Ability to make patrol pathing and active movement on tokens

I was just playing a session and came across a very simple moment where to further bring the players into the story something like this would be neat. It may have been touched on before but I am taking time during a small break in the session to throw this idea out there as it would be a neat addition to bring players into the story and make the job of the GM in some cases easier.  The idea is the addition of adding pathing options to certain npc tokens, such as a patrol route on a set timer. I.e. Draw a line on the pathing tab (a new tab much like dynamic lighting) then on the token itself add timers for how long it will take to move through the path, how many times and how often, and also the ability to turn a token a certain direction during the path. I had some simple ducks in a pond just for environmental effect and I thought it would be sort of neat if they had a random path in a certain set square area that they would follow. You could trace the edge of the pond or make a square that they would randomly, at a set speed (high, med, low) move through a random path each time as to show variety. Also stopping points could be allowed in the path as if a guard was patrolling a stretch of hall and stopped to look out a window, but the guard would only stop every 3 trips through the path. This would give players the ability to observe and visualize what the guard was doing with little need for the GM to physically drag the token to show them. It would cause a good sense of immersion and would be REALLY neat with the dynamic lighting tool if the guard had a torch.  A last side thought would be something such as a dart trap with pathing to fire straight across from where the dart marker is hidden in the wall of the dungeon. If a player were to hit the "trigger" or activation point on the map for the path then it would automatically fire off and continue to run its preselected path. Just a thought! Any thoughts on this? Again, not sure if this has ever been touched on or debated before but it seems like it would be a really neat thing to include if it were possible. Not sure how much code this would add either. Settings such as activate on area being entered or activate on timer/cue would be optional of course. But the ability to draw a path or select random path and watch npc counters run their course would open up so many options that I can think of. Would just be neat, figured I'd throw it out there and see what the community/Devs thought. Just shoot any ideas on this below, how you think it could be used or if it would be possible/work. Thanks! Back to my GM'ing!

My first thought what I read this: big block of text, hard to keep from skimming second thought: aren't most games on roll 20 turn based so smooth motion wouldn't be very beneficial. third thought: couldn't the dm just use description test to describe the situation and give more immersion that way via better info. fourth thought: why would I personally ever use this?

It is a lot of text but I just wanted to get the full idea across for the Dev's if they saw it.  Most things are in fact turn based, but not everything is in turns, for instance if they are observing things out of combat and want to sneak past a set of guards on patrol on a wall. Yes the GM can describe this as I do, however it adds the ability for players to clearly observe this and ability to use guards and lookouts as sort of a puzzle if they want to clearly avoid them. It adds a layer that draws characters in more than just description alone can if you are also using tabletop.  It is just a quality of play bonus, it isn't at all required but a lot of neat things could be done w/ it if you think about it. It would be for more complexity if a GM wanted to include it. This session alone I spent about 45+ hours on one map and it would be a neat addition to have this feature. I will summarize the 1st post later in lesser amounts of text.

Well, my understanding of the developers is that this won't get to Roll20, as when you play at a table, you won't be able to do this.  They have a general principal against that amount of automation.  That said, they are planning the release of the API, which will be able to take care of automation (highly likely exactly like this example). The API will only be available to mentors, but it's not been released yet, so we can't say exactly what it will and won't do yet :-) 

I would talk about some of the leaked information that I read about the API, but I promised that I would not, as it was incomplete information that may not hold water once it is released, that being said, an API solution I think is your best hope at seeing this feature seeing daylight, and looks like you might be able to rig together a solution within it for this request.