YARPS Changelog

This page is meant to outline any changes that have been released, so that you are aware of new features, bugfixes, and new application behaviors.

2020, August 7th (Version 0.3.2)
Overhauled Dashboard Catalog Feature & Configurable Color Schemes

With this update we are applying some changes to the Instance Dasboard, more precisely the Dashboard Catalog feature. Therefore we suggest to read the next section “Dasboard Catalog for Pinned Elements” in order to better understand what to expect from this update.

• Dashboard Catalog for Pinned Elements

  

  Because this new Dashboard behavior is replacing the current one, you may find your screen a little empty when navigating to your instance dashboard for the first time — no need to panic; all your entities are still accessible via the specific entity type’s list views or via the global search.

  

  With this updated implementation the dashboard catalog is focused on what you considered to be relevant for being visible. You now can tell YARPS explicitly whether an entity is important enough in order to show up on the dashboard by activating the “pin icon” for the corresponding entities. You will find this “pin icon” pretty much in any location where entities are listed or displayed in detail.

  Also the dashboard catalog related search is now focused on entities displayed on the dashboard but still manages to resolve and suggest interlinked entities the way it was used to do – provided that the interlinked entity is pinned to the dashboard as well.

  For your convenience we also implemented a configuration option in the instance settings so you can decide whether you want new entities to be automatically pinned to the dashboard.

  

• Selectable Color Schemes

  As quite a bunch of our users asked for different color schemes – especially schemes providing a little more contrast than our current YARPS CI branded template is able to offer – we decided to release this feature a little earlier then we actually planned.

  Based on the configured scheme you now can also tell in which instance you are currently located without checking the browser’s url or YARPS’ bottom bar.

  

  For now you can – by navigating to „My Account“ – set a different color scheme for each of your instances.

• Fixed: Attaching certain file formats to entities was prevented by an error message

  
  Thanks to your feedback, Hans-Joachim, we squished a bug that was preventing PDF and some other file formats from being attachable to entities, resulting in an error message when the file was selected in the filebrowser.

  So to anyone who experienced this type of message recently while trying to attach a PDF file, for instance: Give it another try. Should be working like a charm now.

• Fixed: Entity Picker for Scenes was not suggesting all available entities for instances with over 1000 entities in total

  

  Also a high five goes out to Massimo for reporting this one – which we would’ve had a hard time finding on our own.

  The Entity Picker for linking Entities to Scenes will now initially appear without showing suggestions in order to prevent performance issues with large Encyclopedias but therefore is returning all results based on the given term you are entering into the search bar.

2020, June 2nd (Version 0.3.1)
Bulk Editing of Entities, List Filter Improvements & UI Enhancements

Concerning this update, please bear in mind that your first page requests on your instance can appear to be slower than normal. Some features and changes we introduce require some background processing and as a result the server may take a couple seconds longer to respond when you visit an instance for the first time after this update. Please be patient – things should turn back to normal within a few minutes.

• Bulk Editing of Entities

  With this update we introduce the first version of our mass editing feature. Of course this feature right now is considered as a first iteration and will improve over time during the releases following. Therefore feel invited to share your impressions and feedback with us.

  
  

  In list views you now are presented with an additional array of buttons in addition to a select box for each of the list views items allowing you to either hide and reveal the entities you selected from the list all at once, or to switch into edit mode.

  

  In the mass edit mode you can set an attribute’s value for all of the selected entities at once.

  Annotations

  Please note that mass editing is currently available for world entities and for ones of the same type. In case you selected entities of various types the mass editing button will show as deactivated in order to prevent you from switching into mass edit mode.

  Also important for this features is our brief explanation about the specific behavior when changing values via the mass editing view, which you will find in the mass editing view itself as well. Please read these explanations first before performing changes via the mass editing in order to prevent accidental loss of information.

  • Existing values may not be shown

    The existing attribute values are only shown here if ALL entities share the same value for a given attribute. If no value is shown that does NOT mean that there is no existing value for certain entities. If you want to double check if an entity has a value for a given attribute use the preview link in the list of entities you are currently editing.

  • Values will be replaced

    The changes you make here will REPLACE all existing values for the given attributes for all entities you are editing. It is NOT possible to only ADD a value. For example: If one of the entities you are editing has a tag ‘A’ and another one has no tag at all you won’t see anything in the tag field here. If you add a tag ‘B’ here, once you save all entities will only have the tag ‘B’, the relation to tag ‘A’ will be lost.

  • Empty attributes will be ignored

    If you leave a given attribute empty here, it will NOT remove the existing values for the entities you are editing. That means it is at the moment NOT possible to use the bulk editing mode for removing the value of a certain attribute for the entities you are editing.

  • No on the fly drafts

    During bulk editing, it is not possible to create new entities from the search field of an entity relation attribute even if you are used to do this for the given attribute while editing a single entity.

  • Saving duration

    Although we will change this in the future, under the hood the saving process is at the moment partly repeated for all entities you are editing. That means the more entities you are editing the longer the save process will take. Please be patient, YARPS will tell you if something went wrong. As long as the loader is showing, YARPS is still saving your entities.

• List Filters now support “Not Set” Values

  

  In case you ever wondered for which entities you have not defined tags yet, we now offer a way to list those entities with just a few clicks. In any list views filter section you can now select “Not Set” as a value which is returning all the entities for which this attribute is undefined.

  Annotations

  In order to allow this type of filter value, you may occasionally find attribute filters in the list filter section which are not used for all of the entities displayed.

  

  This especially applies when showing all world entities (Encyclopedia › World › Show All)

  In case you apply a “Not Set” filter to the world entities list, all entities are shown for which the selected attribute has no value defined – even if the attribute you filtered for is not applicable for this specific entity type.

  In addition to this we find it worth noting that only attributes which are at least defined once in your instance are shown in the filter section.

• List Filters now support Plain Text filtering

  

  Now you can use a plain text query in combination with all other filter options available. This allows for easier filtering whenever you don’t require a complex combination of filter values. But of course the plain text field can also be combined with all other filter dropdowns available.

  Annotations

  In order to apply this filter please either hit return after you finished entering your desired filter value or click on the magnifying glass to the right of the input field. We are pointing this out because – in contrast to the other filter options – this one does not apply by just typing in a value yet.

• Workflow Improvement for Search Suggestion Dropdowns

  

  We improved our searchable Dropdowns a little concerning their behavior when making a selection.

  The updated implementation now clears your text input after you selected an entity out of the suggestion box so that you can immediately continue searching for another one. This way you can add multiple entities faster than before.

• Preview Page Navigation Improvement

  Navigating a preview page via a #-link caused the main content section to scroll erratically in certain cases.

  

  A thing of the past! Clicking on a #-link now will open the preview section on the right while scrolling the originating #-link in the left column to the vertical center of the viewport – also highlighting it properly with a decent glow, indicating that this link is currently active. Just like you are used to already when clicking on a relation attribute link.

• #-Link Navigation Improvement

  We also improved the behavior of #-links. For new #-links you create from now on you can use them like any other link you find on the web! This means right clicking offers to open this link in a new tab or copying the links url, as well as CTRL + click or CMD + click causes the browser to open a new tab with the #-links URL.

• Entities in “Draft Mode” Visualisation

  

  Before this update entities in draft mode were visually highlighted / differentiated by displaying them in a slightly transparent way.

  Because this could make an entity somewhat hard to read, we decided to change this into showing the entity’s header text in italic font, which should be a considerable improvement for readability. This change is propagated all over the YARPS platform.

• Entities in “Secret Mode” Visualisation

  

  In conjunction with our updated draft entity visualization we decided to also make secret entities easier to distinguish by adding a subtile yet sufficient visualisation to such entities. This might sound familiar to you, as we are using this type of hightlighting in the detail view’s relation attributes – which is one more reason to consolidate.

  Therefore all over the YARPS platform secret entities will display with a greyed tint as well so you can tell an entities visibility status with ease.

• Deletion & Renaming of Instances

  

  A feature we’ve been asked for regularly in the past finally finds its way into the YARPS platform. By today you are able to delete instances you no longer use. But beware of the consequences! Deleting an instance does exactly what it says. We won’t be able to recover any of the data once you confirmed the deletion

  

  Instead of deleting an instance you may only want to rename it? By today you can achieve this on your own as well. Just check the instance’s settings page and either set a new display name for your instance or even change the (sub) domain under which your instance is accessible.

  But please consider that changing your instance’s domain will render external links to not point towards your updated domain.

2020, January 24th (Version 0.2.9)
UI Enhancements & Kickstarter Survey Processing

• New Entity Action: Reveal Entity (Entity Menu of all entities)
  

  This is improvement worth noting for anyone who found himself to require way too much time in order to make an entity visible to other players. We just made this a two-click action, which also doesn’t require you to enter the edit mode.

  

  You can find this option by clicking on any entity’s Entity Menu, located in the top right of the entity’s the header box. The first menu option will show you the option Reveal to Players.

• New Entity Action: Reveal All Entities (Entity Menu of “Collection” entities)
  

  This also is a small improvement – yet – meant to reduce efforts of setting the visibility of larger amounts of entities by revealing a collection’s entities to other players all at once. In case of an import, for example, this should significantly reduce pain for your index finger.

  

  Similar to our Reveal Entity improvement, you can find this action by navigating to a collection of your choice – e.g. an import collection – and klick on the Collection Menu. The first navigation item will offer you to Reveal to Players, which will take effect for any entity that is part of this collection.

  Outlook: We will spread this feature for further use cases in the near future. For instance you could reveal all entities to players that are assigned to a certain Session, which we find to be a handy thing as well.

• New Entity Action Duplicate Entity (Entity Menu of all entities)
  

  This entity action is creating a complete duplicate of the respective entity which we find especially helpful when creating multiple, rather similar entities in one batch — yet not numerous enough to utilize our import feature. Also this is a significant step towards using template entities.

  

  By now you can have an entity that is only meant to represent the essence of your game world’s structure. By duplicating this entity in order to conveniently derive new entities from that blueprint, especially creating new worlds from scratch will be way easier for you to accomplish.

  Same as for the previous new actions introduced above, you can find this one in the entity’s Entity Menu located in the top right corner of the header box. There you will find the option Duplicate Entity.

  Outlook: This feature will be enhanced further in future releases. We are already planning to enable you in assigning a specific template to a certain entity type — we will keep you posted on this one for sure.

• New Text Editor Option for Text Alignment
  

  As noted by some of you it was not yet possible to have influence on text alignment for formatted text fields. By today you can find the text alignment options whenever our WYSIWYG editor is used. Just look out for the respective symbols.

• Instance Limit Update: 5 Instances per Account

  Some of you already managed to hit the ceiling concerning the three instances you could have for your YARPS account. After reassuring that performance should not suffer from raising the limit once more, you can now create up to 5 instances in your account.

• First Batch of Kickstarter Surveys Processed

  As we already received plenty of responds concerning the survey we recently sent to our Kickstarter backers, the first batch of email mappings has been processed with this update. Further details are given in a dedicated update on the YARPS Kickstarter project page

2020, January 16th (Version 0.2.8)
Usability Improvements & Kickstarter Pledge Assignments

Beside the noticable changes, which you find listed below, we are providing plenty of changes under the hood as well. Please therefore be patient when accessing an instance for the first time after the update. During this first instance access, initiated by you, the application will perform some background tasks which can cause the the application to appear a little slow for 60 seconds.

• New Attribute: Shared with players

  As a GM you now can share secret entities with certain non GM users via the entitie’s edit view.

• New Role: Player Editor
  

  This role can create entities that are flagged as Draft and are only visible to themselves and users with GM role (GM Secret & shared with the creator). This role’s users can edit most attributes of all entities they have permission to see. (visible entities & shared entities)

  Some attributes that would break the security level of this role are not editable of course. Uneditable attributes are status, visibility and shared with players.

• New Instance Settings
  

  Owners now can configure wether all players can edit their own player characters. Also instance owners now can configure wether all player editors can see secret entities (that are not shared with them) in lists, in order to prevent creation of duplicates.

  You can find these settings via the navigation bar in the bottom left, by navigating to Instance Settings

• Dashboard: New “My Shared Entities” Box for Players and Player Editors
  

  We created a new box section for Player and Player Editor roles that contains all the entities that are shared with tis particular user in order to provide easier collaboration – especially in conjunction with the introduced Player Editor role.

• Dashboard: New “Shared Entities” Box for GMs & Owners
  

  GMs and Owner roles also get a now box, giving a brief overview of what entities are shared with other players which usually would be hidden due to having the visibility set to GM Secret.

• Dashboard: New “Player-Created Drafts” Box for GMs & Owners
  

  In order to keep track of what has been created by your comrades with the Player Editor role assigned, this box shows all of the draft entities created by them.

• Users can now rename all entity types
  

  Users can now rename all entity types in the respective entity types detail view which you can navigate to via the Encyclopedia menu item.

• New Entity Type: “Other”

  for Characters, Creatures, Factions, Items, Background Articles you now can also set “Other” as a type.

• Manage Boxes and Fields

  It is now possible to edit options of most existing dropdown / multiselect attributes. Before this release it wasn’t possible to edit options once you initially created them.

• Bugfix: Infinite Loading for Attribute Settings

  Attribute settings form now should always loading correctly, whereas before loading sometimes resulted in an infinite loop.

• Kickstarter Pledge Assignment

  Our Kickstarter backers can now view and confirm their KS Pledge in the Customer Account Dashboard for their respective YARPS account. Users who confirmed their Kickstarter pledge will have their Idea Hub Votes assinged automatically.

  We will provide further guidance regarding this in a dedicated update on Kickstarter.

• Changelog

  The changelog is now accessible from the help menu within the YARPS application