Updated interface and other enhancements?

Support
#1

I was wondering if there are plans to upgrade the interface? It’s rather old fashioned, and there are many things that should be upgraded using newer languages.
So far there are a lot of content updates, but nothing for the interface.

Here are a few things I’d love to see:

  1. Option for automatic updates/update all. Currently, when I want to update something, I need to go to the settings, click the reload button, then go to the soundsets and update them one by one. It would be helpful to have an automatic update option, or at least an “update all” button.
    I am also not clear about how the updates work. When an update is available, is the whole soundset downloaded again? Not just the updates?
  2. Push notifications for updates. If we can’t have the above for whatever reason, the “Reload” button should be removed. We already have the flags in the main interface, so the system knows which soundsets need updating, we do not need the “Reload” on top of that. We just need a “download” button.
  3. A “Close” button is nice, but modern interfaces should allow for automatic closing of windows when touching the screen or mouse outside the windows. This will allow quicker closing of the smaller windows. For example, if I am in the update windows, I need to press close to get back to the settings window, then I need to press close again to return to the main window. It would be easier to just press outside the smaller windows, which will close them all and return to the main interface.
  4. On-player order change. With newer interfaces, we should have the option to reorder moods/elements by drag and drop on the player itself, without needing to go to the online soundset creator. The changes should then be pushed to the online creator so it will be updated accordingly.
  5. Mood groups. We should have a way to group moods together in the same soundset. For example, I have a soundset for Baldur’s Gate’s upper city, which has moods for the different neighborhoods, specific locations and some combat moods.
    It would be helpful if I could group those together for ease of use. Even just surround the group with a border of some kind to make it easier to recognize in the player.

I’m sure I’ll have more ideas in the future.

#2

Hey @nimrod_yanai,

All good sensible suggestions. I have noted them down in our system.

For the past 2 years MOST of the passion and dev person hours have gone into improving use experience in the Master UI. We DO have a UI re-look on the cards for the older Fantasy Player, but with limits of hours and dev money, it’s still not something that is super high up on the list yet.

Is there any reason you are not using the Online Player for playback as well as authoring?

Did you get in on the New Search Beta = there have been SIGNIFICANT improvements in finding stuff with this.

Here’s my favourite video showing how I go about live DJing in the Online Player… (not including the new search)


It did take me a while to move over from the Fantasy Player to the Online Player… but once I did I have never really looked back (one of the reasons for the focus on THAT interface).

Hope this all makes a bit of sense and gives you a bit of context.

#3

Honestly I never really thought about using the online interface for live games.
The main issue I would have is that the base functionality is different. In the player, I have all the soundsets on the left, then I can click one and see the list of moods etc.
In the online player, once I press a soundset it will present the list on moods INSTEAD of the soundsets list, which makes much more clicks to move from one soundset to another.

Just to make you understand the problem, my current game has 15 soundsets (currently, more might be added) that I navigate through while DMing. So you can imagine, even two extra clicks are a lot for me :slight_smile:

1 Like
#4

Also BTW the online player is very unreliable. It crashes for me often.

#5

Just a suggestion, my other half is a DM and has LOTS of different SoundSets for his entire Curse of Strahd campaign (around 20 SoundSets currently if I recall, it could be more now tbh) but he likes to tweak things and customise them, so what he’s done is customise them in the Online Master Interface, put them into a Campaign using the Campaign Builder on the website, that then shows up in the Online Player and he can quickly switch between his SoundSets when he’s playing. Does that make sense? Might be an idea for you to try out.

I’m the same as Ben, as soon as I learned how to use the Online Player and Master Interface, I’ve had no need to go back to the Fantasy Player at all but everyone is different.

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#6

If you are experiencing crashes you should definitely be reaching out to the support email. 1000s of people and US are using the Online Player every day with good reliability. Why don’t we take some steps to see if we can get you sorted?

2 Likes
#7

Thanks Vicki!
I probably didn’t explain that I am using campaigns :slight_smile: All of my soundsets are custom and in two different campaigns (with different custom soundsets in each).

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#8

I updated the online player, so I’ll see if it still crashes as often as it did and if it does, I’ll contact support.

1 Like
#9

Sounds like a plan! :slight_smile:

‘sounds’… see what I did there!!! :wink: