Dynamic Lighting Weirdness

I don't know if this is a bug, or something new to the recent changes in Dynamic Lighting, or some general weirdness that applies only to me (there are so many of them) but: I have a temple. I have set up dynamic lighting so that inside the temple is dark, as it should be for an abandoned temple, and the outside is bright for daylight. I accomplish the latter by having torches spread around in the DL layer. Here is the dynamic lighting setup: There is a player token near the entrance in the token layer, and several in the GM layer. They have no bearing on the issue as I deleted them but still had the same problem. Here is what I see as the GM: Here is what a player sees from the outside. The outside area is bright but only where the token is - the rest of the outside is dark. The entrance to the temple is dimly light which is correct. Here is what the player sees when the token is moved to the right. The entire right side is lit up as it should be but the area near the entrance is dark. Here is what the player token sees at a midpoint between the two areas: Here is the setting for the player token vision: Here is the setting for the torches: Note that I started with distances of 20 ft, moved to 100, then 500, then 1000 ft without any change in the effect.  So, what, if anything, am I doing wrong? Or is this a bug? Can anyone explain this? Thank you.

Something is definitely odd there. My first thought was a thin blocking line of a difficult-to-see color. That's probably not the case. My best guess is that the long horizontal line that indicates the side of the mountain is the issue. It looks to be drawn with the freehand drawing tool, which is not recommended for dynamic lighting purposes. It draws an astronomical number of segments and I have a feeling that is confusing the ray-tracing algorithm. I would suggest deleting that line and redrawing it with a few clicks of the polygon tool, like you have done for the underground river. If I can suggest a stylistic tip while I am at it? Your players probably would enjoy the experience more if the walls were moved back a bit, allowing them to see what is blocking the light. It reduces the claustrophobic feeling that DL systems can sometimes cause, and gives them a little more information about their world. The can see if that impassable barrier is a masonry wall or a cavern edge or a mountainside without having to ask.

keithcurtis said: If I can suggest a stylistic tip while I am at it? Your players probably would enjoy the experience more if the walls were moved back a bit, allowing them to see what is blocking the light. It reduces the claustrophobic feeling that DL systems can sometimes cause, and gives them a little more information about their world. The can see if that impassable barrier is a masonry wall or a cavern edge or a mountainside without having to ask. That's one of the big reasons I've switched back to using regular Fog of War or Permanent Darkness.  It's easier to just put a big square over hidden areas and just uncover it when needed, instead of setting up all the DL lines and dealing with what each player can or can't see at any given moment.  At first it helped somewhat with player immersion, but after a while it started to become a distraction and/or a technological interruption.  There are definitely some dungeon crawls where Explorable Darkness will be useful, but for a lot of maps I'd rather keep it simpler and more 'theatre of the mind' (though not 100%) and it's a lot more reminiscent of playing at a physical table and just drawing maps by hand. With that being said, once true DL 'windows' are available through the Roll20 toolbar, I could see going back toward setting up Dynamic Light for maps such as this, and putting the 'window' on the edge of the rocks so that players can't move their tokens through them, and a second true 'wall' layer a little further inside that actually blocks players from seeing inside.  That will take quite a bit of setup, which may end up not being worth the time opposed to just using Permanent Darkness and revealing the inside when players enter.

I also use regular fog of war for some maps. It's just simple when you don't need to worry about light sources or lines of sight. What I was talking about when I said "moving the walls back" doesn't require one way walls at all, if set up time is a concern. This is what I am talking about: Simple to set up, players can see walls and lines of sight are preserved.

Its a bug I am having the same problem

Any newly created maps with dynamic lighting will have these invisible lines you CANNOT delete in the NW sections of the map. Please fix this Roll 20.

DMFrank said: Any newly created maps with dynamic lighting will have these invisible lines you CANNOT delete in the NW sections of the map. Please fix this Roll 20. Can you give more detailed repro steps? If I create a brand new map, turn on DL set to daylight and drop a token, there are no light blockers.Do you need to set a minimum number of lines? If so, polygons, circles or freehand? (The last is not recommended, though I just tried it also without incident) Also, if you can reproduce it, the best place to get Roll20's attention on it is in the official feedback thread, or in a  Help Center Request .

Be advised it is when I use the Legacy Lighting. I took it off Legacy and put it on the laggy updated lighting.   I always do dynamic lighting with polygon lines.

Try turning on Hardware Acceleration in your browser. I experience zero lag on UDL, even on a chromebook, or with five players on vastly different hardware. In fact, since the latest update, it seems smoother than ever.

My map tonight that I made about four weeks ago had "dead spots" and random UDL lines that were not in a color I use, so magic lines added for no particular reason? I erased the errant lines so we could run the scene, I realized when the game was over that I should have screen shot them. Is this from the latest update, or has Roll 20 been haunted? I am baffled by the update, would just roll it back if it was local software. It seems as though just about when I get an update working exactly how I want it, they introduce a new buggy change.

