This is a very minor enhancement release for the new filing system brought in during the last release.
Firstly, the initial dialog window that is displayed when Sojour is first run now includes a third option: ‘Cancel’:
This gives users the option of backing out completely and just closing Sojour.
Another enhancement is that the Manual and EULA pdfs are now installed under the Program Files directory rather than the Documents directory.
The manual is a large file. Moving it to Program Files means it no longer needs to be copied when moving Sojour around your system. Plus, only a single manual is required, rather than multiple copies, one per Sojour instance.
This change makes everything more efficient and removes a corner case where the manual button would sometimes fail after moving Sojour around.
The map toolbar buttons also have their statuses updated correctly after performing a file operation.
Before I start with this post proper, I’ll just go over the results of a question I asked in my previous blog post:
“Would you prefer a slower release cycle – say once a month – to allow for more testing? Or do you prefer the current weekly cadence with an increased risk of bugs being introduced?”
Thank you all for your responses – it’s been much appreciated.
The result was that an overwhelming majority of you – 84% – wanted me to stay with the current release cycle.
To quote from one of the respondents:
“I like the current “Elon Musk like” fail forward releases. Your hard work is very much appreciated.”
This fills me with some relief, as one of the issues of being a lone software developer is the perpetual dread of dropping ‘that’ release that breaks everything.
Whilst the perpetual dread is probably a good thing, it’s good to know that my customers are allowing me some slack to occasionally drop the ball in the name of progress.
I know the results aren’t going to make everyone happy, but on the plus side, you could just skip a few releases. Sojour’s built in updaters are designed to automatically work from any prior version, so skipping releases will not present an issue – you will not miss out on anything!
Now back to the release!
v1.2.28.0 saw Sojour’s filing system getting a massive upgrade thanks to feedback from many customers.
In the past, you were stuck with having your data saved under Documents/PollySoft/Sojour.
Not any more! 🙂
Click for larger image!
If you closely examine the above screenshot you will notice that the status bar now shows where Sojour is accessing its data from! In this case I’m using some folders on my D:\ drive.
Sojour’s data can now be stored practically anywhere. Sojour will perform the relevant checks to see if it can access your chosen folder and if it can, that folder is in!
When you first start Sojour you will be presented with this screen (if it can’t find any data):
Most users will click ‘Yes‘ and have Sojour store its data in the usual place of Documents/Pollysoft/Sojour.
However, if this is not a suitable location, you can click ‘No‘ whereupon you are presented with this dialog window:
From here you can pick or create a folder for Sojour to use anywhere that your system can access!
But that’s not all….
Sojour now has a new File Manager:
Click to view a larger version!
This file manager lets you do many things! You can move your current data somewhere else, you can back up and restore data and you can even point Sojour to a different set of data files!
The latter would allow power users to have several sets of Sojour data and allow them to switch between them at will!
Alas, this was no easy feature to code, it took a lot of effort to implement:
22 code commits over 29 hours of coding! (each day is 8 hours)
The reason it took so long was in part, due to some poor initial design choices from my previous self! (As an aside, my previous self has a lot to answer for and if I could go back in time, I would be having some serious words with him! :p )
With the original design, I had encapsulated the ability for each object within Sojour to know where its data was stored. This was a good thing. However, I had coded this system to use rooted paths rather than relative paths. This was a really bad design choice as one cannot move data around with rooted paths!
Undoing the above and designing a new system that would work with both the old and new filing systems really pushed my brain into overdrive! But it’s now done and I think Sojour is all the better for it.
The new functionality is really flexible, so to that end I have produced a You-Tube video that will take you folks through some of the things the new filing system can do!
The full list of changes in this release is:
RPG-354 New enhanced file system, which adds a whole bunch of new features and additional flexibility to Sojour.
RPG-358 Tokens no longer show their health bars when dragged from or to a map that has them disabled.
RPG-363 A tentative code alteration that may alleviate occasional crashes when using the screenshot tool.
This is a bug fix release and as usual is free to all customers.
The following issues were addressed in this release:
RPG-337 The treeview will now better remember its last state. It will now also focus on the last selected campaign and/or ruleset prior to shutdown. This should ensure that when you restart Sojour, you will always start in your last played ruleset/campaign.
