to a character, so you can rewind it to any point in the past. You can also share a character from your account with a special link. Right now, accounts are limited to 3 characters each, but I’m looking into possibly changing this in the future.

New Character Wizard - Now when you create a new character, you get a popup asking if you’d like assistance. If you click “Yes”, you’re then walked through the character creation steps from the Core Rulebook. Every time you move to the next page, the previous changes are pushed back to the character, so if you don’t need help any longer, you can just close the wizard and keep going however you’d like. There’s no provided database of character options, but each page of the wizard has links to the related pages on The Hidden Truth and Archives of Nethys, and can be copied and pasted into the wizard.

Printable Sheets - You can now print a character sheet for your character at the current level. These sheets have pretty much all of the important information relevant to that level, and should be able to let you play your character without using an electronic device at all. You can also use any PDF printer to make a PDF, so you can play offline.

Animal Companions - We were calling drones “companions”, that has been updated to reflect the fact that animal companions exist now. You can now add animal companions to a character. They work similarly to drones.

Shields - Shields are now supported, and can be found at the bottom of the Combat section

Point Pools - This is a new feature that I designed to make it easier to track all of the various types of points that you may need to track on a character, such as attunement or entropy. You can name each pool whatever you’d like, and can set a maximum and current number for each one. I hope these will be pretty useful for a lot of folks.

Backup Data Recovery - There are now certain points where the site will try to backup your character data locally, so if something goes wrong, it can attempt to be recovered. The site will offer to recover it automatically if you end up running into an error, or you can recover it manually by going to MIsc > Options, and then clicking on the Recover button next to “Backup Character”.

Error Reporting - There’s now automatic error reporting enable on the site, so that if something goes wrong, I’ll be notified immediately. If click the “Send Error Report” button, you’ll be given a a form to provide any additional info that you’d like to send to me.

Changes

Analytics - I’ve turned Google Analytics back on, so that I’m able to get some better information about how many people are using the site, and roughly where they are, so I can figure out where to prioritize putting some resources in future projects and updates.

Auto-Save Timer - The site now waits for 10 seconds after you stop making changes before saving your character data: online if the character is on your account, locally otherwise.

Character Images - You can now select an image file from your device, and it’ll get resized and embedded into the character data or saved file. This will make it easier to use the site while offline. It’s also uploaded to your account if you save the character there.

Ability Descriptions - The details about abilities that you type in now show up in a small modal window when you click on the link, rather than trying to show them in a small “popover”.



Skills - You can now be set to use any ability score modifier, in case that gets changed by some character ability.

Feats - You can now add multiple feats at any level.



Damage Entry -There’s a Vitals button below your HP, SP, and RP bars. You can click on it to have one place to enter damage taken or healed, and it’ll automatically deduct from temporary hp, sp, or hp, as required. Oh, probably should also say that you can access your temporary hp from there as well, and then use the Round to recharge them at the end of every round.

Resting - In addition to damage entry, there’s buttons to automatically handle a 10 minute rest, and an 8 hour rest.

Weapons - These have gotten cleaned up on the Play section, they work much better on mobile devices. It hides the extra info you may not need to make an attack roll until you actually need it. This includes ammunition tracking, which has also gotten a few buttons. In general, the entire experience is a lot better on mobile devices.

Bug Fixes

Fixed several issues with mobile layouts and functionality

Fixed some issues with default drone data

Fixed an issue where dice rollers wouldn’t work

Fixed some issues where character data wouldn’t load

Fixed an issue where notifications wouldn’t dismiss automatically

Fixed an issue where the menu didn’t close when loading a character

Probably a couple others that I’ve forgotten about…

Things to Come

I don’t have all of the next updates completely planned out, but I have been learning quite a few things about Vue over the last few months. The next big thing I’m needing to do is a significant rewrite that should help make things a lot more stable. I’m also wanting to do an overhaul of the Equipment and Society sections. I’m still planning on working on some concepts with some ideas for Starships, but those are still going to be a little ways off.

Thank You…

So let me go ahead and wrap this up. I hope that everyone’s able to benefit ton from all of the work that I’ve been putting into Character.Gallery. I’ve been listening to all of the feedback that you folks have been giving me, and I’m extremely thankful to everyone who’s reached out with any ideas, every one of you who have stuck around, and every one of you who are just now discovering my little project that I work on in my free time. Every single one of you have helped to make this the best project I’ve ever worked on.

Thank you. And have a very happy holiday season this year.

- Trevor