Non CT tokens cover CT NPCs

[Kelrugem]

<calm voice>I already paid said developers, even when their extensions only work for DND or when they removed Pathfinder support because of the DMS Guild debacle. Among others I paid for two extensions that are meant to allow usage of tokens as spell-effect areas by players and one meant for token stacking. None of these are usable in FGU at this time.

So my money is now invested into a new extensions feature that is meant to pull more money out of me while the extensions features I already paid for are not usable anymore. How do you suggest I should feel and react about this? Genuine question.

I understand the frustration. But there is not much else to suggest right now, I personally would not recommend such extensions right now. They were often originally built for FGC and are seemingly not properly updated. (I hope those extensions were not advertised as FGU extensions)

The token stuff and FGU in general is of course still developed, so, features will still be added of course; about the spell template, see that post here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...l=1#post571391

Right now, I'd try to stick how FGU handles those things. Do not use those extensions, maybe even ask for a refund because they are not proper for FGU. Then use pointers for those things, or use image assets for spell effects etc (especially for long-lasting spells; when your players often cast certain spells, then I would already drag&drop those assets on the map and hide them before the actual game started)

That is how those things work right now. Even when an extension changes this, that extension may often break because they touch a regularly-updated field of FGU

[LordEntrails]

<calm voice>I already paid said developers, even when their extensions only work for DND or when they removed Pathfinder support because of the DMS Guild debacle. Among others I paid for two extensions that are meant to allow usage of tokens as spell-effect areas by players and one meant for token stacking. None of these are usable in FGU at this time.

So my money is now invested into a new feature that is meant to pull more money out of me while the features I already paid for are not usable. How do you suggest I should feel and react about this? Genuine question.

Thanks for the calm voice, hopefully you'll read my reply in the same vein.

Honestly? Like you made a poor decision buying an extension for a feature you wanted in a program that was in beta or early release and undergoing rapid changes. That would make me frustrated and annoyed, at myself, not at someone else. And here's why -

Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are my assumptions; You are smart enough to know that community extensions, free or paid, are not the responsibility of SmiteWorks to make work in FG. And that because they require community developers to be dependent upon SW developers and what they do with the code, that it will always be challenging forcommunity extension to maintain support. You also know that FGU is a new program that is under going rapid development with new features that change regularly. And maybe you knew that token stacking issues were an issue in FGC, and certainly that they were in FGU since you bought extensions to change the behavior.

So I (and probably everyone else) understand why you might want the FGU behavior changed. But even though it is not ideal, and may be so far from ideal that you chose not to use the work arounds, but they exist if you chose to use them.

I think you are also aware that from the discussion in this thread that very few users tend to be particularly bothered by this issue. Where I also think you are aware of the numerous community developers & even more GMs affected by the DMsG / Forge development issue. And the very popular dynamic lighting/vision and how many folks are clamoring for. Do you really think this issue is more important than those two? And then can you, or do you consider the larger business challenges of software development? Because, honestly, you come across on the forums that every time you find something that doesn't work the way you want it to, that you seem to think the SW devs should drop everything and solve your issue, regardless of the opinions of any other community members or the business realities SW actual has to deal with.

Look, I know you may not have reason to trust the business decision SW makes because you may not agree with them or have enough experience with them for them to have yet earned that trust and so you may not feel they are prioritizing things appropriately. I think you know where I'm going with this, and not sure I've got much more to say that would be constructive.

I will say that my approach to things is this; I report bugs when I find them, I make suggestions when I think of them, and I vote on other suggestions that I would find valuable. And then I don't worry about it. It's not in my control, so I'm not going to spend my emotional energy on it.

[Weissrolf]

Me buying an extension is a bad thing, but SW prioritizing time to develop "The Forge" to sell me the same extension is a good thing? There is some double-standard here.

Especially the Spell Token Extension seems to do what it advertises and worked as expected when I last tested it. Putting any assets token on a map with or without an extension does not work as expected, though, since they keep covering CT NPCs.

