Dynamic Lighting Issue

Hi there ! I love this program and I and my group decided to play using roll 20. Your program is fantastic, especially your flexibility! You can use it with every set or rules and that is a great plus. I have just become a supporter to try the Dynamic Lighting effect. It is great and very fun. Notwithstanding that I would point out few issues, one of which appears to be quite serious (the third one) and might potentially compromise our decision to keep using Dynamic Lighting on permanent basis: 1) In the advanced edit token section Emits light is only calculated in ft., it coul be cool to add the meters option. 2) The dim light is only of one intensity, it will be cool to add three different potential level so the effect could be more realistic (more penalitity at higher level of dim). 3) This serious issue I have verified is that using light and line of sight the light does not turn corners. This gives an unrealistic effect that causes problems. Let me make an example in the following map, The Gnome (Hnakerl) is holding a lantern (3 hex of full light and 3 of dim). From his position due to the corner his line of sight of the room (zone around ex Q5) is limited. On the contrary his ally (the Orc Keidor is in a better position and should see in the room taking advantage of the light carried by Hnakerl. Unfortunately this does not appear to work... and Keidor just see the light that Hnakerl's line of sight cover... In order to solve the issue, the only solution I have found is to "give" Keidor a falso light reducing it of one ex in order to let him see what he should see... The result is the following: The problem is that it will be extremely time consuming to change such a "false" light emission on the character that is not holding the light source for every step he does... This could make the game too slow and not worth to be played using such a great system of dynamic lighting. Is there any way to solve such problem in an easier way? Thank you in advance for your support and assistance.

Dear Kristin, thank you very much for your answer. Indeed the third problem is quite a big issue if you play using both dynamic lighting and line of sight. We do not now how to use script. In reality, it would be sufficient to not allow light effect to be blocked by line of sight when dynamic lighting and line of sight are used together. I hope you will try to implement something to solve such a problem that might compromise the pleasure in using the dynamic lighting upgrade.

3) Light is being generated from the center of the token. As a workaround, what you might want to do is to place an additional token to use as the light source and then move that to the edge of your token as needed.

3: Light doesn't bend. (Okay, it does bend slightly when changing mediums, and strong gravitational forces can cause light to bend, but neither will cause light to bend around a corner in a room.) Light can reflect off of surfaces, which might be the sort of thing you're hoping for, but emulating that would require defining the diffusion of the walls (which is different per-material), and then allowing for reflections in the raytracer, which multiplies the processing time by the number of reflections performed. Also, you should NOT use freehand drawings on the DL layer. The dynamic lighting has to check against every single line on the DL layer, and even very small freehand drawings are made of hundreds of lines. Use the polygon tool instead.

Good catch regarding freehand Brian, thanks. :)

For 3): you could simulate the diffuse lighting reasonably by allowing any area of the light out to the edge to be seen as dim by tokens with line of sight to the area, while still restricting light of sight as done. Something vaguely like:

Guys thank you very much for the support. For Brian: Light does not bend but as you may try at home, if you turn on a light in a room and go out of that room leaving the door open you won't be in the absolute darkness... and that's the sensible issue raised by my players. As Kristin correctly noted, I used the polygon tool following the instructions... For Guss: the idea of placing addition tokens already made and ready to use can be a feasable solution. I hope it would speed up the procedure... also if this will add an extra mechanic to the game that I wanted to avoid...

MASTER said: Light does not bend but as you may try at home, if you turn on a light in a room and go out of that room leaving the door open you won't be in the absolute darkness... and that's the sensible issue raised by my players. What you're describing is the light reflecting off the walls through diffuse reflection: Accurately modeling this behavior requires defining a number of characteristics of the wall (including color!), and it is not a fast computation. When modeling enough reflections, you can get a very realistically-light room, but the computation required generally means this sort of thing only happens offline, usually by an entire bank of computers working in parallel. (The only time you're likely to encounter such a thing is in an animated movie by a big production company like Pixar or Dreamworks.) I've written an accurate raytracer before. As I recall, it took about 5 minutes to render 15 pool balls with absolutely nothing else in the scene. (Okay, it was technically 15 colored spheres and 7 colored toroids, since we weren't using textures, only equations.) As Kristin mentions, video games often cheat this by including ambient light. You're not seeing the reflections of the lantern while you're in the next room, you're simply seeing the results of the ambient light source. I'll admit, an ambient light option for Roll 20 could be quite nice, though.