Obsidian Portal Reforged: Week 1

Originally published October 30, 2013

As I mentioned last week, Obsidian Portal relaunched their site this week with a revamped interface and the first of a series of massive improvements. As one might expect from most new releases (like some video games or health care), there were a lot of bugs as well. Here is what I think are the good, bad and the ugly sides of the update.

First let me say that I backed the Obsidian Portal Reforging Kickstarter at the Demi God: The Immortal tier. So I already have my life time Ascendant membership. I don't think that has been wasted and I'm happy with the money I spent.

The Good

So let's start with the plus side, or rather the stuff that was promised and is now available. The interface has been altered dramatically to improve the speed for interacting with your campaign site(s). Now when you log in you are brought to a dashboard to your current campaign (which you can alter if you want) with easy links to the various components of the site.

The dashboard highlights recent forum posts, adventure logs, and upcoming events in a quick understandable way. There are also nice plus (+) symbols which when clicked allow you to quickly add new content to those items. This pattern of making it easier to access the site for reading and editing carries over to all various pages.

I really like the top bar which allows easy access to different campaigns. I currently have four live game sites going so it is handy to switch between them quickly. Adding new pages (wiki, characters, items, forum posts, and so forth) is also easy to do without having to change to the relevant section. Plus you have a search field for your tags and titles.

The search functionality is very fast and easy to read which is handy when you need to reference things quickly. It also makes tagging of pages more worthwhile to allow better cross-referencing of the site.

I also like the faint transparency given to all pages which are for the GM only. Previously as a GM the only clue would be a marked check box when editing a page (or a complaining player). Apparently one of my early logs for my current campaign The Price has been in GM-Only mode for who knows how long. Oops.

Lastly we have customized URLs so that we have easily parsed links. This was actually a stretch goal of the Kickstarter that they were able to resolve earlier than expected.

The Bad

Not everything is perfect though. I'll get to most of the issues (which are clearly bugs) down below in the Ugly section. For now I want to talk about what I don't like.

First they changed the section links from a bar between the banner and the page to a side bar. This is only a minor issue for me, though it wrecks the look for my (now complete) Corrupted Transmission game. On the whole I like the sidebar better, it's just a shame that my customization work was ruined.

Second, the site colors are odd. I'm not sure why the color of the dragon logo, the section highlighting and the links all have to be the same color (and why the default is a terrible yellow color). I'm sure I can work around it but I think the link color and highlighting/logo could be separately designated. It is nice that setting the color is relatively simple.

Why do they all use the same green?

Third, there is a weird split between the website Dashboard sidebar and the main site sidebar. If you go the site pages you can navigate to: Dashboard, Front Page, Adventure Log, Wiki, Characters, Items, and Maps. But from the Dashboard you have the choices: Dashboard, Front Page, Forum, Calender, Adventure Log, Wiki, Characters, Items, Maps, and Settings. Hiding Settings seems reasonable but I'm less certain about Forums or Calender. If my group was more forum active (as the Space World game was) it might be handy to have it more accessible.

There are other items which I think are important but don't affect me personally: removal of subforums and hiding of comments to forum posts for example. These are impacting the some people in very serious ways. It looks like the Obsidian Portal team is working to resolve these issues as best they can. But some people may have to adjust their gaming for a few weeks until it is sorted out.

The Ugly

Now we get to bugs. I work in the software industry so I sort of expect these. I wouldn't say that these issues are particularly horrible for a fresh release (at least one without a wide beta test). They did use up a lot of my energy yesterday afternoon and I still have some work to do to get my stuff back to a reasonable level of functionality but on the whole they are manageable. From what I've seen they mainly affect existing campaigns.

First off all your old CSS needs rewriting. I'll be revisiting my post from last year on that in a few weeks once I have time to deal with it. This is less a bug and more a consequence of the site revamping. Things got renamed and code will need tweaking. In some cases it might not be worth the effort because there are easier ways to accomplish it. For example my backgrounds tended to be tiled images. These seem to be only partially working and not in the places I want them. For an Apocalypse World game I was in, it just seemed easier to use the original image to build a large custom background (with some added effects).

The second big problem for me was that the thumbnail images for many of the NPCs and items broke. I have not found any images that were lost so I guess whatever process they used for creating the thumbnails choked at points when they updated. I've fixed most of it, but the Price and its 40 odd characters was badly affected. I'm about to redo those images soon anyway when that game enters its second 'half' so I might just leave it for now. The Obsidian Portal folks are working on that problem as well.

Well I guess its good we were going to age all the characters a decade soon...

Third the banner specifications changed from 750 by 300 to something like 1000 by 220 which kind of wrecked my banners. There are a number of workaround though so if you look on the forums you should be able to get the CSS code to fix that.

There are plenty of other issues like timing out of uploads and tweaks needed to page width. I expect that the team will get them resolved in the next couple weeks. What's left should be solvable with some CSS.

Conclusion

Overall I like the result. Change is painful and often destructive. For me thankfully the damage is limited.