The latter is a question of which tokens should be on top of other tokens. I can think of various instances where I would want asset tokens to be at the very bottom of the token stack, below CT tokens. This is how it currently works for PC CT tokens, which are on top of all other tokens, including asset tokens. Why would NPC CT tokens be below asset tokens by default? (other than maybe marking them with some cross or letter tokens on top of them, which seems rather niche)

And to underline this again: I am not asking SW to make an extension work, I am asking to make standard token functionality work in a way that it does *not* inadvertendly cover NPC CT tokens.

I am mildly annoyed about the workarounds being suggested as viable long-term options. Users need a better UI experience, less clicking and more convenience while handling the game. Having users click a myriads of buttons and sub-options to use long-term workarounds is the opposite of where SW (or anyone) should go with their software.

[Kelrugem]

Me buying an extension is a bad thing, but SW prioritizing time to develop "The Forge" to sell me the same extension is a good thing? There is some double-standard here.

Especially the Spell Token Extension seems to do what it advertises and worked as expected when I last tested it. Putting any assets token on a map with or without an extension does not work as expected, though, since they keep covering CT NPCs.

The latter is a question of which tokens should be on top of other tokens. I can think of various instances where I would want asset tokens to be at the very bottom of the token stack, below CT tokens. This is how it currently works for PC CT tokens, which are on top of all other tokens, including asset tokens. Why would NPC CT tokens be below asset tokens by default? (other than maybe marking them with some cross or letter tokens on top of them, which seems rather niche)

And to underline this again: I am not asking SW to make an extension work, I am asking to make standard token functionality work in a way that it does *not* inadvertendly cover NPC CT tokens.

I am mildly annoyed about the workarounds being suggested as viable long-term options. Users need a better UI experience, less clicking and more convenience while handling the game. Having users click a myriads of buttons and sub-options to use long-term workarounds is the opposite of where SW (or anyone) should go with their software.

The Forge thing is mainly a community support right now because a lot of people suddenly got into problems with respect to that. It may have been differently when people never would have started selling extensions on DMSguild. Moreover, the Forge is also mainly about just supporting an easier updating of extensions and reducing workload of support questions, of those many arise from broken extensions When there would be no forge, there would be a lot of people saying that they want their support of extensions back and complain about that. So, ignoring that forge stuff may just lead to other problems; hence, it is not fair to say that there are "double-standards". It should be clear that this is an exceptional situation.

The tokens are not really intended to used directly from the assets, just for assigning them to sheets; I never had problems with that, but seemingly my expectations about that was in alignment in how FG works. Not saying, that it would not be nice to have some z-axis for the token stacking related stuff. Just saying, that tokens are not intended to be used like that right now, which is why there are pointers for that, and now also support of layering for image assets to shift the stacking stuff there. And at some point in the future there might be that mentioned z-axis Until then I really suggest not using those extensions to avoid dissatisfaction

[Weissrolf]

I am not against The Forge, I like enhancing my UI experience by using a variety of extensions and will make ample use of it. But when people are told not to expect extensions to work properly then how can The Forge = Extensions shop be a priority over basic functionality fixing?

I also do not agree that tokens are not meant to be dragged to maps directly. It worked that way in Classic and it still works that way in Unity. Only that in Unity asset tokens *always* cover Combat Tracker NPCs now, there seems to be no way around it. There also is no easy one button way to using tokens on image layers, even less so without forfeiting map screen estate.

Personally I would be fine with asset tokens just being at the bottom of the stack until a better solution is found. PC tokens on top, NPC tokens below PC tokens and asset tokens below NPC tokens. This sounds like a one-number-source-code-edit to me, unless the code is messed up.

Concerning the Spell Token extension: it allows players to easily drag properly scaled spell area tokens to the map themselves without any messing around. It's a simple drag & drop action, period. No GM based workaround messing with more complex layer functions, but an easy player based functionality. Should I need an extension for that? No. But since I do need one and even have to pay for it I would like for FG at least not getting in the way of its proper functionality because FGU's asset tokens mess up NPC tokens.

[LordEntrails]

Me buying an extension is a bad thing, but SW prioritizing time to develop "The Forge" to sell me the same extension is a good thing? There is some double-standard here.

