Release 0.3.1

June 16, 2019

Beta 0.3.1 Update Notes

Greetings everyone, I am very excited to release the first incremental update from the 0.3.x Beta generation of Foundry Virtual Tabletop. Thank you all so much for your continued testing and support. Without further ado, here is the 0.3.1 Beta update! This update contains 60 fixes and improvements following the massive 0.3.0 update from earlier this month.

As it is the first update following a new major version - update 0.3.1 is primarily focused on bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements which build upon the new major features. Despite that focus, there are several new key features which I hope that many of you will greatly enjoy. The most significant improvement in this update is a major performance improvement to Fog of War rendering which will allow Foundry VTT to scale to larger and more ambitious maps while maintaining the high level of performance which is a cornerstone of the project.

I'm really excited about the continued progress for this software and motivated by the support and encouragement of the community. Thank you all for appreciating my work, providing thoughtful feedback, and encouraging me to do even more. As always, please keep an eye on the development progress board here for visibility into what features are in progress and coming up next!

https://gitlab.com/foundrynet/foundryvtt/boards

New Features

Implemented a major performance improvement for Fog of War rendering which is especially valuable for large scenes (10,000px and larger) which economizes substantially on the WebGL resources needed to render and save fog of war. This result in significantly improved application performance which is most noticeable for large and complex maps.
Improve the specificity of the Scene Control application identification to allow for multiple scenes to be configured at the same time.
Improve the flexibility of the placed Map Note pins to now allow them to be edited to reference a different Journal Entry after they were originally placed. Furthermore, this makes the system more fault tolerant whereby a map pin which points towards a non-existent Journal Entry no longer causes a failure for the notes layer.
Usage of the newly added chat bubbles feature has been made more intentional - requiring the use of an explicit in-character /ic or emote /em message prefix. Default (non-prefixed) messages will no longer trigger a token chat bubble.
Improved the render positioning for various follow-up applications which are rendered through the Actor Sheet. Now the Token Config, Sheet Config, and Portrait FilePicker apps will render in a more usable position relative to the actor sheet.
Improve the rendering behavior of Sidebar Tab popout applications to allow their height to more dynamically adjust to changes in their inner content.
Added a file locking mechanism to the Foundry VTT application which will ensure that only one currently running instance of the software is operating at a time within a single source directory. A consequence of this change is that if you want to host multiple worlds simultaneously on different ports, you will need to have multiple root directories for Foundry VTT to avoid any possibility of data conflicts. This is a limitation that can perhaps be relaxed in the future.
Added a new core component to assist with Localization support. This allows for the core code, game systems, and user-defined modules to provide translation files which can add or extend support for different languages. The core software provides tools for defining translation tables and applying translations programmatically or during the template render process. I look forward to working with members of the community to gradually begin translating Foundry VTT into other languages! If you would like to sponsor a specific language translation, please don't hesitate to reach out to me in Discord.
The newly added Token HUD has undergone some user experience improvements following feedback from the 0.3.0 release. Previously the HUD relied on a left click+hold workflow to trigger, but this has been moved to a simple right-click action to streamline and simplify the user experience.
Change the styling rules for Actor and Item portraits in the sidebar to always show the top portion of an image. For asymmetric portrait style images, this reduces the odds that the actor will be "decapitated" in the sidebar thumbnail.
Pausing the game will cause any in-progress token animation paths to end once the token reaches its next waypoint. This gives the GM more control over interrupting a movement to narrate certain key events which may happen as a result of the move.
When placing wall endpoints you may now bypass snap-to-grid by holding the SHIFT key. This can be especially helpful when paired with wall chaining (CTRL) to create more circular wall shapes or for other special situations. Take extra care when placing walls which do not snap to the grid to avoid leaving gaps between your wall endpoints which could allow light to bleed through.

