The Jumpgate Beta for Pro Users Has Arrived!

Hey everyone, We’re incredibly pleased to announce the start of the Jumpgate Beta for Pro Users! This is a major milestone both for this project and for Roll20 as a whole. Jumpgate is a complete reworking of the lowest level of the VTT experience, featuring a brand new rendering engine as well as significant work in making a more delightful user experience for your gaming.  You should see better performance with lower CPU and memory usage whether you’re loading up a blank game or playing in a massive adventure from the Marketplace.  To use the Beta , just check the "Opt in to Jumpgate Beta" checkbox while creating a new game or a copy of an existing game. We want to thank everyone for your patience these last few months while the team has been hard at work behind the scenes getting this ready for your feedback. Our hope is that this effort shows our commitment to making sure that Roll20 is the best option for your online tabletop gaming for the next decade to come. To set expectations, the current state of Jumpgate is that it is a complete VTT, with everything you need to play a game, from tokens and character sheets to Dynamic Lighting and Jukebox. However, this is a Beta for a reason, and there will be bugs! That’s why we’re only allowing new games and copies of existing games to opt into the Jumpgate Beta at this time. Note that once a game has joined the beta, it’s a one-way trip. So proceed with caution. We’ve compiled a list of Known Issues on the Help Center which we will endeavor to keep up to date as we receive your feedback and release bugfixes. Please take a look at that just so you know what we’re already aware of and working on before submitting bug reports. If you’re willing to take the time to play with the Jumpgate Beta, what’s most useful to us at this time is your general feedback on the performance on your device, feedback on the UX changes, and qualitative feedback from real-world gaming sessions. How is it working on all the many different kinds of devices that are used by Roll20 players worldwide? What show-stopping bugs are you encountering that are making it difficult to complete a session? What did we do well, and what did we do not so well with the changes we’re proposing in this Beta? We didn’t want to just build this behind closed doors, we wanted to build it alongside the community – and that’s why we’re here now sharing this pre-release version with you to allow you to give your feedback. With all of that said, let’s take a look at all the new stuff that’s packed into this Beta release. It’s an incredible list of new features and quality of life improvements! Zooming has been greatly improved! Zooming should be overall more performant and much smoother. Zooming will now zoom to the location of your cursor Radial menus will remain in the correct position while zooming You can hold down the Shift key while zooming to do precision zooming Panning has been greatly improved! Panning should be overall more performant and much smoother. You can now freely pan around the entire area of the map, without being restricted by the bounds of the page. You can now place objects anywhere you’d like on the screen , including outside the bounds of the page itself.  Any objects that you place outside the page boundary will be visible to only the GM. The right-click context menu has been reworked with a brand new design In addition, we’ve surfaced many menu actions that were previously only available to players via keyboard shortcuts You can now perform actions on groups of objects all at once with the right-click menu including locking their position. We’ll now automatically choose a default Frame Rate Limit for you based on the quality of your detected graphics card. You can override this setting and change it manually still under the Settings tab, in the Graphics section. For Mac users, the CPU usage when joining a video call inside the Roll20 VTT using our Integrated Voice and Video platform has been greatly reduced, so you should have a better game experience. (We also rolled this out to non-Jumpgate games as well!) The Page Folders feature is always enabled for all Jumpgate games. Token bars, nameplates, and markers now scale down when the token is smaller than 1 cell and remain legible even at small sizes Token bars now have a max width and their text has better legibility The Fog of War system has been completely overhauled , and the Dynamic Lighting system has been unified into a single backend system. There's a new UI for the Fog of War tool that should make it more clear what it is that you're able to do with adding and removing fog. The basic Fog of War system is now integrated into the overall Dynamic Lighting system. So basic Fog of War and Permanent Darkness for Dynamic Lighting are now the same functionality. The Legacy Dynamic Lighting system has been removed and is not available in Jumpgate games. Pasting multiple times in a row will now spread out the objects you have pasted so you can easily see them and move them. Undo has been greatly improved, and we’ve added Redo! The Ctrl+Y/Cmd+Y shortcut will now Redo if you Undo something and want to revert your Undo There’s now support for undoing and redoing a wider variety of actions; we’ll continue to add more throughout the Beta. Undo and Redo are now page specific – so if you change to a different page and press Undo, you won’t have something weird happen We’ve begun the process of improving support for tablets and other touch devices. The performance is majorly improved Panning and zooming now work well, long-press to bring up the context menu works better, etc. Multi-gestures are possible (i.e. start a marquee select, zoom or pan, keep selecting) We’ll continue to work on making this a better experience throughout the Jumpgate Beta, but this work is still in early development. The Ping system has been completely overhauled We now have a new system for pings in the backend The default ping has been improved when you click and hold on the tabletop More on this coming soon! Improved keyboard movement for hex and iso/dimetric grid types You can now Copy and Paste doors and windows When dragging to select multiple objects with the marquee tool, you will now see immediate feedback on what you’re selecting Token tooltips are more responsive to hovering and are easier to see Auras resize dynamically with token and isometric circle auras are more accurately sized Pressing X to show previous movement toggles into a mode where all previous moves will persist until deselected Snap to edge for all grid types works We also improved snapping when resizing, and you’ll now see that tokens will snap at half and quarter size inside of a grid cell. Measurement distances when using hex grids should now work properly

