Blog Archives
New System Thursday
It’s back with avengence! Today we’re adding not one, not two, not even ten new systems. That’s right, today we’re turning the knob to 11.
- Chronica Feudalis (Make a Campaign Now)
- Aces & Eights (Make a Campaign Now)
- Lejendary Adventure (Make a Campaign Now)
- Fireborn (Make a Campaign Now)
- Hero System (Make a Campaign Now)
- Dragon Age RPG (Make a Campaign Now)
- DC Adventures (Make a Campaign Now)
- GUMSHOE (Make a Campaign Now)
- Star Trek RPG (Make a Campaign Now)
- Lamentation of the Flame Princess (Make a Campaign Now)
- Legends of Anglerre (Make a Campaign Now)
New Feature: Quick Previews
I’ll be the first to admit that our Textile input isn’t exactly the easiest thing to use. Getting linebreaks to work and text to look right can be a real chore. Trust me, we’re working on it.
However, a good interim fix is to reduce the turnaround time between writing the text and viewing it. To that end we’ve added a quick-preview feature for wiki pages and adventure log posts. There’s really not much to explain. Just click the preview button below a textarea and you can see the magic.
Give it a shot, and I think you’ll find that it makes formatting your posts much easier. Edit a little, preview, edit some more, preview, rinse and repeat.
Another ENnie!
Thanks to all your hard work and your votes, Obsidian Portal won a 2nd ENnie. We took the gold in the Best Website category, beating out some really tough competition, especially the Pathfinder Wiki and the d20 Pathfinder SRD.
You won it, we accepted it
Of course, I have to point out that Obsidian Portal is only where it is today thanks to all the hard work of the thousands of GMs and their players who use it every day to make their campaigns more fun. Ryan, Dan, and I keep the machines running, and we add features when we can, but it’s all of you who fill it with great stories, wacky characters, and breathtaking worlds. For that, we express our deepest gratitude.
Pics or it didn’t happen
I didn’t get as many pictures as I’d like, but here’s what I got.
Yes, that’s exactly what I was wearing when I accepted the award. Everyone loved the costume, as the ENnies are about geeks awarding geeks.
Just your average, everyday wasteland savage, riding high on his latest win and enjoying a beer. I thought I was going to a GenCon-style bar, but it turned out to be pretty far outside the con-zone, so everybody was looking at me like I was crazy. I guess you have to be a little crazy to dress like that. Hey, it’s what we do.
Jerry (dreadgazeebo), and I celebrating the win at lunch the next day. Jerry is holding this year’s medal, and I’ve got our gold from 2009.
Micah’s GenCon Schedule
For all of you heading to GenCon this year, I thought I’d post parts my schedule. Come find me and tell me what you think of Obsidian Portal. Be warned, I’m not a trained customer service representative, so I may just tell you what I think of your criticism…
What I look like
That’s me in the picture to the right. I’ll probably be wearing my Obsidian Portal t-shirt most of the time. Otherwise, I might be in costume (heh, it’s a secret).
Contact Info
Micah Wedemeyer
Phone: 724-484-3423
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @obsidianportal
Note: I don’t have a fancy-phone, so I’ll be checking Twitter and Email sporadically. Feel free to call.
Thursday
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Roleplaying for the Severely Disturbed
Hosted by the folks from Stupid Ranger, I’ll be acting out my deviant side as The Puppeteer, a delusional adventurer. Then again, every one of us will be delusional. We’ll see how that goes.
9:00pm – ???
D&D @ Hooters
A good friend is having his bachelor party at Hooters, and we’re all going there to play some D&D. I’m not sure the space-time continuum will be able to survive the irony of so many nerds at a Hooters, and I apologize in advance if the universe is destroyed.
Friday
12:00pm – 5:00pm
Dark Heresy : Chaos in the Void
I’m running a Dark Heresy 1-shot with friends that I have met through Obsidian Portal. We’ll see if they’re still my friends afterwards. I will consider it a personal failure if the adventure ends with all limbs still intact.
6:00pm – 9:00pm
The ENnie Awards
We’re up for another one, and I’ll be going in-costume. Fingers crossed that we get some good pics.
9:00 – ???
ENnies Reception
This is all about hobnobbing with RPG bigwigs, but I know neither how to hob or nob, so I’ll see how it goes.
Saturday
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Secret Lunch Meetup
Um…it’s a secret 😉
4:00pm – 5:30pm
GM Jam
My goal is to get in a plug for Obsidian Portal without being crass. Otherwise, just like anyone else, there’s always a lot for me to learn about being a GM.
8:00pm – 9:00pm
Blogger Meetup @ The Union
I had a great time here last year, so I’m going back. If you’re a blogger and want to meet/talk about Obsidian Portal, this would be a great time. Otherwise, just email me and we’ll set something up where it’s quieter.
10:00pm – ??
