moulinette

December releases (Update : general availability)

Added 2022-12-22 14:47:51 +0000 UTC

I'm very excited to show you the latest improvements, developed over the past few weeks. Most of them come from your ideas and requests ♥.

Tell me what your favorite or expected changes are in the comment section!

Due to the large number of changes, it will first be available as beta releases and must be installed manually (see links at the end of the post) until I get the chance to test them on The Forge, fix reported issues and update the documentation.

1. Creator & pack pickers

For anyone with tens of thousands of images, it quickly becomes difficult to navigate and find the desired asset. Have you ever raged trying to click on the tiny scrollbar?

I re-implemented the drop-down list entirely in order to make it the fastest and easiest to use :

No scrollbar. The lists scroll automatically as you move your mouse to the top or bottom of the list.
Icons to distinguish cloud images from local ones
Keyboard navigation (tab, arrow up/down)

2. Group packs with the same name

Creators prepare packs based on their tiers. By doing so, you might end up with multiple packs with almost the same name. It makes it then less convenient to browse assets. The new version combine these packs together and let you browse all assets at the same time. The example below illustrates how packs with 4 variants (HD, 4K, summer, winter) are merged into one.

3. Improved breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs / folders have been improved with icons and different sizes to help quickly read them.

4. Search : whole word match

This new toggle allows you to search and match whole word only. When do you need it?

When you search for "male" and don't expect "female" results
When you search for "goblin" and don't expect "hobgoblin" results
When you search for "fly" and don't expect "flying creatures" results

Simply enable the "not equal" toggle to enable "whole word match".

5. Search : regular expression (advanced)

Power users can even use regular expressions to refine their searches.
For example, if you can use "(green|red)" to search all assets available in green or red.

6. Optimized footer

What do users want most after fast browsing and efficient searching? Maximum space to display the results ! I re-implemented the footer by :

Replacing the old options with the new ones (already used by the faceted search)
Hiding the logo and references to Moulinette
Hiding the actions (buttons) that you only use occasionally
Adding an gear icon to show the actions, logo and links to Moulinette

7. Export / Import / Delete Soundboard

New actions have been developed to export a soundboard into a file and re-import it in another world. Note that only the configuration is exported and that the files (images, sounds) must have been downloaded beforehand. This is always the case on the same server (worlds share the same files).

8. Preview audio without downloading it

The main interest of being able to preview a sound or music is to quickly confirm that it fits to your game. I changed the implementation to play it directly from the cloud (almost instantaneous) without the need of downloading it first. It saves valuable time especially when hosted on The Forge.

9. Create and render an article from an image

If you want to quickly show an image to your players without placing it on a map, you can use the "Create article" function. It will automatically generate an journal article for that image and you can then use the standard action "Show Players".

10. Support for Adventures packs (for creators)

Moulinette Cloud now supports modules containing "Adventure" type packs. This feature is primarily intended for creators who use this type of format and wish to import their modules to distribute the content to their users. Note that Moulinette still specializes in searching and importing individual assets (ie. one scene at a time). But it supports adventures when combined with Scene Packer.

11. Game icons : harmonized look-and-feel

This module was one of the first developed and got very little improvement over time. The module has been revised to adopt the look of the other modules: