December Updates

I’m getting ready for several play-testing sessions with my kids in my upcoming time-off, so I’m rushing to get as many things done in HEXROLL as possible:

Random wilderness encounters

random encounters

In addition to the previous ‘feature encounters’, all landmark hexes will now have a random encounters table for when exploring or camping. Some of the landmarks could be tied in with the encounter by the referee. For example, if there’s a destroyed village in the hex, it could be that a group of Bandits or Orcs pillaged the place and are still lurking around.

Printing-friendly output

print layout

Both the layout and specific element formatting should now look much better when trying to print a sandbox using the browser. This is still far from perfect (for example, my browser still cannot generate a usable PDF table-of-contents), but it’s a start.

To check this out, press Ctrl+P in your browser and make sure you enable ‘Print Backgrounds’:

printing dialog

Optimized images

I’ve moved away from using PNG images and started using WEBP images. This reduced the total size of any generated sandbox page by a factor of ×7 (from about ~14Mb to ~2Mb). It should make the pages more responsive in some tablets or phones.

Sandbox Persistence/Anchoring/Permalinking

Sandbox anchoring using the ⚓ icon in the sidebar will store a sandbox in its own unique URL so it can be revisited and shared (storage courtesy of our Patreon supporters).

ZIP file download

You can now download any generated sandbox as a ZIP file using the download link in the sidebar.

Duplicates avoidance

Due to the sheer size of the content, duplicate region names, faction names or other names did eventually pop out here and there. I’ve added an experimental duplicates avoidance feature that should help get rid of these in most cases.

On-demand generation with parameters

I already have the core of this working, but it will require more computing resources from the server so I would need to wait before making this generally available. This feature will also allow content creators to experiment with their own full version of the sandbox generation model.