Ambient Director

Fire Ambient Director scenes, events and sounds straight from your session notes. Write an inline token and it renders as a clickable button — tap it while you read to switch the table's lights + music, without leaving the note.

The party reaches the gates of Stonebrook. `sm:scene:city`

As they haggle in the market you can drop in a `sm:sound:crowd` or, when the guards
turn hostile, `sm:event:alarm-bell`.

What it does

• Inline buttons in your notes from a compact syntax (below). Clicking fires a background request to your server (via Obsidian's requestUrl, so no CORS issues and no browser tab opens) and shows a small toast with the result.
• Autocomplete: type sm: and it suggests the kinds; type sm:scene: and it suggests the scenes that actually exist on your server, with their name and tile art.
• Art & emoji: a button shows the entity's uploaded tile art (or its leading emoji), pulled live from the server. Two styles (a global setting): compact chips, or full-width banners with the art as the background.
• Live highlight: a button shows a pulsing dot + accent ring while its scene/event/sound is active — even if you started it from the panel or a Stream Deck.
• Control panel in a pane: open the whole app inside an Obsidian tab (ribbon dice icon or the Open control panel command), so you can drive scenes from the same window as your notes.
• Works in Reading view and Live Preview, on desktop and mobile (iPad) Obsidian.

Syntax

Put the token in an inline code span (single backticks):

Add a custom button label after a pipe: `sm:scene:city|▶ Enter the city`. Without one, the button uses the entity's own name from the server.

Install

This plugin lives in the app repo but isn't in the Obsidian community store. Build it and drop it into your vault:

cd integrations/obsidian
npm install
npm run build          # produces main.js

Then copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into your vault at <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/ambient-director/, and enable Ambient Director under Settings → Community plugins. (On mobile, copy the same three files into that folder via your sync of choice.)

For iterating on the plugin, npm run dev rebuilds on change; use the Hot-Reload plugin to reload it in Obsidian automatically.

Configure

Open Settings → Ambient Director and set:

• Server address — your API's base URL, e.g. http://192.168.1.20:5252 (the same address you open the panel at). On the same machine as the server, http://localhost:5252 works.
• API key — only if you set Security:ApiKey on the server. It's stored in the vault's plugin data, never written into your notes, so it isn't exposed when notes sync.
• Button style — Chip (compact inline button) or Banner (a full-width bar with the tile art as its background; best when the token sits on its own line). Global — reopen a note to apply it.
• Show tile art — show an entity's art on its button (a thumbnail on a chip, the background on a banner), falling back to its emoji.
• Highlight what's live — poll the server and mark a button with a pulsing dot + accent ring while its scene/event/sound is active, even if it was started from the panel or a Stream Deck.

Hit Test to confirm the connection. If ids change on the server, run the Refresh scene / event / sound lists command (or just wait — the list cache is short-lived).

Control panel in a pane

Beyond the inline buttons, you can embed the whole control panel inside Obsidian: click the dice icon in the left ribbon (or run Open control panel from the command palette). It opens the app — pointed at your Server address — as a normal Obsidian tab you can split or drag beside your notes, so you can run scenes without leaving the window you prep in.

The toolbar has Reload (after restarting the server) and Open in browser (pop out to the system browser). On the first load, enter your API key in the embedded panel's own ⚙ button if the server has one set — it's remembered per device, just like on the iPad.

It embeds the app in an <iframe>. This works great when the server runs on this machine (http://localhost:5252). A remote LAN-IP http server (e.g. http://192.168.1.20:5252) may be blocked by the browser's mixed-content policy — there, use Open in browser, or on the iPad run the panel as its installed PWA.

Notes

• The server must be reachable from the device running Obsidian (same LAN). This is the same requirement as opening the panel.
• A button whose id isn't found on the server renders with a dashed outline — usually a typo or a renamed/deleted entity.