Roll20 uses cookies to improve your experience on our site. Cookies enable you to enjoy certain features, social sharing functionality, and tailor message and display ads to your interests on our site and others. They also help us understand how our site is being used. By continuing to use our site, you consent to our use of cookies. Update your cookie preferences .
×
Create a free account
This post has been closed. You can still view previous posts, but you can't post any new replies.

More robust drawing tools for freeform games

1394895288

Edited 1394896836
I'm generally a pretty lax DM when I play games, and I tend to play a lot of Dungeon World, so I don't do a lot of pre-planning or dungeon design, and I tend to do a lot of scribbling on the map and telling my players to draw the environment as well. Basically, I don't really fancy how the drawing tools work right now, every line becoming an object on the current layer can easily become a pain when people have to swap between layers and tools to make sure we're not accidentally moving around the background as we draw it and move things around. The ability to erase isn't very good either, as all the distinct lines make individual objects instead of operating how my players assume it's going to operate, like a whiteboard, as if they were drawing in say, MS Paint or something. That's the way I play in-person games anyway, I plop down a whiteboard on a table and give every player some markers and have them go nuts as we go through a session. I have a couple online friends who are artists who play with me and they always want to go back to gametable because the drawing tools in there make a lot more intuitive sense to them than how Roll20 operates. And it's such a massive pain in the butt to get everyone set up with working copies of gametable and token libraries and stuff, Roll20 is so much more convenient to use. Would it be at all possible to add better drawing functionality? I'd like to be able to just have a pen tool with various colors and line weights and an eraser tool that works like an eraser would, that everyone can draw and erase on, regardless of who is doing the drawing or erasing. Maybe a dedicated drawing layer that all drawings go on regardless of what layer is currently chosen, that sits about the Map & Background layer? I'm not sure. But the way drawings make distinct objects right now just bugs the hell out of me. Edit: I asked a friend of mine and she said what she wants is raster drawing, not vector drawing. So that, I guess?
1394906180
Lithl
Pro
Sheet Author
API Scripter
The problem with an eraser tool is that Roll20's drawings are all vector art, not raster art. Erasing a portion of a vector requires either rasterizing it, or else performing a complex transformation to split it into two vectors. Tell your artist friends to try taking Photoshop's eraser tool and apply it to a path layer, and see what results they get. (Hint: it's about as productive as searching for an eraser tool in Roll20.) The advantage of a vector representation over a raster one is a matter of both storage and scalability. A vector only needs to know the end points and control points, while a raster needs to know every pixel. A vector can also be scaled or rotated by any amount (such as zooming in on the table top) without any loss of fidelity. Resizing or rotating a raster requires complex transformations and guesswork. Even Photoshop, the leader in image manipulation software, is guessing when you resize or rotate a raster image/layer. Photoshop is quite good at the guessing, but it's still a guess.