Owlbear Rodeo 2.0 Beta Patch 4

Patch 4 for Owlbear Rodeo 2.0 Beta is now out with some networking changes and GIF patches.

Networking Changes

It’s not a stretch to say that there have been some networking problems over the Owlbear Rodeo 2.0 Beta so far. There’s been issues with tokens being stuck in the top left corner and general issues with scenes not changing properly. The most concise way to put it is there has been networking trouble and with this patch we’ve made improvements to tackle these problems.

We're sorry for the inconvenience that these problems may have caused you and appreciate your patience while we’ve been working to fix them.

Essentially, our network changes boil down to us bringing everything back under our domain. We had originally relied on third-parties to bring certain networking features to you. We’re a small team of two people and we had hoped that shifting some of our networking would help us take some load off our plates. It’s safe to say that this hasn’t been the case.

The benefit of the networking changes means that some things are going to be faster. For instance, previously on Scene changes you had two stages for loading and this meant slow Scene change times. Now we can do optimistic updates (just like in our asset system) and switch to your new Scene immediately.

A small disclaimer here, a Scene may take a little longer to display on the players side and what is being shown in the video is from the DM/GM side.

GIF support changes

Some users have reported GIFs not loading properly and even causing Scenes to hang, particularly ones exported from Photoshop.

We’ve patched this by changing the GIF rendering library we use. GIF is an older image specification and not easy to implement, meaning that you’re limited in options on the libraries that you can use to render GIFs on webpages (and even then some GIFs just won’t work). Not all GIFs are built equal.

What’s next

PAX Australia

We’re going to be at PAX on the 7th October and while we don’t have a booth we will be wandering around for the day. If you happen to spot us we’re happy to have a chat!

OBR 2.0 Plugin API/SDK

Work on the new Plugin SDK has begun and we’re excited at the possibilities that it could unlock for our users. Generally availability is still a while off yet but here's a small teaser of an initiative tracker plugin made to test the SDKs capabilities.

OBR 2.0 Beta Roadmap

We promised a roadmap for OBR 2.0 Beta a while ago but it was pushed back so that we could focus on the networking changes.  We’re working on it and it should be made available soon.