Tired of different VTT's holding my assets hostage!
Started GM'ing sometime in the 80's and coding professionally around '97. Around the beginning of March I was running a game and my players went a direction I was totally unprepared for (you know what I'm talking about, lol) and I had to whip out a new map fast. I knew which map I wanted, but my VTT wanted me to stop, open an import window, upload the map to their cloud library, tag it and set grid options before I could even show it to the table. The momentum at that point was dead.
This wasn't the first time I'd encountered the situation but for some reason it was the first time that it clicked with me that most VTT's (all of them?) treat GMs like we don't know how to organize our own assets. I mean, I've never met a fellow GM who uses a computer to run their games that doesn't have some kind of preferred file structure for their maps and tokens so they can find their content quickly.
So, I've decided to build something that respects me and my players time. I'm calling it Solarsteinn. It's a local desktop app for IN PERSON ttrpg's. There are no browser tabs cluttering your screen and filling up your computers memory, and personally, I'm sick of subscription-based web apps, so there will be none of that with Solarsteinn. More importantly, there isn't a proprietary asset library - it just points at the folders you already have on your machine. For folders that aren't pointed (like something you just downloaded to your computer on-the-fly) just drag-n-drop it to the app and BAM! your map is live.
I'm spending the weekend tearing apart my prototype code to clean up the architecture, but I want to get input from fellow GMs and players who have to deal with us (yeah, I know you guys think we're a pain more often than not!) to make sure I build this right: What's the one clunky VTT feature that consistently ruins the vibe at your table?