White Wolf Party
If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to grab another invite to the White Wolf party. Last year’s was great, and I actually bumped into a member from my D&D group from 10 years ago. Crazy.
?? – ??
Mythic Party
As a co-sponsor of Mythic Party, I’ll definitely be there for a good chunk of the night. Maybe we’ll get a chance to make amends for letting the entire world perish in our game of Pandemic from last year.
Sunday
I’m mostly free on Sunday, just lunch with a friend. If you want to get together and chat, drop me a line.
Textile Parser Follow-up
In the previous post, I asked people to give examples of highly detailed campaigns that were pushing Textile to the limits. The goal was to see if it was a good idea to upgrade our parser. Well, I’ve made a decision.
Curent Plan: Do Nothing
Essentially, I think it would be a mistake to upgrade to the newer parser as-is. There are too many places where it will break peoples’ existing work. And, as I feared, the more work you put into making things look nice, the more in danger you are of having the new parser break things for you.
Future Plan: Do Something
However, I’m beginning to believe that perhaps we should be offering more choice on how to handle your input. Many of you are quite comfortable dealing directly with HTML, and Textile just gets in your way, adding paragraphs and such where you don’t want them. Likewise, many of you come from the BBCode forum world and would prefer to work with that. It’s not like we believe that Textile is the be-all-end-all markup language and you should all be forced to learn it. To be perfectly honest, the main reason we went with Textile was that the parser was easy to integrate and allowed us to quickly move forward with other parts of the site.
I’m considering making the input parsing a campaign-wide setting, starting with Textile and raw HTML. Then, as we get more comfortable, we may add more parsers, like Markdown and BBCode. This will allow you to choose the markup language that makes the most sense for your group.
Any thoughts on that?
As always, I’d like to know what you think. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts.
Individual Findings
For those that are interested, these are the individual findings that I discovered while playing around with the new Textile parser.
Most pages render exactly the same
I’ve re-rendered probably a dozen pages and all except one looks exactly the same. The only one that looks different has a bunch of Textile examples on it, as in “Here is how you use Textile for this campaign…” The main takeaway was that for the majority of people, they won’t see a huge change. That’s a good thing, I think.
<br/> tags inserted automatically
This is the main complaint we get, that it’s difficult to insert line-breaks, as Textile ignores a single newline, and converts a double newline into a new paragraph. The newer version of Textile adds line-breaks for single newlines, which should make a lot of you much happier. No more adding <br/> at the end of every line.
And, as a bonus, it won’t double-up the <br> tags. If you already have them there, it won’t add another on top of it. Very nice.
<pre> no longer ignores Textile
If you’re putting Textile inside a <pre> tag in order to give an example of how to use it, it will now be evaluated. This will only affect a very small portion of you, but for those it may be very irritating. The trick to bypassing this is to use the notextile block modifier. Here’s an example:
notextile. p. This won't make a new paragraph, and will show the p. instead of evaluating it
p. Same here...still no new paragraph
Put in br tags manually if you want spacing<br/><br/><br/>
p. Still no new paragraph, but it will have 3 newlines above it.
p. This will be evaluated by Textile and the p. will make it a paragraph (because of the double newline above...)
HTML (mostly) unaffected
If you do all your formatting in HTML, then you’re pretty much safe. The new parser still ignores HTML and passes it straight through. I looked at a handful of pages that were mostly composed in HTML and they looked identical to me.
The more complicated it is, the more it gets mangled
Take a look at ChainsawXIV’s templates and tools page. Pretty sweet, huh? Well it gets mangled pretty badly by the new parser. For some reason, the parser doesn’t even generate valid HTML. It can be somewhat alleviated by putting a notextile modifier right at the start of the page, but that’s definitely not the best way to handle it.
Upgrading Textile – Easier post formatting
I checked recently and found that we haven’t updated our Textile parser in several months. The Textile parser is the piece of code that takes the text you type in and displays it on the webpage. Making tables, bolding text, adding headlines, adding linebreaks, all that stuff.
Update: I’ve made a decision on how to proceed.
We’ve been receiving more and more complaints lately about the inflexibility of Textile and how difficult it can be to get things to look how you want. Looking over the change notes of the new parser, a lot of those concerns have been addressed. However, I’m worried that putting a new parser in place might break a lot of the formatting that many of you have painstakingly created.
If you take great pains to get your campaign to display correctly, please leave a comment here with a link to your campaign. I’m going to test out the new parser in development, and I’d like to see how it works with some well crafted campaigns. If nothing breaks, then it’s a no-brainer to add the new parser. Otherwise, if it seriously destroys existing campaigns, then I’ll have to seriously think about the consequences. Fingers crossed that it’s a no-brainer.
Note: Comments like “Drop Textile and go with XYZ” will get you promptly ignored. We have thousands of people and campaigns all using it, and we can’t just drop it. We may add more parsers and allow you to choose, but that’s a future task.
