Sojour is the premier solo virtual table top (VTT)
Lord Gwydion over at RPG Frequencies has discovered a way to use embedded web pages within Sojour!
To be honest, I had no idea you could do this!
One thing for sure, I’m now thinking that Sojour needs to be able to host web pages natively as this is exceedingly useful!
If you want to see how to do it, pop over to the RPG Frequencies YouTube on this link:
Have Fun!
RobP
A quick fly-by update to let you good folk know where we are.
Development has been slow, mainly because I’m finding trouble getting the time together. That’s completely my fault, as I have far too many hobbies!
I’m still working on the Mk2 Calendar system but we have progress!
Firstly, we are back where we were – in that the calculation and display systems are now fully operational again:
In addition, multiple rolling entities can now be added. In the above screenshot we are just using one set of rolling entities called ‘Days of the Week’. But what if we also added phases of the moon?
Here is what the calendar looks like with phases of the moon added:
Not entirely realistic. However, rolling entities do support a skip function. Given that these phases tend to happen every 7 days in real life, I have decided to set the ‘Day Skip’ to six. eg there will be six skipped cells before the next rolling entity triggers.
The results?
It is starting to look a little more ‘real’, though I did randomly set the synchronisation point on the previous screen (aka Start Year and Start Rolling Entity), so these moon phases will not be the ones you will see in real life – unless I’m very lucky.
The above functionality will enable people to to add special rolling events in the form of iconography or text to their calendars. This should benefit many RPG calendars. For example the Runequest Gloranthan calendar should show the phases of the Red Moon as that moon directly affects the strength of Lunar magic. This system makes it very easy to add those phases!
Can we go further? Maybe by adding a third rolling entity?
This new set comprises of 5 random pictures in a fixed sequence. Adding the new sequence results in a calendar that looks like this:
In addition, I can also apply an independent ‘Day Skip’ to the new rolling entities. In this case I will specify a skip of 2 cells:
The result?
As you can see in the above screenshot it all works perfectly!
Plus, as you would expect, these rolling entities roll properly across month boundaries.
Here is a screenshot of the previous month:
Note that the sequences of rolling entities, the days, moon phases and the other images carry over across the month boundary!
What about going a month forward?
Going forward a month also results in the three sequences from each rolling entity group carrying on correctly across the month boundary 😎
Plus, remember, that the Gregorian calendar that you see in the above examples is created from first principals using time units and rolling entities – no operating system calendar components are used! Sojour’s calendars also go a lot further forward and a lot further backward in time than the Windows calendar too – see this post for more information.
None of this post probably makes much sense right now, but it will do when I put a video together explaining this new powerful system and how it will help you create any calendar that you can imagine!
A lot of progress with the Mk2 Calendar system, but still a lot more to do.
And for those that don’t know, if you buy Sojour, all updates are free 🙂
That’s it for this update!
Have Fun!
RobP
Rather than stay in a black hole whilst working on the Calendar Mk2 system, I thought, that instead, I’ll provide some regular updates.
These updates might not necessarily prove useful in of themselves, but at least they’ll let you folk know that I’m still working on things.
In the last post I alluded to the fact that I had refactored the code in the calendar backend without having updated the UI to use that code (Doh!). This resulted in various UI elements simply not working, or in extreme cases crashing!
A bit of a backward step considering we did have a mostly working system!
I’m now at a point where the UI is starting to work again.
Although a hard slog, I think the detour is worth it. The result is that the new code runs faster and because it is better encapsulated, the higher level code in the UI is also a lot simpler!
The hard bit is working out what needs to stay, what needs to go and what needs to be modified. This is quite a difficult task when one considers the complexity of the modelling (it’s complex because it can model any calendar you can imagine!)
Here are some screenshots that show the UI is now back and working… mostly….
Firstly we can now view mark 2 calendars again:
The above screenshot shows a Gregorian Calendar created with Sojour’s built in tools.
At this point, the structure of a year has been defined, but the Days of the Week rolling entities have not been switched on. The result is a calendar month with the correct number of days but no real context.
Next up, I switch on the Days of the Week rolling entities:
Straight away we can see a number of things have kicked in.
Firstly, days of the week now appear in the calendar and you can see that the relevant time units in the tree-view have been properly overridden by the rolling entities.
The other notable feature is the way the month view has automatically added space elements to allow all of the same days of the week to align in the correct column (the additional blank row at the bottom is an existing bug that will be fixed).
