April releases (Beta)

I am delighted to present to you the improvements that have been developed in the past weeks. They mainly focus on the indexing process and optimizations for The Forge (hosting provider) and S3 (file storage integration)

As usual, new versions are available in beta for those who wish to test them. They will be made "general release" in 2 weeks when they have been confirmed as stable. Use the following Manifest URLs :

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SvenWerlen/moulinette-core/Features/Sources/module.json 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SvenWerlen/moulinette-tiles/Features/Sources/module.json 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SvenWerlen/moulinette-scenes/Features/Sources/module.json 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SvenWerlen/moulinette-sounds/Features/Sources/module.json 

1. Indexes are now world-specific

With the introduction of source management, the configurations are now specific to each of your worlds but the index file was the same for all worlds. This led to confusion. A world corresponds to a game campaign with its own system and its own universe. It is therefore normal that a GM would configure sources specific to that campaign (ex: Fantasy vs SciFi). 

Changed : you need to re-index tiles, scenes and sounds to regenerate world-specific indexes. Moulinette will display a warning about the missing index.

2. Export & Import sources configurations

Some sources are common to several or even all of your worlds (ex: Wilderness Assets). It's then frustrating if you have to reconfigure these sources for each of your worlds. 

Changed: you can export sources configurations and import them into another of your world.

3. Index folders from multiple sources

Although Moulinette allowed to configure indexes based on directories from different sources, indexing only worked according to your main configuration:

• Self-hosting : only assets from "User Data" were correctly indexed
• The Forge : only assets from "My Asset Library" were correctly indexed
• S3 configured : only assets from external storage were correctly indexed

Fixed: this problem has been corrected and it is now possible to index directories from all sources available to your server : User Data, Core Data, S3, Asset Library and Bazaar (The Forge). 

4. Toggle generation of thumbnails for scenes

Source management introduced the ability to index images as a map/scene and generate thumbnails to speed up browsing and searching them. Unfortunately, the thumbnail generation relies on a FoundryVTT API which is not optimal and can lead to a server crash if your images are too large. Also, the generation of thumbnails considerably slowed down the indexing process which could sometimes take several minutes or even more than an hour according to what I have been told.

Changed : 

• A configuration has been added to switch off the generation of thumbnails. Indexing will then be much faster but browsing large images will be slow then (due to missing thumbnails)
• Moulinette automatically skips the generation of thumbnails for images that are larger than 10 MB.
• Moulinette skips the generation of thumbnails which already exist. This speeds up further index updates by only generating thumbnails for new images.

5. Optimizations for The Forge (hosting provider) & S3

For all those who use The Forge to host their games, I worked to improve the indexing capabilities to better support its specificities :

Changed & Fixed :

• Reduce the size of the indexes (requires 90%+ less space & memory)
• Index scenes from enabled modules
• Caching issue which required hard refresh after indexing

6. Download Scenes in top-level directory

Some of you have asked if it was possible to disable the creation of folders when downloading a new scene. I added a new configuration which lets you choose if you want Moulinette to organize scenes into folders or not.