Overseer Studio Early access
Changelog
v0.17.0

Write your heart out - New rich-text markdown documents

Happy belated 4th of July to all of our friends in the USA! It's been about 2 weeks since our last major-ish update and I'm super excited to show off a number of new features and performance improvements.

Just like v0.16.0, this update comes jam-packed with new features, performance improvements, and a handful of bugfixes.

As always, please let me know what you think in Discord or by sending an email to tom@overseer.studio - With that said, let's dive in!

Document tile

A common theme in the past few weeks has been that the current Text tile is lacking in a lot of areas. To be clear, the Text tile was never meant to be a full rich-text editor, it was meant to serve as a cheap and easy way to label your GM screens. Many of you have been asking for more though, specifically many of you have been asking for a way to copy/paste articles from Obsidian into Overseer. I never wanted to build a full markdown editor but I'm also not one to turn down a challenge. Luckily there are a number of incredible programs out there to lift inspiration from which helped me create the new Document tile. The new tile takes inspiration from Notion and Obsidian and can easily be expanded in the future. As always, let me know what you think.

You can use slash commands ("/") to quickly create new sections or simply type plain ol' markdown. Just like any other tile, Document tiles can be placed on your GM screens or can be created as full-page tiles like the above.

Focus on hover

Some users have expressed that the controls of Overseer can be confusing at first. I totally understand this. The biggest problem I face when developing Overseer is making the interface intuitive but also predictable. For example, if you were hovering over a tile, how would Overseer know you want to pan the canvas vs interacting with the tile? How does Overseer know that the keyboard shortcuts you're pressing are meant for the your VTT tile, not Overseer? To avoid confusion, I've made a very deliberate decision that any tile you interact with must be "selected" first. When you select a tile, it purposely tells Overseer that anything you click or press within the tile is meant for the tile itself, not Overseer. Many users may know this state because it requires first clicking into a tile before clicking anything inside the tile.

That all said, some users would prefer if they didn't need to do a performative click before interacting with a tile. It would be better if they could simply hover over a tile and begin interacting with it.

We introduced a new setting called Settings > Session > Focus on hover that does exactly as the above states - when you hover over a tile it'll automatically select the tile for interaction without having to first click the tile.

While this makes it easier to interact with tiles on your canvas, it will naturally inhibit your ability to pan or zoom the canvas when hovered over a tile. To counter this, you can always press Escape+Escape to exit a tile's selected status.

Create and open sessions

This is a feature I believe most people would have expected Overseer to ship with initially but I never had the dedicated time to implement. Regardless, there are now two new options to the main menu: Open recent session > and New session.

You can now open any of your last 5 sessions from within the main menu or create a new session from an installed preset. The "Blank" preset is preinstalled with each copy of Overseer. You can browse the Marketplace for additional presets to install.

A note on Google SSO

This update includes some updates to trick Google SSO into behaving normally but please be aware that it can break at any moment. Google has been blocking third-party browsers from using it's authentication in the name of "safety" but until they start blocking scammers that call my personal cell phone 3x a day on a Google Voice number trying to access my accounts as aggressively as they are third-party browsers, they can shove their cries for safety. Their claim for safety is nothing more than monopolistic practices. This will likely be a cat-and-mouse game - I am prepared to win.

Let me know if you continue to experience issues. If you need to login to a site that has Google SSO and are still presented with an insecure browser warning, please try a different login mechanism for now.

Changelog

The complete list of features, improvements, and fixes are below. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out.

✨ Features

🔧 Enhancements

🚀 Performance

🐛 Bugfixes

📚 Documentation