Oginme said: Ok, first issues came up pretty quick.  Started a new game and attempting to place map and align the map. 2. When attempting to adjust the map on the VTT, clicking on the map brings up a large background image of the map, making it difficult (nearly impossible) to see the edge of the grid or to align the grid lines of the map which has been clicked (the darker image) with the background image showing (lighter image.)    Roll20, Win10 operating system, Firefox. Okay, thanks for reporting that, we're tracking a Known Issue for that where basically if the image is very large, the "ghost image" that it leaves behind when you're dragging it isn't responding properly. Working on a fix for that now.

Hey everyone! Thanks for the early feedback already :-) Doing my best to catch up with all of it. First off, we just pushed out a few fixes already: That "ghost image" issue noted above where large images were leaving behind a ghost that wasn't responsive when you moved them should be fixed. The torch and default character icons should be working again. You should be able to turn on Dynamic Lighting without needing to reload the page. We are tracking a new issue where Compendium drag and drop doesn't seem to be working properly on Jumpgate games, looking into that now.

vÍnce said: Can't wait to test but... Just to be crystal clear; if you opt-into Jumpgate it's only for THAT game, correct? Yes, it's a per-game basis for opting in.

Will M. said: Mike East said: Not entirely sure whether this is a design decision or an oversight but I thought I would mention it.  If I right click on a token (or a selection of tokens) and choose to move them to a new layer, should the layer that you are moving them from automatically change to the layer that you are moving them to once selected?   I don't believe it works this way currently and I don't prefer this functionality.   I often have numerous tokens I want to move from the GM to the Token layer.  It would be a pain if the layer changed every time I moved a token from one layer to another.   No it should just move the object to that layer, but remain on the current layer. Is that not what you're seeing?

Gauss said: Mike East said: TheMarkus1204 said: Scrolling with Mouse Wheel now Zooms in and out the Map now instead of scrolling the Map like it was before. In order to move the map around, you need to right click the map. Before it was CTRL+Mouse Wheel to Zoom while just Mouse Wheel scrolls the map! Will there be a way to RESTORE that functionality with Jump Gate? (CTRL+Mouse Wheel to Zoom in / out, just Mouse Wheel to scroll across the map) If you go to the cog icon in the top right and then click on Keyboard Shortcuts, there's a drop down menu that allows you to choose either Pan or Zoom for the mouse wheel controller.  Maybe the Beta is set to Zoom by default.   My guess is that it is a cookies thing, Jumpgate is using different cookies.  Edit: in my testing I discovered that the Menu is correctly set (as per my normal cookie setting) to Pan, but it is zooming instead. Then I switch from Pan to Zoom, back to Pan and pan works correctly. Yeah looks like there's an issue with that currently, I'll get that tracked. In the meantime if you change the option from Pan to Zoom and back again, it should work properly from then on (including on subsequent reloads, it looks like).

Will M. said: Issue: Opening Character Sheets (D&D 5e OGL) is slow, taking 3 to 5 times longer.   I'll look into that, but we didn't make any changes to how any of that works (assuming you mean, just clicking on the Character and then opening the sheet from the Right Sidebar). It might just be prod load after the deploy.

Will M. said: Issue: The @{selected|hp} syntax and functionality doesn't work.   In fact, any of my macros that rely upon a selected token do not appear to work.  I get the following message: " You attempted to use a roll command looking for the value of a selected token, but no tokens are selected." That said, @{Conan|hp} syntax works, as long as you have a character/token named Conan.   Assuming this is the best place to post issues I've not seen in your  Known Issues   document.   Okay, got it, we'll get that fixed, just an oversight on a piece of code not being hooked up. Thanks!

Martijn S. said: Being aware that i am an edge case using linux, the rendering of tokens and token text seems to be more blocky in both chrome and firefox compared to the current version So we are using a different kind of filtering, we'll try switching this up in the next release and see if that looks better.

Mike East said: Here's another one for you.   In pre-beta maps, the icons for doors (and presumably windows) are fully visible in Dynamically Lit maps.  Here's a pre-beta example In Jumpgate games, the icons appear to be half obscured as though they are not placed above the barrier that they create.  Example below:  Yeah we've kind of gone back and forth on that one. I think we'll talk this one over tomorrow and see what we want to do here and I'll let you know what we're thinking so you all can weigh in.

keithcurtis said: Wow, this is chock full of improvements. I've run into some API issues, but I have not been able to repro them. I'll report when I have a better idea. The main thing I've seen however, is that "Fit to Page" does not seem to do anything on the Zoom control. (Mac/Chrome). Okay sounds good. A couple of API things that might not be working well would be Pinging and then also I am wondering if selected info isn't being sent to API commands properly since selected macros aren't working either. Let us know what you find and we'll get it fixed though.

TheMarkus1204 said: Riley, Since the new Compendium seems to be the only one usable with Jumpgate, might it be possible to make it MORE COMPACT? EDIT: The toggle is missing! In one of my other campaigns I switched back to the OLD compendium and it worked for the Jumpgate one as well! Okay yeah that's an oversight, there should still be a toggle for the New/Old Compendium for Jumpgate games. I'll get that logged. TheMarkus1204 said: How to Reveal Areas with STANDARD FOG OF WAR? Clicked on "Reveal All" as there is nothing else and then tried to Reveal Areas like in Standard Campaigns. But NOTHING happens at all! What is "ADD" / "SUBTRACT" for?! If Dynamic Lighting is DISABLED, why is it even showing "Permanent" / "Explorable"?! This new Interface is REALLY Confusing! Especially if you ONLY want to Reveal / Hide Elements! So first off, there's a Known Issue we're working through where a lot of the Dynamic Lighting and Fog of War stuff isn't fully working properly as you enable/disable features unless you reload after doing it...obviously that's not great! And we should have that fixed soon. Other than that, the idea is you are "Adding" or "Removing" Fog. So if you hit "Reveal All", there is no Fog present, and you would "Add" fog to cover areas. If you hit "Hide All" then you are placing Fog over the whole map, and you would use "Subtract" to remove Fog from areas you want to reveal. All that said, the whole "Permanent"/"Explorable", "Add", "Remove", "Reveal", "Hide" language needs to be cleaned up and unified so it makes more sense altogether. We'd be happy to take suggestions if folks have terminology they think might make it more clear what that tool does, it's been a pain point for a while now.

Andrew R. said: I can't Transmogrifier from Library games to Jumpgate games at all. This isn't mentioned in the Known Issues or in this thread. I'll copy my Library game to Jumpgate and try it again.  Edit: Yes, that worked. I can Transmogrifier from my copied  Jumpgate   TOR2e Library game to my new  Jumpgate   TOR2e game. All is well.  Good point, I'll add a note to the Known Issues, but basically yeah, you can only Tramsog between Jumpgate games, or Transmog between non-Jumpgate games, they aren't fully compatible with each other. When we do roll this out for all games eventually, then at that point it will all work, but we didn't want people accidentally breaking their games by taking Jumpgate content and placing it into a non-Jumpgate game.

John said: Right out of the box the improvements are clear - great stuff. I did notice some weirdness with token rotation and auras. Even if I have the grid off, token (or drawing) rotation snaps to the grid in increments of 90 degrees. Also, if a token has an aura, the aura grows beyond its set radius when the token is rotated. Not sure if this is intended by the "Auras resize dynamically with token and isometric circle auras are more accurately sized" feature, but seems like a bug. Glad that you are enjoying the improvements! Let me check with the rest of the team and find out what's going on there.

DMFrank said: Group Initiative, Initiative Tracker Plus, Aura/Tint Health Colors, Token Action Maker and Group Check APIs do not function. Okay, noted, we'll investigate that now. Just as a general note, the goal is to get the new API stuff out the door in the next few weeks, and then make whatever changes are needed for Jumpgate to function at parity with the API on that version, so this might be a bit more delayed than some of the other bugs noted above, but we are working on it.

Hey folks, We just pushed out a new update to Jumpgate games with the following changes: Using @{selected} with rolls/macros should be working properly. Dragging and dropping items from the Compendium (such as Monsters) onto the tabletop is now working correctly. We've changed how texture filtering works, and things should look much smoother and less blocky overall, especially for lower resolution tokens. We've adjusted the threshold for allowing mouse movement when doing a long-press to do a Ping -- this should make it feel more consistent so it happens when you want it to and not on accident. Toggling on/off Dynamic Lighting and Explorer Mode should no longer require a reload to actually activate. Fixed a bug which could cause the position to desync during multiselect. Dragging and dropping when the Pan tool is active should no longer have weird behavior. We've got more fixes and changes on the way as well which we're hoping to get out the door ahead of the weekend. Thanks for all of your feedback thus far!