Dynamic Lighting and player-specific map views?

Hi Roll20eers.  I am really impressed by dynamic lighting.  So impressed, in fact, that I am going to make a suggestion that not so long ago was way more than I thought would be practical.   It has always been tricky in RPGs to reveal different things to different players.  We've passed notes, sent people out of the room, etc., but those all have their downsides.  My question:   would it be possible to implement different views of the map for different players?  And, if so, could dynamic lighting be implemented so that, if character A has a torch and moves away, that character B can see the things lit by character A's torch only to the extent that character A is visible to character B  (given the light obstructions system and line-of-sight rules)?  So, A could enter a new room and see the goblins in the corner, but B could only get a glimpse of the room (based on her/his position in the rear) and couldn't magically see everything that A, scouting ahead, could.    Once an area is mapped, then it could be lit up for all  (i.e., override dynamic lighting).  Currently fog of war and dynamic lighting are an AND gate; perhaps an option of them being an OR gate would work for this.   I suspect that player-specific map views would be a major upgrade, but can't hurt to put it on the stack. Great addition, in any event. Thom

I use dynamic lighting as LOS, give all players 50 ft of light that only they can see. This way everyone has their own visual radius. I'd like an LOS layer separate lighting, like a FoW layer that auto updates based off LOS. 

@Voth, definitely a solid way to go with existing tech.  I'd love it, though, if players could see *something* from the torch the scout is carrying, and to have it mean something, tactically speaking, for some characters to bear torches and others not.  It can be important simply to keep the torch in the right place for the human fighters to use.   We run fairly low-magic games so not everybody is aglow.  

Yep, currently I'm running a game where the PC's are in a cave. I experimented with glowing mushrooms, but the PCs can see them from anywhere in the cave complex so i have to actively FoW and unFoW stuff. Thankfully FoW isn't as clunky as it use to be.

The only glowing PC in my campaign stuck mushrooms on the horns on his helm.

So one trick you can do is drop token light sources on the lighting layer that all players can see. Switch to the dynamic lighting layer Find some very visible token (I made a bright green sphere in gimp) and drop it on the lighting layer and give it a light radius and set it so all players can see it Repeat as many times as needed When you switch back to the token layer you won't see the tokens but players will see the light they cast. I do this quite a bit for shared-information areas but all my players have their own light radius and only they can see their own light. It works great when they get split up to keep thing secret.

Thanks folks.  @Eric, that's a really decent workaround.  I hadn't tried dragging tokens onto the lighting layer  (you can't move tokens to the lighting layer via the Layer item on the contextual menu, and I hadn't figured that you could drag them onto it afresh).  Thanks for that.   I still like the player-specific view possibility, for the interesting tactical reasons I mentioned, but this will do fine for now.  

Agreed on the original player specific view! I had a game recently where a glowing bubbling pool was halfway across the map. It was the first time I had used Dynamic Lighting. All of my players could see the pool upon entering the dungeon, even though it was in an unexplored room. It really drags the game if the GM has to add all environmental lighting as the party explores.

Derek, out of curiousity, how does it drag the game? It only takes me about 5 seconds to do it. I usually do it while players are talking about what to do. - Gauss

Depends on how many different kinds of things use dynamic lighting. Takes me a bit longer than 5 seconds, and that can add up over a game if there's enough of it.

Huh, ok. In your example I would have just revealed the Fog of War when they hit the bubbling pool area. It would have taken me a few seconds at most. DL is designed to work with FoW. :) Note: I am not commenting on the suggestion, just stating how it works currently. - Gauss

Yeah, that's ultimately what I did. I just don't like using the FoW with the Dynamic Lighting, seems to defeat the purpose of the latter to me. Also had some lag going on using both recently, but that could have just been the sheer size of the map and what was going on with it. (Basically, party is trying to take a fort with 3 floors, initially tried to put all three floors on the same map in case the party split up.)

Are you still experiencing lag with the recent update?  Instead of FoW you could put light sources on the GM layer. Players will not see the light source then. Move to the map or token layer when you desire players to see the light source. - Gauss

I don't know how recent the update was - this was about three weeks ago, and for my game last night I went ahead and broke up the map for them ahead of time. I didn't know about the GM layer light sources, I'll keep that in mind in the future, thanks!

The update occured about a week ago. It has sped up rendering times a bit.  - Gauss

Eric D. said: So one trick you can do is drop token light sources on the lighting layer that all players can see. I have a situation where it's a day time event (all can see) and then in the dark for a small dungeon.  I think this may help so I don't need to implement any FoW elements.  Thanks.