What does MapTool 1.4 offer?

[MeMeMe]

Hi, I was a maptool user back in the days of 1.3, and am looking at picking it up again.
I have looked through the dev forum and havent been able to figure out what 1.4 offers over 1.3. Is there are comprehensive feature list, or description of differences anyway?

Also, I must say, browsing the forums outside of the user creation section gives the impression that its a mostly dead forum, and some potential users will leave as a result. There are so many stickied posts with really old dates, its easy to miss that there are newer posts. It might be an idea to have someone look over them and see which ones are really needed.

[Full Bleed]

Hi, I was a maptool user back in the days of 1.3, and am looking at picking it up again.
I have looked through the dev forum and havent been able to figure out what 1.4 offers over 1.3. Is there are comprehensive feature list, or description of differences anyway?

Development since 1.4 has been slow. Some of that is because the current crop of developers just aren't very active. Another part of it is because the most active developer has forked most of his work and, despite some assertions to the contrary, much of it has not made its way to MT proper for a variety of reasons.

Probably the best way is to look at what's been done since 1.3 is to look at the 1.4 Announcement threads and see the posted Change Logs. They are pretty quick reads.

1.4.0.0 (9/15)
1.4.0.1 (4/16)
1.4.0.2 (5/16)
1.4.0.3 (5/16)
1.4.0.4 (5/16)
1.4.0.5 (6/16)

Development Versions
1.4.1.6 (6/16)
1.4.1.8 (8/17)

And 1.4.1.9 is supposed to be released "soon."

Also, I must say, browsing the forums outside of the user creation section gives the impression that its a mostly dead forum, and some potential users will leave as a result. There are so many stickied posts with really old dates, its easy to miss that there are newer posts. It might be an idea to have someone look over them and see which ones are really needed.

You're right.

The forums aren't as active as they used to be. And there isn't anyone really keeping things tidy and buttoned up.

And while I wouldn't want things to be "deleted", some stuff could certainly be moved to an Archive section.

[Jagged]

The forum isn't as active these days cuz all the cool kid are using Discord. Come join us.

As an old fart, I will still be here stinkin' up the forums

[Azhrei]

Personally, I bemoan the use of Discord over the forums. I have a terrible time trying to find anything when I want to review past conversations, for example. Discord seems to be a "stream of consciousness" type of chat system, while the forums tend to be more organized and easier to reference.

But I'm an old fart too, so maybe it's a generational thing.

[MeMeMe]

I dont have any interest in discord, it's too real-time for me.

Thanks for the announcement links, I'll check those out.

[Jagged]

I am quite the fan of Discord. Mainly because my group use it as our Voice over IP client. For which it is very good. Much better than anything else I've used and much much better than Skype

Its probably worth explaining the reasons behind the current release delays. You may be aware that Oracle has changed the way they release Java to the public and how they manage (or rather no longer manage) support.
These changes have unfortunately had a massive impact on our deployment and build process. Libraries we rely upon have dropped out of the Oracle curated set. Not all of which have been picked up by the Open Source projects. Plus the build services we are using are also playing "catch-up" with these changes, so while we can build on one platform we can't build on all. ARgh!

At the moment the next release contains mainly bug fixes, but also:

• new features in the Draw Explorer,
• improvements to the behaviour of Hex grids,
• improvements to Auto Save,
• improvements to the Italian translations and
• possibly the ability to draw lies with square corners!

[aliasmask]

possibly the ability to draw lies with square corners!

Sounds like witchcraft to me.

I've been using many different apps to run campaigns, but ever since EpicWords had issues (they seem fine for now) I've been looking another comparable resource. We ended up just doing wordpress with a bunch of plug-ins but it never quite hit the mark for me. Mainly for campaign management it's nice to have your own forum, wiki and calendar that notifies the players of times and sends an email reminder. And then there is the voice chat for the game which we used google hangouts. Mostly because it was less annoying than skype and more reliable at the time. But discord is the new norm now. To me, it use more like an instant messenger and I get real tired of popups. But that was before I discovered the #mute for each channel.

But now, I'm thinking of ditching google hangouts for discord so it can take over the chat, forum and wiki part of the game. It can also do the reminder, so that's a plus.

[Jagged]

I would love to do a Discord Plugin for Maptool, to take the chat off to a discord channel and maybe sign is using Discord too.
As an option of course.
But realistically I don't have the time at the mo

[Yarberry]

Does something like that take a lot of time to program, Jagged? That's a shame, considering how popular Discord is nowadays. I think it would be so neat to have that.