Upcoming Features Discussion

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

Hello everyone,

If you're here, then you've probably read the release notes for Mote 1.12 and (maybe) seen the poll we posted regarding which feature to tackle importation first.

While HTML5 and Javascript are often interrelated out there in the wild, our implementations are separate from each other, due to Sift's modular nature. We won't delve into the technical details here, but we'd like to open up the discussion of these 2 features, in the context of Mote.

Regardless of the technical nature this discussion might take, the overarching goal should be where we attract user groups into the fold, promote the creation of shared works that help toward this goal, and support our development via feedback and use cases.

According to the current poll count, the majority wants Javascript to be imported first, and HTML5, comes second. Our initial questions are: "Will this attract more users to our community?" and "How will this feature attract (even the most casual) users?", "Will you actually avail of the feature, once it's made? (i.e. subscribe to use?)"

To be honest, we also need some motivation to keep doing this. The ideal back when we first started was, we make the tools, and the community builds with them and shares the fruits of their labor for others to enjoy. The reality is, very few have come forward to share their work, and sometimes, we are afraid that no one really is making anything out of the tools we've worked hard to make available. We also live with the possibility that early contributors have been asked by members of Mote's parent project, to discontinue collaboration with us, for reasons everyone can just speculate about themselves. 

But with the lack of apparent usage (to an outsider), and only a small portion of this community being vocal and participatory, the adoption of our apps and services, has been slow, and this does not bode well for our future.

We are aware, of course, of our own shortcomings. Most of which is rooted on the scale of our projects, and the size of our team. Most of the time, it's a choice between writing code and promoting our work, and, unfortunately, the latter always gets pushed to the back burner. We want to grow the team, but most, if not all, the people we trust to add to the endeavor, won't work under the conditions the current team has voluntarily chosen to live with until success.

But if Sandstorm doesn't succeed, then we'll have to start being honest with ourselves and evaluate if we still can do this. The desire to create, will always be there, but reality always wins out in the end. It is on us to determine whether reality is a success or failure. We just can't keep churning out work to no end or for a handful of hardcore users (we love you all!), while the costs of doing all this, keep running up.  Sooner or later, we'll have to make the hard decision to reach for the plug. I think most people can understand the point we're trying to make. We believe in what we're doing, but belief does not always equate to success. Only users and consumers can guarantee that. Such is the way of the world.

Now, we're not asking that people run to the gates and subscribe to Sandstorm. What we would like is for everyone to participate in helping us make our products and services, as great as they can be. There are many ways to do this, and most of them will only take some effort and time. Help with the feature discussions; Tell people who might be interested, about our work; Share your creations, for others to find and enjoy; Let us know where we can go to spread the word in an productive way, because experience tells us that many forums and blogs are hollow. Contribute toward making this community vibrant, because if it isn't then most people will just move on.

Every bit helps. On our part, we will keep up our end to work hard to make great features available :)

Anyway, going back to the purpose of this thread, please discuss what the feature would mean to you, what you will do with it, and what you'd like from us, or share any other thoughts you may have, regarding these 2. The only thing we request for, is for everyone to contribute constructively, with the purposes of making sure things are done right, and to help with our continued growth & success.

Thanks everyone.

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

Porting comments over from G+:

John Waite
it was very hard to choose between html5 and javascript. To the casual user, the html5 improvements are perhaps more visible, but really both features are for the content creators to expand its ease of use. For me, the video conferencing feature would not even be used.
I agree with John 100%. It's a tough choice, but the HTML/CSS is very visible
Sébastien Thill
I chose javascript because I believe it would be easier for new users to copy code snippets, instead of learning the maptool specific language, however I agree HTML5 is more visible ;)
James Murrell
^ That was my biggest point in favor of JS. It's just more accessible than having a totally constructed native scripting language which, frankly, is pretty unlike other programming languages

 

James Murrell (Deus Vulture)

 

 

We don't want to affect anyone's opinion or decision over this, but personally (just me and not the entire team), I agree with going with HTML5, and one of my reasons is the same as you all, it's a front-facing feature that can be immediately taken advantage of. To my knowledge Roll20 and it's enthusiasts has a large repository of sheets over at GitHub. Porting those into Mote, would require a bit of tweaking particularly it's likely that these sheets make API calls into the service, to fetch data and the like (don't know, I haven't looked).

Furthermore, the "copy-paste" paradigm holds true for HTML/CSS, even more so in this context than JS. JS in Mote (and Sift) call more into the app, and we'll be controlling whatever calls out of the app (for security and the usual reasons). Calling into the app means a lot of the code forms found online will either be inapplicable or need modification to make it work. On our end, it's bit of work to modify the Mote Script API, for it to be accessible to JS (Idle Engine). If anyone previewed the MT source, the functions were designed as Singletons. JS for Java requires large aspects to be static in nature. That's about as technical as I want to go into, over this :)) But once it's done, and because of our move to standardize the API naming convention, people who've been using Mote for a while will have easy name recollection and will be productive out of the bat, once JS makes it in.

Now some of what I've just said holds true for HTML5. We'll have some work to do to properly rig Third Eye's DOM to the way Mote uses it's current HTML views. A lot of funky, only-in-MT/Mote handling of forms and custom protocols, will likely be dropped, in favor of a model we come up with. For example, the dialog and frame rolls won't be used. We'd rather not parse and evaluate script and properties (the way it's currently done now), that are found in the form code. We're also not going to do that funky event that updates the form/sheet, when a new token is selected, at least not right away. These things can be scripted in.

