Dynamic Lighting - altitude workaround

Until one of the possible suggestions get implemented, what have people been doing to deal with multi-tiered maps and dynamic lighting? My maps usually have 2-3 altitudes, and I've tried making a "high altitude" and "low altitude" character sheet and associated token, adding players to the "Can Be Edited and Controlled By" field of the "high altitude" character sheet when applicable. However, when I use Ctrl+L on one of the character's tokens to check, it doesn't appear that it worked. I'd like to get my method working since I have several maps set up with the high/low tokens, but I'm all for implementing a totally different method if someone knows something that works.

Ctrl-L only shows what a token can see, not a player. Maid suggest adding a test player account and logging in as that one to check player setups, or using another tab and the "rejoin as player" button on the Settings Tab. You will need to add yourself or your test account to all the tokens/characters for that to work.

Embarrassingly enough, I didn't know I could add myself to characters because my Display Name was a blank space. I can now at least check how it's going. Thank you. Short of littering the map with transparent "High Altitude" tokens, has anyone come up with anything better for providing appropriate vision?

I have been contemplating this for some time. I'm not sure about how to create dynamic lighting pages for given altitudes but, perhaps an API could be created to simulate this. I don't know the math involved but I don't think it would be very hard. For the command it would be something like: !setaltitude 10|20|30|40|etc... (selected token being what is applied to, and only if the one using the script has control of it) And once that is done the token would be marked or highlighted or something to indicate its altitude, then once that is done the API could dynamically set the token's Light Radius / Dim Lighting. So the higher the token is the narrower the Light Radius is and the Wider the Dim Radius gets. After all you are getting "more distant from the ground..." I dont know enough about how the dynamic lighting layer works on a code level. Perhaps creating overlays from different pages that have different dynamic lighting... Like, Page one has Ground, Page Two has Low, Page Three has Mid and Page Four has high. I tried doing that manually once because of a cliff side battle with dragons. Needless to say, doing it by hand was a colossal nightmare. But it sorta worked. Shunting your token from one page to the next when you change your !setaltitude and having the movement of tokens be mirrored across all of the pages. Admittedly, that would probably be a very complicated API to construct if it were even possible to do at all.

It is definitely possible, and has been talked about before. I created a script called Twins that keeps two tokens in sync across two pages. The same concept could be used, it's just a matter of setup and extending to more copies (Twins only handles a single pair). Another idea I've kicked about for the one way view type of thing (I'm on top of the cliff so I can see below, but you're below so can't see on top) is to dynamically create an invisible token in the low area whenever a token attains the high area, and give it the same control as the token on the top. This could probably be automated fairly well.

Hrm, I'll have to look at that script, perhaps I might have some use. As for the one way vision, the big problem that I can think of for that is, there is a fall off distance on each side. For example if you are 6 ft tall and are next to an 8 foot ledge on the underside you cant see the top. But if you take three or four steps away you'll be able to see over it with little difficulty. Likewise if you are not standing on the very edge of the cliff (within 5ft of the edge), you cannot see things 10ft out from that edge on the underside. Granted thats just a matter of geometry, probably something to do with triangles, but I can see how it would pose an interesting issue to solve.

Yeah, I think you'd see diminishing returns from trying to recreate 3D space on a 2D plane.