The fact that this is working at all, is somewhat miraculous, given how different the new backend code is.
Next up I tried turning off the upper header bar to see what would happen:
Right away, the system removes that header bar.
It has also realised that with no column headers, the calendar cells no longer have context – i.e. the day of the week. The system remedies this by automatically adding the day of the week to each calendar cell.
Speaking of calendar cells, these are not the finished product. The cells are currently rudimentary and are designed so that I can check the calendar calculations are working correctly. They will look a lot better and incorporate a lot of new functionality once completed.
Everything seems in order, although the ‘spare-row’ bug is still there.
Finally I turn off Days of the Week to make sure the tree-view reverts back to its original settings:
And it does! All good!
There is still a huge amount of work to do as I keep identifying additional use-cases that need to be covered off by the code. The good news is that the newer code is much better segregated, which makes adding new functionality like this a cinch.
The effort ploughed into this feature, so far:
That’s a lot of commits and development time!
Whilst this feature takes me away from Sojour’s more regular updates, I’m a firm believer that it is essential for Sojour’s longevity.
Sojour needs a calendar system that can model rolling calendars, which right now it cannot do. The current version cheats with regard to this feature by having the Gregorian calendar use the Windows Calendar! In contrast the new system does not do this and recreates all calendars from first principals.
That’s it for this mini update!
Have Fun!
RobP
This is a small bug fix that one of my customers reported:
RPG-440 Drag and drop in the Assets Tree-View now works when there is no map loaded.
That’s it for the release.
Work is still underway on the Mk2 calendar system, though it turns out I have more work to do than planned.
Last year, before I added the custom folders system I had added a whole bunch of integration tests to Sojour to support the MK2 calendar – 211 of them in total!
What I hadn’t realised was that whilst writing these tests I had actually performed a large refactoring of the code to ensure that each class was focused on its job, and solely on its job.
Architecturally, it’s a great idea and it will also make the system easier to maintain in the future.
However, these changes were put in without updating the UI layer to use the new updated system(!) – “previous Rob” has a lot to answer for!
This has meant a lot of rework in the UI layer. We are headed in the right direction, it’s just I’m a little further behind schedule than anticipated.
In the meatime
Have Fun!
RobP
I’m now back in the saddle after some time off over the Christmas period.
I hope that everyone had a great Christmas holiday and is feeling refreshed for 2025!
The first part of this year’s development effort will be focused on completing the work on the calendar Mk2 system for which there have already been a number of posts.
For those that want the TLDR, the new system supports rolling calendars which means that calendars such as Pathfinder’s become a possibility. It also means that the Western Gregorian calendar can start using the same calendar technology as everything else (it currently uses Windows Operating system components).
Once the work is completed, users should be able to create any calendars that they can imagine – all from within Sojour itself.
I feel that the Mk2 system is important because Sojour is primarily built upon three cornerstones:
I have always considered the time tracking part to be the weakest subsystem of the three which is why it is being upgraded. There are also plans for the other two, especially the journal, but I don’t want to go into that just yet.
The Mk2 Calendar System is one of those tasks that I know is big and that I’m already quite far into it, but alas, I don’t really know how much farther there is to go. All I know is that there is a tangible sense that I’m over the hump.
That’s it for this short update.
Have Fun!
And I’ll talk to you all later!
RobP
I hope you all have a great Christmas and a superb New Year in 2025!
I’ll be signing off till the new year.
Have Fun!
RobP
This is a release that contains a number of minor enhancements as requested by customers. The intent is to get as many customer requests in before the Christmas Holiday, then switch back to the Calendar Mk2 work which will take a significant amount of my time and thus reduce my public output.
This release contains the following enhancements:
RPG-423 Added a new global setting to allow users to enable or disable automatic token centering. The option can be viewed under Settings->Map Settings:
This setting affects character centering when waving the mouse over a character in the main toolbar, NPC centering when waving the mouse over an NPC in a journal toolbar and also token centering from any running turn sequence.
When disabled, the focused character / NPC will still have a focus ring drawn around them, it’s just that the map will not move to centre them:
RPG-426 Documents already attached to characters, tokens and campaign assets can now be renamed using a new button:
RPG-427 The on-map context menu now has additional context sensitive options that more closely align with other context menus used in Sojour. The new menu options are highlighted in red rectangles:
RPG-432 The assets browser’s ‘Rename’ option in the context menu is now consistently shown for all assets. In the past, assets that had an associated editor window would not offer this option – the thinking being that a user would just click ‘Edit’. However, ‘Rename’ is now offered for all assets including those with editors.
RPG-433 Three new buttons have been added to all Sojour tables that will let you do the following:
The new buttons are as follows:
Note keyboard shortcuts have also been coded to support CTRL-V for paste, CTRL-C for copy whole table.
Users might experience issues pasting tables from PDFs as these are not real tables in a programmatic sense. An easy way to tell is to try and paste those ‘tables’ into a spreadsheet such as Excel and observe the behaviour! (Just mitigating potential bug reports ahead of time!)
RPG-435 Characteristics sets can now be renamed using a new button:
RPG-436 Tidied up assets browser context menu by ensuring that the correct number of menu separators are shown at all times. The folder rename menu has also been moved to be near the other folder commands and has had a new icon assigned to it:
That’s it for this release! If you need further information on the new functionality, please consult the updated PDF manual.
Before I go, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the customers that took the time to contact me with these requests!
Have Fun!
RobP
This minor fix addresses the following issue:
RPG-421 When dragging campaign assets to the map, Sojour used to register two drag and drop events, this resulted in the drop event being called twice, which in turn resulted in two identical tokens being dropped on the map. This only affected campaign assets that were set as not unique. This has now been fixed. The drag and drop event is now only registered once, resulting in only one token being dropped.
This is the only reported bug after the rather large release on Friday (touch wood). I was expecting a torrent of bug reports and angry customers with pitchforks on the Saturday morning, but luckily for me, that never materialised!
I guess the testing was good after all! 😎
If you folks do find anything else, please do get in touch and I’ll see what I can do!
That’s it for this drive-by post.
Have Fun!
RobP
It’s with a little excitement and some trepidation that Sojour 1.3.0.0 has finally been released!
The reason for the trepidation is that this release also includes a huge refactor of the code in the User Interface layer. I think my testing has covered everything, but with such an extensive change, it always feels that whatever testing I do, it will never be enough!
This release is primarily about providing the new custom folders feature for customers.
Other features and fixes are also included. The full list is below:
RPG-360 Sojour now supports custom folders! That is, the ability for users to create their own folder structures under a variety of nodes in the assets browser. This story also included a massive coding refactor of the UI layer.
RPG-407 Sojour now provides the option to activate or deactivate all characters under a folder or node, including all of its sub-folders, with just a single mouse click.
RPG-411 Reenabled the use of the enter key to close simple dialog windows. This functionality was originally disabled due to useability issues. However, it turns out those issues only affected the larger dialog windows (the user would accidently shut them when hitting enter whilst typing text entries). This functionality was re-enabled after a customer request.
RPG-412 Moving the mouse cursor off map whilst the fog of war torch is on, will temporarily switch off the torch until the mouse cursor returns over the map.
RPG-414 Fixed a rare bug (which bit me) for the Restore functionality. In the bad old days if you squirreled away your old saves folder before the time of Sojour’s file manager being introduced, and then changed your Windows Documents directory, then tried to restore that saves folder, it would lead to missing maps and tokens. This has now been fixed.
RPG-416 The Microsoft WebView component has been upgraded to the latest version. This is used for viewing PDFs.
RPG-417 Sojour now hides and re-shows the token palette for more of its functionality. This is to prevent soft locks caused by the palette appearing over other dialog windows.
Here is the obligatory You-Tube video covering off the main new features:
I hope you good folk will find the new folders functionality beneficial for your games! 🙂
That’s it for this release!
Have Fun!
RobP
This is a very quick update post to let you folks know where we are!
After 14 hours and 30 minutes, the custom folders detailed testing is now complete!
Many interesting issues were found and all have been resolved.
In addition, I also needed to tidy up a few things. For example, the context menu now looks a lot more professional with the functional areas being properly separated into groups:
The code for custom folders has now been merged into the main code branch, so there is no turning back now – the next release has to include custom folders! This release will be version 1.3.0.0.
The only thing left to do now is to update the manual.
This will be a fairly significant revision as there is a lot you can do with custom folders, plus, I also need to cover off the upgraded character activation-deactivation system.
Total time on this feature has been pretty high:
Each day is the equivalent of 8 hours, so in total I have worked 70 hours and 57 minutes on custom folders and this total does not include the additional effort needed to update the manual.
Not long to go now! (Honest!)
Hopefully this update will be in your hands in the next week or so. Thank you for your patience!
Have Fun!
RobP
Sojour 