Before either JS or HTML5 makes it in, we're starting to modify the macro model, to accommodate the control necessary to manage how a macro's content gets used and/or executed. We'll talk about it as we go.

As for video conferencing, we notice that it's a feature that is more popular with "casual" groups than ones who have savvy members that can script, make forms and scour the internet for communication apps that suit their tastes. Often from our research, we see such groups want "everything" in one place, with a minimum of fuss, which is why Roll20 took off the way it did back then. Video Con in our apps just completes the suite, making it a more attractive package, in our opinion.

I hope people will keep the discussion going, and more will join. We figure that at least one of these features will make it out for testing soon; usable, albeit incomplete. 

[James Murrell]

Fundamentally you are correct about video conferencing. The trouble with present company is that you are seeking feedback from (mostly) GM programmers. Our interests are skewed, and may not entirely line up with the best overall decisions for the future of the platform. ^_^

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

You're right of course, at the very least, the only vocal part of our communities is made up of such users. We do have "casual" users, but they've been quite "shy", so far LOL

I know the team can do more in making how Mote us much more than MT (and rivals like Roll20 for that matter), but takes a lot of time and effort we don't have right now. We hoped for the longest time user creations would come out to prove this very thing for us :(

[James Murrell]

User creations will require an extended period of feature stability. I can speak for myself quite frankly when I say that I'd be happy to put together frameworks both large and small for Mote, but when a game engine (since it is that, for our purposes) is in its infancy, there is the risk of losing a lot of work due to changes or in-engine bugs. That's a substantial risk to take on a hobby. More so when it's not clear how many people would actually use and enjoy your work.

MapTool went through this process early on so there's no devastating surprise here. Fundamentally, I think what we need are small system-agnostic utility frameworks like Health / Damage managers, Inventory managers, etc. For MapTool, these served as a sort of baseline for the future development of full-on system frameworks.

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

I get the points you made, and they're all good. From my standpoint, Mote's been around for a while now. I think we've demonstrated we're willing to work closely with people to address conversion issues etc. One of the reasons we push out features (tested or untested) at a fast clip was no one really comes forward to put the brakes on it, because of something they're working on. If there were such users, we'd have gone the dev/stable route long ago. 

Going by what some users share when debugging issues, there are quite a number of soundly made creations, though since they're for personal use, they never get shared. There's also the existing creation base from MapTool. It's there, and we've rooted out the conversion issues we were made aware about. That only a handful have actually made the jump, speaks something about how many people are unaware of Mote, or are aware but have reasons not to use it.

Which is what I think is actually the heart of the issue, awareness. We just can't seem to find the right places to drop news and have it spread. And believe me, we've tried, especially on the KS campaigns. Perhaps if it's not posted as a KS/crowdfunder, more people will pay attention now, so we're likely going to do that run again. It's an exhausting task, that netted small results, which is why we're a quite reluctant about LOL.

[James Murrell]

You guys are killing it on feature support. Every time we have a problem, you hit it right away. You're absolutely right though, there's a lot of personal use creations here that don't get shared.

It's disheartening to launch something which is technically better than its competitors and yet have so much trouble with adoption (believe me, I've been there). But that's the reality of people -- our yearning for innovation is trumped by our need for sameness. But given time and reputation, you'll do fine. Mote offers both sameness and innovation, which is the ideal product.

More than anything, you guys should ramp up your public-facing aesthetic. Having a good logo and branding is a nice start as is consolidating your web presence. I think the sites need to look nicer and sleeker, with a consistent theme and more presentation of the application itself. My experience with showing Mote so far has been to have people look it up online, then immediately question the quality of the program based on their impressions of the web presentation and wonder where they can see previews of it.

On our end, I think it would be helpful for us to be more forthcoming with our framework projects. There are likely parts of my homebrew which could be modulated for system-agnostic use.

EDIT: Also, that's another reason why better custom HTML would go a long way. Useful system-agnostic tools are great. Beautiful and useful ones are stellar. ; )

[John Waite]

Here is a sample HTML/CSS character sheet I found here: https://codepen.io/evertras/full/YVVeMd

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

Great input, as always, James :)

I'm sorry if I can't do justice with my reply. It's been a long day for me, and I'm very exhausted.]

Regarding the sites, it's something we are painfully aware of. It should be obvious to anyone who's in or dabbles in the industry, that we're more backend than front :)), at least when it comes to our web content. I want to believe the current group has the chops to put out something nice, but it always gets sent to the back burner, due to the other aspects of the projects. No one can see it, of course, but Sandstorm, to us, is a technical feat we're quite proud of, and everything that's coming out now were worked on in parallel to Sandstorm.

To deal with that reality, we fell on using stuff we can rapidly cobble together (e.g. Weebly, Stock Bootstrap etc). Making a site is not hard; making a site with a theme unique to us, is a challenge we often pick up and drop LOL Personally, it's just so much meticulous , often tedious, work. I know we need it, but for the life me..ugh :)) Early on, we had some great drafts, but the guy we had working on it, dropped it due to an opportunity in Architecture.

Lastly, apart from coding, debugging and real-life demands, we literally have no time left to game with the app i.e. no good shots and previews. You did spark an idea, though. I think we should ask everyone to submit shots and/or previews of actual usage. It's the only way right now that we can put what you suggest, on the site. We just don't have the bandwidth, and something had to give LOL

I got to crash, people. I almost fell asleep typing the last lines hahaha. Sigh...

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

Thank you John, we'll check on it tomorrow. I'm dead on my feet right now :p