Core Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug which prevented Journal Entries from being shown to players with the image mode displayed as intended by the standard workflow.
Fixed an issue with the FilePicker UI which prevented navigating upwards to the root public directory.
Handle invalid user input in the attribute or elevation bar of the Token HUD. Previously an invalid input could result in the attribute bar getting nulled, now invalid user input will simply be ignored.
A minor aesthetic improvement to the control icons for ambient light sources, sound sources, and placed measurement templates now positions the control icon more perfectly in the center of it's grid space.
Fixed several bugs around audio playlist failures which could result in subsequent tracks in sequential or shuffled playlists from not triggering correctly for any or all players.
Fixed a different playlist issue which prevented deleted Sounds within playlists from being properly removed for the triggering GM client.
Tokens which have their combat tracker visibility set to hidden will now roll initiative using a private GM roll as originally intended.
Make dynamic entity links in rich text fields failure tolerant. Previously if attempting to link to an entity which does not exist, substitution of that (and all other) entity links would fail.
Fixed a client crash condition which could result when bulk Token deletion requests were made in a non-active Scene.
Resolved a bug which caused chat messages that were sent without an active Scene to generate an error due to invalid speaker data.
Improved the fog of war reset mechanism, which should no longer require two attempts in order to get fog to correctly reset to it's unexplored state.
Background image filenames rendered via inline CSS in the sidebar are now wrapped in quotes to avoid common issues with file naming conventions.
Entities where the default permission level was set to LIMITED were resulting in the GameMaster also having a limited view of the entity. This is no longer the case and GM permissions correctly override all others.
Improved the rendering of long-named tokens in the combat log to avoid style breaks.
Fixed a failure of World-level setting changes which prevented them from immediately propagating to other connected clients.
Fixed an error where removing a token from combat using the right-click context menu did not always update that token's quick-controls display.
Fixed a problem with the "Roll All NPC" button in the combat tracker which should now correctly roll initiative for all non-player characters.
Fixed a bug with chat bubbles which could end up accidentally displaying a bubble for private whispered messages (whoops!).
Improve the TAB token cycling workflow to avoid accidentally cycling tokens when a user is editing a form field.
Fix a problem with the FilePicker for image type journal entries which prevented the picker UI from correctly rendering.
Fixed an issue which prevented the Journal Entry from being properly resizable in either text or image mode.
Removed an issue which attemped to place two walls with each click during wall chaining workflow, although the second wall was never placed due to zero length.
Attempting to use the FilePicker for a file path which no longer exists will now correctly revert back to display the public root folder.
Improve overflow scrolling for the ModuleManagement application to help with cases where users have many modules which could scroll off the viewable screen.

Core Software, APIs, and Module Development

Improved the behavior and layout of the Audio Playlist sidebar which should now behave more as expected when adding playlists and sounds. In particular, this update should resolve issues with players not having synchronized audio when the active track changes or was modified by the DM.
Improve security around user-provided HTML input by sanitizing the set of allowed HTML tags more aggressively to strip any javascript which could be injected as inline HTML.
Fixed a security loophole whereby players could assign themselves GM privileges using the provided API.
Improve application security by refusing to serve database files directly via HTTP requests.
Refactored the server-side Compendium code, making several key improvements for performance and reliability. The most prominent benefits for users involve bug fixes whereby compendium packs could get stuck in an unusable state when switching active worlds. Furthermore, newly created world-level compendium packs will be available for use immediately rather than requiring a VTT restart to function properly.
Converted the hotkey shortcuts supported by the Electron layer to only function as local hotkeys when the application window has active focus. Furthermore, I solved the issue which prevented me from using F12 as a hotkey for the developer tools, so I have restored that original functionality to feature better consistency with browser behavior.
Improved server-side validation of EmbeddedEntity update and delete operations to add an extra sanity check confirming that the requested item exists before attempting a delete operation, allowing for an earlier and more clear error message if unsuccessful.
Increase the level of context provided to the Application.render function to allow for downstream applications to make more intelligent choices around what work to perform when render requests are received. Please see this issue for more detail: https://gitlab.com/foundrynet/foundryvtt/issues/951.
The mechanism for triggering chat bubbles for sent messages has been made more direct - passing an optional flag through the socket creation event itself rather than simply inferring intent using the contents of the created message data.
A second, but more minor performance improvement to Fog of War saving now allows this save operation to occur in the background rather than delaying the rendering of animations or vision updates.
Made world migration operations slightly more tolerant -- previously a data validation failure experienced during a migration could prevent the migration completely leave a world in an un-launchable state unless the invalid data were manually removed.
The previous update allowed for Modules to request a custom socket event to use for passing data between connected clients. It was an oversight to not extend the same level of functionality to game systems also. A game system may now have it's own dedicated messaging socket. Please see the following issue for usage details: https://gitlab.com/foundrynet/foundryvtt/issues/939
Implemented an extra layer of precaution around the PIXI asset loader to prevent cases where attempting to load a video file (like .webm) with an invalid file path could cause the entire Scene load to fail as the attempted file load does not receive a rejected promise. More details in this issue: https://github.com/pixijs/pixi.js/issues/5336
Implement a more graceful shutdown routine for active Worlds which are better protective of data and less prone to failure when switching between worlds.
Improve the Electron initialization routine to ensure that it only attempts to load the local server URL after the Express server has correctly started listening for requests.
Added an extra server-side safety check to ensure that a user has permission to upload files.
Build the AWS SDK into the package as a dev dependency to help with building and distributing new versions and automating the upload and release process further.
The copyObjects and pasteObjects methods in each PlaceableLayer will now return an Array of the objects which were copied or pasted when resolving their Promise.

D&D5e System Improvements