For nearly a month and a half now, we’ve been bringing up updates on our progress on Rugged Reroll. I’m pleased to announce today that we will officially launch Rugged Reroll on December 16, 2013 – about one month from today. We’ll continue to update you on our progress as we near that date!
Today’s update is all about the Roll20 API. The API is a powerful tool for our Mentor-level users which allows you to fully customize and control the Roll20 experience for your players. You can see an incredible list of community-contributed scripts in the API forum, but in a nutshell, you can do things ranging from spectacular automatic intros for characters, to automating crunchy systems, or even automatically show gibberish to other players who don’t speak a language, and the proper translation to those who do.
However, the API is far from finished. Our goal is to unlock as many facets of Roll20 as possible for complete control via the API. In Rugged Reroll, we’re taking a nice, big step in that direction.
First off, it’s always nice to be able to customize existing objects as much as possible. So we’re opening up several new properties for you to edit, including the “represents” flag of tokens (linking a token to a Character), the “playerspecificpages” property of the Campaign (allowing you to split the party using the API), and the “avatar” and “imgsrc” properties of tokens, characters, and handouts. This also allows you to do things like change the side of a multi-sided token using the API. In order to protect your players from malicious scripts, there are some restrictions on the new properties (namely: you have to use an image hosted in your Roll20 Library, not an external site), but these shouldn’t prove very much of a barrier at all.
Secondly, we’re adding entirely new object types that you can now control, particularly those relating to the card deck system in Roll20. You can now view and modify some of the properties of the Deck, Cards, and Hands, allowing you to unlock new interactions such as whispering to a player when a card is played to their hand.
Thirdly, we’re adding some nice new utility functions to help you interact with players during games. In particular, you can now use the sendPing() function to send a “ping” to the tabletop just like a player can do by holding down the mouse button. You can show it as the color of an existing player or as a “yellow” color to indicate it’s from the API. And you can even “scroll” player windows to that location automatically (the same as a GM holding down “Shift” while pinging).
Finally, in Rugged Reroll you can now create all sorts of new objects from scratch. Graphics (tokens), Rollable Tables, Table Items, Paths (drawings), Text...and even more! We’re excited to see what sorts of new possibilities this opens up to our API users.
This new API functionality is available starting today on the Dev Server to our Mentors (and we’ve updated the Roll20 Wiki API section with all the new details), and they’ll be able to use it on all their games when Rugged Reroll launches on December 16th.
Happy gaming!