The Parade Continues

Your Fashion Royalty The end of the Fashion Jam is here, and while we had dozens of amazing participants walk The Runway, or customize their looks with our Sprite Painter, ultimately only a few can be crowned as Fashion Royalty. Let's give congratulations to our three winners @goose.art, @meson.ninja, and @heika.dog who each get Creator Accounts to expand their fashion empire, Jam Medals for their wardrobe, and all our adoration. In addition, the top 30 contestants have had their sprites immortalized in the Fashionista Archive and will soon be printed on real sticker sheets that we'll be mailing out to them. If you are among them, there will be a special announcement in your inbox, and you'll see a claim button on the Fashion Finale page to submit a mailing address to receive them at. Thank you everyone for participating in our second jam, we've got more on the way! Builders Jamming With more jams on the way, we've added a new Builder Jams portal which is designed to highlight our current events and keep a nice archive of all our prior ones. If you're new to jamming, it's got a nice breakdown of what they are and what to expect. There's also a new feature to add yourself to our Jammer List and get notified whenever there's a new one coming up! Expect another Jam in the end-half of June! New Profile Layouts One of the things that's slowly evolving without much fanfare is our UI, which has recently had some really nice changes (in particular on mobile). With all the new features the old layout just wasn't working anymore, so we've broken things into three distinct dropdowns for Experience (games, places), Creative (sprites, etc), and Toolkit (plugins, documents). It's a little more helpful organizing things, and should offer more extensibility as things contine to expand. Much more noticeably, on your profile there have been some big changes to the way things are laid out at first view. Now, rather than defaulting to a single character sheet, we're offering a card-based overview that showcases all of the games you have stats for. It even has a special "Other Games" card for including a list of all the more stat-oriented games (like Clun's Cannon, or Proto Hopper), as well as custom systems, which can continue extending quite easily. Now when others visit your profile, they'll be able to quickly know at-a-glance which games you play, and can more easily recognize what systems and genres you're fit for. A great way to find new party members! New Stats Structures Excuse while we get technical... if you only like rolling dice, feel free to skip! When first building out our .stats lexicons we were deep in the mindset of, "these are your stats, they're you!" and so built the schema oriented towards the /self reference with all of the different systems having different header keys within the singular record. At the time there were only 3 systems in play, and it made sense to our dungeoneering brains... but now that there are more than 20 systems, our engineering brains disagree. The obvious problem with this design is that as more games get added, the single record becomes unwieldy, and new games are required to ingest, modify, and republish the /self key as whole each time they update. This can run into clashes, or careless developers (which we must expect!) could accidentally wipe out your entire .stats record in one failed write attempt. NOT GOOD! So, we've begun the scary process of transitioning to a per-system rkey that functions almost identically to the existing /self oriented system, except now every stat system is broken out into its own individual record rather than split-by-heading under the singular. It's simpler to read, it's cleaner to write, and it's probably what we should have started with, but one of the beautiful things about AT Protocol is its forgiveness toward these kind of evolution. Thankfully, we're still pretty early in the game(s) and have good relationships with everyone currently producing these records, and we have the bandwidth to help them upgrade. For our own systems we've already implemented all the automation process to upgrade existing users; just by logging in you'll find your records instantly improved while the old /self stays preserved as a retrofit fallback. Any new records will still write both for the time being, but the Compendium will default to preferring the per-system rkey and even show a little checkmark next to the system title when it's happy with them. Players won't have to think about this, and pretty much everything is just seamless automatic. None of the .master records are affected by this change (only their interpreters), as they never pointed to keys and only referenced system names which transpose perfectly to the new rkey names. For the time being, all of our games will remain in a dual-write method until eventually we sunset the entirety of the /self key sometime in the near future. Pathfinder & Starfinder OKAY BACK TO THE FUN STUFF!!! Since we're talking stats, we might as well mention we've added 2 New Games to our supported list of TTRPG systems. Pathfinder 2e and Starfinder 2e are now fully compatible with the rpg.actor profiles with an easy-to-use sheet. !image.png We've wanted to add these for a long time, so giving a very big thanks to community member @dneaves.com for their work on the schema, it made things super easy to implement and we're very grateful for the uplift. Streampets Enhancements Streampets has quickly become one of the most popular ways folks are using their rpg.actor character, appearing on all sorts of stream.place broadcasts as a fun and interactive representation of themselves from the audience. So, we've done a little more work to keep improving it and help streamers get the most out of it. Now instead of having to enter your handle to generate an OBS URL, the service now automatically recognizes you from your login and keeps better track of the settings you've applied between sessions. This includes the command permissions you've applied, as well as the badge designations that you've assigned privileges to. We also fixed the way that the Badge Repos are recognized so they now (actually) work, and added a real easy one-touch button to add all the badges officially issued from @stream.place themselves! Also, as a viewer you can now visit the Streampets setup page and see this nifty little preview window of what your character looks like walking around, and try any of the !commands yourself just by clicking on them. There's been a few changes to some like !dance and !sleep, and some new secrets in !transform to explore, so go ahead and try them out. Cross-Compatible Cannoneering Now that there are a few experiences outside the walls of rpg.actor starting to offer their own Catalogue Items, our dear clown @clun.rpg.actor thought it was high time we gave some respect! Clun's Cannon will now recognize certain items you've earned from other games and give your character a little boost next time they're being launched. If you've been looking for an unfair advantage, and a way to climb the leaderboard, then it might be worth exploring The Atmosphere and playing some new games! Creator API Coming Soon! For a while our Creator Panel has been a bit of an eye-sore and very developer-oriented. We decided to give it a little facelift to help improve the flows for creating and editing items, along with a few other areas, as we continue striving to make it a fun and easy-to-use system for all your world-building and game extension needs! To help our mission of making it ultimately useful for creators, we've been hard at work at a new API which will enable game developers and app builders to leverage our server to compile or recolour sprites, alter .generator records, validate composition, check item references, and check / roll stats from your character sheets. It's a very robust system and we're still working out the finest details with the help of some beta testers, but it's coming along swimmingly and should be available to all before our next announcement. Improving the Creator Panel and offering more things to do with it remains one of our highest priorities. We want to make sure that those of you who support our ecosystem with your upgrade get as much value as we can offer! ...And It Never Stops! Okay, so... that's a lot... but, what's next?! Well, we're cooking up another Builder Jam for later in June and we're in the final stages of testing a new game coming soon to the Experiences tab. Those of you who enjoy daily challenges are in for a treat! We're also working on some more character sheet options, and continuing to expand the Sprite Generator with more of your requests... so keep 'em coming! But, that's enough to mention for now. Thanks for reading. HAVE FUN!!