Animation query

This is probably not possible, but I'm just wondering: My game uses a table for certain action results. I currently have a script that determines the results and rolls for damage. My dream would be to have an animated version of the table that appears on the screen with every roll, in addition to the results shown in chat. It would "light up" and show players exactly where on the table their roll landed. Is this too "video game-ish"?

You could have it appear in the chat roll and highlight the location, but true animation of it isn't possible. Theoretically, there are some additional possibilities with a custom character sheet, but I haven't done (or seen) anything quite like this using a sheet.

What would a chart look like in chat, though? I had no idea that was possible. Are there examples?

Might it be possible by dynamically re-writing the html of a journal? You would need to keep the journal open, of course, and probably keep it engaged in the window.

So what would the journal window contain? Some sort of re-typed version of the chart that would light up a new location each time a roll is made?

Not sure. Just spitballing. How large is the table? Scott's solution is probably the best. You could write a script that would display your table with proper highlighting of the results. How it would look in chat would require more knowledge of your table. If it's a 10x10 grid, probably not. In any case, actual animation is probably not a realistic goal.

It's a 10x10 grid. So I guess that means it wouldn't fit.

Ah, for that big, you'd need to use the handout gui solution that Keith suggested.

Just to be clear, though. That kind of js/css-fu is out of my league.

Thank you both, though. I just think it would be a neat feature to add to my game. If there's ever a way it becomes possible for someone to do this, don't hesitate to let me know!

You can do this the hard way, if you're super keen - create 100 animations (assuming 10x10 results are possible), save them on an image host as result_00.gif result_01.gif ..... result_99.gif., and link them to chat using the actual die roll, [img](result_[[[1d100]]].gif) - that's alot of animations to knock up though - I know nothing of graphics workflows, there's probably a simple way to do it. Someone recently detailed the GIF linking trick in the Stupid Tricks thread. So... very much achievable, more a question of "Do I feel like creating 100 GIFs?".

So the script that does the rolling could be programed to play a GIF? That's interesting. With the way this chart is structured, I assume you would need to assign each of these letter results a GIF number. I actually wouldn't mind creating the GIFs if I had a clue how to even do that!

Yeah, I'm not much help with that part sorry. What kind of animation did you have in mind? There might be some way of generating a glow effect on certain pixels programmatically, allowing you to generate all 100 with a script, but that's beyond my ken.

Something like that. I'll work on figuring that part out. Thanks for the encouragement though! Might make for a fun project.

Hmm, yep, I could see doing it with that image in a handout via script. It'd be a bit complicated just cause we have very limited css capability in script generated content.