Keith,  You're a genius. :-)  Removing the line for the side of the mountain and redrawing it with the "line" tool worked! The light now is correctly handled!  Unfortunately, I use freehand elsewhere because Roll20 doesn't let you erase part of a line. So I use the freehand tool when having to draw semi-circles or areas where the "line" tool doesn't make sense.  As for your suggestion about moving the walls back is a good one.  I'm now going to have to go through all the rest of the maps I did (about 30 of them) and redraw them...  well, maybe not all of them but... Anyhow, thanks for solving the problem! keithcurtis said: Something is definitely odd there. My first thought was a thin blocking line of a difficult-to-see color. That's probably not the case. My best guess is that the long horizontal line that indicates the side of the mountain is the issue. It looks to be drawn with the freehand drawing tool, which is not recommended for dynamic lighting purposes. It draws an astronomical number of segments and I have a feeling that is confusing the ray-tracing algorithm. I would suggest deleting that line and redrawing it with a few clicks of the polygon tool, like you have done for the underground river. If I can suggest a stylistic tip while I am at it? Your players probably would enjoy the experience more if the walls were moved back a bit, allowing them to see what is blocking the light. It reduces the claustrophobic feeling that DL systems can sometimes cause, and gives them a little more information about their world. The can see if that impassable barrier is a masonry wall or a cavern edge or a mountainside without having to ask.

1.  You can clearly see invisible lines are affecting the torches in the very first image posted by the OP.  If its a marketplace map, the author used invisible lines for the trees.   2.  UDL parrots:

The OP did the lighting themselves. Redrawing the line I identified as the problem apparently fixed it, for the reasons I stated. I somehow get the feeling you don't like UDL. But please don't name call the people who do. Opinions are great. But calling people who have different ones "parrots" is antagonistic. I disagree strongly with you on the merits of UDL/LDL, but name-calling only shuts down conversation.

I've had a similar issue with a map I made a few weeks ago, today. Played it last weekend and it worked fine, then went in today to start prepping it for next week's game only to find a light blocking 'wall' running almost down the cell 38/39 dividing line from left to right. I tried deleting and redrawing the lines around it, tried dragging the select box over the affected area but couldn't find anything. I followed the line both up and down to see if I could find a wall elsewhere it coincided with, and eventually found one 15/20 cells 'south.' Following that line/wall, I found the entire area affected. I ended up deleting and re-drawing that segment of wall, but I had used the line tool to start and the only thing I could see 'wrong' with the offending line was a tiny burr sticking out through another wall. Barely noticeable, certainly not 15/20 cells of wall. Something in this last update messed with some stuff. Hopefully it won't be a continuous concern. A quick screen of how the line was cutting through 'empty space,' just for reference.

Not sure if this is a similar issue to what I had Ken-Lee! I had a strange cut out in the northwest of the room when I was testing the dynamic lighting. Went through the checklists and couldn't see what was wrong. In the end I had a quick exchange with support (mainly as I hadn't explored here) and they correctly identified that I'd used the polygon/line tool to draw the dynamic lighting walls and managed to double back on myself to try and save time. That creates a glitch (which they're aware of but don't have a date for the resolution). The simplest solution is to delete any doubled lines and then redraw without them.  The issue above is on one of the window insets, you can see (if you look carefully) it is brighter than the rest of the lines because I doubled it up. Once I fixed that, it resulted in: ...which is working as it should. Sharing this in case you have the same issue. I had this in two or three places on the map. The wall causing the issue was always inline with the issue but could be some distance away. Hope this helps.

Here are some pics of my dynamic lighting problem

Yeah, I believe that's what might have happened. Thank you for demonstrating and confirming with your own experience and clarifying the doubling back. That actually makes a lot of sense because the wall in question for me was an interior wall of set of rooms. Dom said: Not sure if this is a similar issue to what I had Ken-Lee! I had a strange cut out in the northwest of the room when I was testing the dynamic lighting. Went through the checklists and couldn't see what was wrong. In the end I had a quick exchange with support (mainly as I hadn't explored here) and they correctly identified that I'd used the polygon/line tool to draw the dynamic lighting walls and managed to double back on myself to try and save time. That creates a glitch (which they're aware of but don't have a date for the resolution). The simplest solution is to delete any doubled lines and then redraw without them.  The issue above is on one of the window insets, you can see (if you look carefully) it is brighter than the rest of the lines because I doubled it up. Once I fixed that, it resulted in: ...which is working as it should. Sharing this in case you have the same issue. I had this in two or three places on the map. The wall causing the issue was always inline with the issue but could be some distance away. Hope this helps.

DMFrank said: Here are some pics of my dynamic lighting problem ... Weird. That looks like something just off the edge of the VTT area. Did you try selecting all and moving stuff with your arrow keys to try revealing it?

I have 10 floors of DotMM done up in DL and I always double back on my poly/lines and have not seen a single map misbehave on me in LDL.  My typical situations where I double back is when I need to go in half a grid square to meet a door thats halfway in a dotmm hallway which most are 2 grids.  Not a single issue.  Try seeing it via LDL and see if theres still issues.  

keithcurtis said: DMFrank said: Here are some pics of my dynamic lighting problem ... Weird. That looks like something just off the edge of the VTT area. Did you try selecting all and moving stuff with your arrow keys to try revealing it? I tried that and moved the map around, it disappears when I use the UDL but for some reason my ACER Gaming Laptop and high speed internet still allows lag. I do have hardwear acceleration turned on in my browser

Hmm. Internet speed shouldn't be an issue. And frankly, hardware specs shouldn't either. I can run UDL without lag on a low-cost Chromebook. It might be worth capturing a Console Log ( Chrome ,  Firefox ) and filing a  Help Center Request . Your laptop is almost certainly set up to use WebGL, but here's the test for that . Another weird possibility: Make sure your map itself doesn't have any light or vision settings on it. Do you have any similar issues (including lag) on other pages?

ALOT of scripts out there like to put things in the top left of the maps, are you sure there is not a token in the DL, Map, or Token layers sitting in that corner?