RPG-348 Fixed a number of issues with regard to tokens from the token palette. Looks like these issues got introduced when the new drag and drop system was put in place two or three releases back. Issues fixed are: 1) Tokens that use dice expressions for their characteristics are now back to rolling their dice only once that token has been dropped onto the map. In addition, Sojour won’t re-roll them when Sojour has been restarted. 2) Tokens that have been rotated, now correctly show their rotation when dragged off map. 3) Dragged token health bars are now back to showing the actual health of the token (this never affected the token itself – just its dragged representation).
RPG-356 Fixed a PDF issue and upgraded the WebView2 component to the latest version. Sojour always tries to restore opened PDFs when you start it. However, minimized or maximized documents prior to shutdown could confuse Sojour when it tries to re-open these documents. This has now been fixed and Sojour now respects whether documents were maximized or minimized prior to shutdown and will now leave those documents in the appropriate state when restarted.
I have been putting my thinking cap on with regard to these bug fixes and have forwarded all my customers a question:
“Would you prefer a slower release cycle – say once a month – to allow for more testing? Or do you prefer the current weekly cadence with an increased risk of bugs being introduced?”
It’s a pretty important question as the answer will affect the way I work and how often you folks get new releases. I’ll go with whatever the consensus is and post the result here!
That said, I am expecting a new release this Sunday that will provide much more flexibility with regard to where Sojour saves its data. This should be the next release, unless any critical bugs are detected between now and then.
This is a hotfix that fixes the Map Scaling Wizard that got broken in v1.2.11.0. All users are urged to upgrade to this version.
In addition, the following story got addressed:
RPG-333 Vertex buffers, Index buffers and Textures are no longer initialised unless the map holding these models is loaded. This should speed up overall loading times and vastly reduce resource usage on startup.
(I discovered the map scaling wizard issue whilst working on the above story)
This version includes fog of war enhancements added as a result of customer feedback.
Once again, thank you for this feedback, it is invaluable.
If you want to know more about the Fog of War enhancements pop over to this You-Tube video:
Fog of War Enhancements!
Here are the full list of changes for this release:
RPG-335 Fixed an issue that could occasionally crash the journal when changing between font types.
RPG-336 Tokens can now have their ability to affect the fog in fog of war toggled by using a right click context menu item. See the manual and the video for each token’s type defaults.
RPG-341 Sojour’s file handling code has been tightened up. However, note, that windows file paths default to having a maximum length of 260 characters. If you go above that, you will need to enable it with this registry tweak.
RPG-347 The map preview is now left on for the duration of map scaling and the map scaling token now always appears above the fog. This makes custom token scaling easier on maps with fog.
RPG-348 This is a corner case fix. If you drag a character to a map that the character is already on, then drag your cursor off the map, Sojour could crash in certain circumstances. This has been fixed!
RPG-350 The map free draw function has had code added to it to smooth out drawings (they used to come out quite jagged!)
This version adds the missing Fog of War function alluded to in the earlier video – the ability to have the mouse preview / torch switched on whilst dragging tokens. I eventually figured out how to do it, so for the moment, this first iteration of Fog of War is now feature complete!
The old video will be taken down as it is no longer representative of what one can do.
You are encouraged to view the new one below as having the ability to use the mouse preview whilst dragging tokens is a game changer for ease of use!
This is a hotfix for custom calendars. Current calendars will automatically be upgraded and customers shouldn’t see any change of functionality.
This fix separates the concept of TimeUnit number and day of at n level.
Warning! The next few paragraphs are highly technical and only really applicable to customers that are using Sojour to create custom calendars!
Previously, the n.number command did not return the TimeUnit number at level n. Instead, it used to return the day of number at that time unit level.
This is a little misleading to say the least.
To fix this all n.number commands have been renamed to n.dayof and n.numberth commands have been renamed to n.dayofth.
These names better represent what those commands are doing.
There is no need for you to change your existing custom calendars! Sojour’s auto-update system will do this for you automatically! 🙂
The n.number command has then been re-introduced, except that this time it actually reports the number of the selected TimeUnit at the chosen level.
I know this is going to sound like absolute gobbledegook to most people! The intent will be to put out a new custom calendar tutorial video that will make this a lot more clear.
The coding is done, as is most of the testing. The only things left to do are updating the manual and creating a new tutorial video that will take you all through the new Fog of War system.
Sojour 