I think you are making assumptions that have no basis. The concern over developers not being able to gift/assign/grant previous customers copies of their extensions when available on the Forge has already been discussed. I have faith that such capability will be available. You choice what you chose to believe may come.

I am mildly annoyed about the workarounds being suggested as viable long-term options. Users need a better UI experience, less clicking and more convenience while handling the game. Having users click a myriads of buttons and sub-options to use long-term workarounds is the opposite of where SW (or anyone) should go with their software.

Long term? Don't know how long that is. Some folks would consider a week a long term solution, some a decade. SW has made no statements as to when this might be addressed. To pretend it is the only issue they need to address as they continue to enhance, adapt and improve FG is disingenuous.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

[Weissrolf]

Anything "will eventually" without time-frame given is a long-term issue, even more so after nearly 2 months of nothing more being mentioned in the department.

Could anyone explain why asset tokens permanently cover NPC tokens? Is this an intentional design decision that follow some logic I fail to understand at this point?

Would it be hard to change FGU's current permanent stacking order to place NPC tokens on top of asset tokens instead of below (like much more work other than changing a single z-order line of code from 1-2-3 to 1-3-2)?

Please leave religion out of this, we have enough world problems based on religion already.

[Kelrugem]

I am not against The Forge, I like enhancing my UI experience by using a variety of extensions and will make ample use of it. But when people are told not to expect extensions to work properly then how can The Forge = Extensions shop be a priority over basic functionality fixing?

I also do not agree that tokens are not meant to be dragged to maps directly. It worked that way in Classic and it still works that way in Unity. Only that in Unity asset tokens *always* cover Combat Tracker NPCs now, there seems to be no way around it. There also is no easy one button way to using tokens on image layers, even less so without forfeiting map screen estate.

Personally I would be fine with asset tokens just being at the bottom of the stack until a better solution is found. PC tokens on top, NPC tokens below PC tokens and asset tokens below NPC tokens. This sounds like a one-number-source-code-edit to me, unless the code is messed up.

Concerning the Spell Token extension: it allows players to easily drag properly scaled spell area tokens to the map themselves without any messing around. It's a simple drag & drop action, period. No GM based workaround messing with more complex layer functions, but an easy player based functionality. Should I need an extension for that? No. But since I do need one and even have to pay for it I would like for FG at least not getting in the way of its proper functionality because FGU's asset tokens mess up NPC tokens.

I see the problem with extensions But that is more like a problem of their developers, they should not advertise something which does not work as intended/expected (or at least mention it in some disclaimer); SmiteWorks cannot track all those extensions and their usablility. Even with the Forge, users should probably still check whether or not extensions work as intended (think of that like modding a game where similar issues are given)

I would also like that players can use their own spell tokens, which is why I linked Moon Wizards previous answer to that It came up as a feature, its priority is just certainly lower than the priorities of dynamic lighting and the forge; that spell token feature may come later then, and it would be certainly nice when players can do similar things, too Since the development of the Forge already started, I doubt that there will be reordering of those priorities

[Weissrolf]

This is not a thread about extensions (even though they are affected), though, this is a thread about a FGU issue. Asset tokens *always* cover NPC tokens, they should not.

The problem happens without extensions being installed, it should not happen. This affects basic functionality, which ought to work, so I consider it a bug.

[Trenloe]

This is not a thread about extensions (even though they are affected), though, this is a thread about a FGU issue. Asset tokens *always* cover NPC tokens, they should not.

The problem happens without extensions being installed, it should not happen. This affects basic functionality, which ought to work, so I consider it a bug.

Then I suggest you take the only post by a developer in this thread (post #3) as the current situation. Everyone else who has been posting in this thread has been offering workarounds and opinions. And, as has been stated a few times, this is not a priority for the developers - even if *you* consider it a big priority. Sorry, but that's the fact - there are much higher priorities on the developer list at this time. A post #3 said: "Token stacking will eventually be addressed so that tokens are stacked by ownership, then last moved by user."

Most people will admit that it will be nice when the stacking order is addressed - as Moon Wizard says it will be. Until then a few options for workarounds have been mentioned in this thread - I know you don't like them, but that's where we are right now.