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Add Multi-Level / Elevation Support to the Foreground Layer

Score + 92
April 09 (3 months ago)

Edited April 09 (3 months ago)
jimmy
Roll20 Team

Roll20's Foreground Layer is live (in Subscriber beta), but does not currently have support for Multi-Level Play / Elevation. (example: you cannot have players climbing on top of roofs or have a party split between the ground and treetops). There are workarounds, but this thread is in support of building official support within Jumpgate games. 

If this is of interest to you, or you have specific suggestions or ideas around implementation, please upvote and comment this thread. 

April 09 (3 months ago)

Edited April 09 (3 months ago)
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter

First off, kudos to all the folks who have brought the foreground layer to life. I will admit that I was skeptical at first. I really never thought a foreground layer would be something I would ever use. Then I got to give it a test drive. (If you've never responded to those "would you like to give feedback on a new feature" survey links, do it! You get to help guide brand new features and certainly will have ideas that the dev team hadn't considered.)

Anyway, I got to take a test spin of this and tried out all sorts of tricks and variations to simulate traps, roofs that disappear when you go inside a building, objects that can't be seen until you get close enough (like seeing over a cliff edge) and a lot more. This is truly cool!

However...

There are some improvements that can be made that will help to handle elevation. I.e. it's still pretty cumbersome to have a token cross under a bridge, climb some stairs and then go over a bridge. It currently requires moving the foreground bridge to a different layer or mucking about with its settings. There needs to be an easier way to handle token elevation. (Note that I am not talking about Altitude, the height of a flying token, for instance.) As a matter of fact, it might be better to use a different term altogether to avoid confusion. Let's call it "Multi-level Play".

The knee-jerk reaction would be to add an additional layer, one that is on top of the Foreground layer. I think this is a bad idea, first, because this has no end (add more layers, more layers...), and second, it would probably be detrimental to performance and get cumbersome pretty quickly.

I propose a condition that can be applied to a token called something like "superposition", or "overhead". This is a status you could add to a token that says, "Ignore foreground layer, ignore light, visions and permissions, just render it on top of everything. This should be added to the right-click menu. Ideally, there should be something that marks the token as being an overhead token. (I think that "overhead" is a good word here, easy to grasp, and describes the state well.


Some questions still arise. Should an overhead token be affected by dynamic lighting? There are plusses and minuses. On the one hand, a token on a rooftop should have a clear view of other roof tops. If the map has dynamic lighting that outlines buildings, you wouldn't want an overhead token to have it's view of these blocked. On the other hand, GMs often do not want part of a map revealed.

There are some solutions. An overhead token might be affected by masking, but not dynamic lighting, for instance.

Although this suggestion proposes a token state to solve the problem of multi-level play, I think this is a good place to hammer out what the community wants. And this suggestion thread might be best served by listing out use cases that other folks want to achieve and how this cool new thing might be used (or what pieces are missing) to make them happen. While a new feature is fresh and in development is the absolute best time for this sort of community communication.

April 09 (3 months ago)

I think it would be very difficult to implement this. But, I don't have enough experience yet with the foreground layer to know whether or not a multi-level functionality would be helpful or not. I can see some circumstances where it would... and some circumstances where it might not. 

I have found what I think is a bug (or two) that cropped up with the new layer, so I'd like to see the new layer working correctly before adding additional complexity. I'd also like to get more experience with the new layer, and get more token sets out there that for use with the new layer first.

April 10 (3 months ago)

Edited April 10 (3 months ago)

I am wondering if someone can make a "secondary bump" script but this bump script deals with moving things from Foreground to Map layer only. 

April 10 (3 months ago)

+1, elevation is sorely needed (I ran an underwater adventure recently, 3d is hard for players to visualize using using either token-markers or numbers in one of the bubbles).

April 10 (3 months ago)

Edited April 10 (3 months ago)

+1 

Finally a foreground layer. Great if you want to display a map with houses, but don't want the players to see what's inside the house straight away. Just put a roof on it and you're done. The inside remains hidden until the players enter through the door. 

But what use is a roof on a house if I can't climb onto the roof? As soon as I show roofs on a map, a player has the idea of climbing onto the roof and then I have a problem.

April 10 (3 months ago)

When that happens, you can set the rooftop's opacity to 100%. Of course, then some other player will want to go inside the building while another is on the roof. <shrug> You can't win.

Nordlicht said:

+1 

Finally a foreground layer. Great if you want to display a map with houses, but don't want the players to see what's inside the house straight away. Just put a roof on it and you're done. The inside remains hidden until the players enter through the door. 

But what use is a roof on a house if I can't climb onto the roof? As soon as I show roofs on a map, a player has the idea of climbing onto the roof and then I have a problem.




April 10 (3 months ago)
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter


Nordlicht said:

But what use is a roof on a house if I can't climb onto the roof? As soon as I show roofs on a map, a player has the idea of climbing onto the roof and then I have a problem.

That's kind of what this thread is trying to find solutions for, with an aim to getting them implemented by the dev team.

April 10 (3 months ago)
Ari
Pro

+1 - I've had a cool skyship map in my head for a few years that pretty much needs this to work. Would love to see it!

April 10 (3 months ago)

Edited April 10 (3 months ago)

I played around with elevation a year or so back with a competitor of yours (*cough* Foundry *cough*), and I really liked some of the ways they (and their mods) have addressed elevation set up. Personally I would love something like the following:

  • Base Implementation: Dedicated Token Bar "Bubble" or Attribute for an elevation value that is used by the rest of the elevation system.
  • Base Implementation: Lighting walls can have an optional elevation value (or range of values) where the wall is visible to tokens at that elevation.
  • More Complicated Implementation: Art assets (including assets designated as Foreground) can have elevation values where they render in beneath the tokens.
April 11 (3 months ago)

I know the square root of diddly squat about coding and stuff, so apologies if this sounds stoopid... but how hard would it be to add a toggle to Tokens that simply says "Trigger Foreground ON/OFF" so that a Token can fly over a roof with the Foreground Trigger "OFF" and with either a switch via the Token Menu or a Token based macro flip that setting to "ON" and go "land" nearby and go underneath the Foreground Layer. 

As far as elevation markers go I just use Token Markers with comparative elevation levels rather than heights in feet/metres.

I'm going out on a limb here and going to assume that its not beyond the scope of the people who know the API to write something that could incrementally change that level via a macro/button, and could flip the "Trigger Foreground" to "ON" when the elevation is at 0, and Flips it to "OFF" when the elevation is at whatever the GM considers an appropriate level.

If I'm talking nonsense please feel free to let me know.

April 13 (3 months ago)

+1 I can see this adding a lot fun dynamic combat scenarios. Especially with flying enemies or underwater encounters. I can see tenacious players wanting to cast fly and soar above the rooftops or have your rogues and monks running along the them like the ninjas they want to be. I would love to give them that freedom!

April 13 (3 months ago)
Stik
Pro

+1  No specific suggests ...yet. 

But playing with the Foreground layer for a bit is enough to convince me that adding Multi-Level / Elevation Support to the Foreground Layer will be a good thing and useful.

April 15 (3 months ago)
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter


Tommy said:

I know the square root of diddly squat about coding and stuff, so apologies if this sounds stoopid... but how hard would it be to add a toggle to Tokens that simply says "Trigger Foreground ON/OFF" so that a Token can fly over a roof with the Foreground Trigger "OFF" and with either a switch via the Token Menu or a Token based macro flip that setting to "ON" and go "land" nearby and go underneath the Foreground Layer. 

As far as elevation markers go I just use Token Markers with comparative elevation levels rather than heights in feet/metres.

I'm going out on a limb here and going to assume that its not beyond the scope of the people who know the API to write something that could incrementally change that level via a macro/button, and could flip the "Trigger Foreground" to "ON" when the elevation is at 0, and Flips it to "OFF" when the elevation is at whatever the GM considers an appropriate level.

If I'm talking nonsense please feel free to let me know.

Not nonsense at all. You are basically restating my suggestion above for a token toggle to "above" behavior. And yeah, API support came out for this almost simultaneously, so I feel confident whatever features come will be likewise accessible.


I want the players to be able to move beneath a bride, then later move onto that same bridge, without the GM having to move the bridge or the player token to another layer.

I imagine every layer being given a value from 1 to 5 (as an example), where the controller of a token can choose that tokens layer value and show whatever is on the layer with the same value.

I also want a shortcut hotkey for the foreground layer, like m with map layer and o for token layer. J or N maybe.

Thank you to the team who has brought forth this fantastic addition to Roll20, and I hope you're able to keep making it even better.

April 16 (3 months ago)

I am of course, in full support of elevations, multiple layers (grid tilting so I can play isometrically easier) etc. So, my vote is for that. I will say though, that it's probably time to change the way thumbnails are captured. Perhaps just a flattened capture of everything on all layers, or just the map layer (excluding animations) or something that doesn't just black out the thumbnail. With something on nearly every Foreground now, I had a panic moment getting to a particular street map last week that took me almost 10 mins to find. It was my fault, but this contributed slightly.

April 17 (3 months ago)

Edited April 17 (3 months ago)
Fran
Roll20 Team

Hey everyone! Thanks for your upvotes and ideas thus far!

Terry, we have work scoped out to fix up the thumbnail for ya'll. The devs have also been taking a look at a small bug around shortcuts (and advanced shortcuts) for the foreground layer - that should be shipped out very soon.

In the meantime....who wants to chat?! Please sign up for an interview here so that we can talk more deeply about how we can get this feature polished for you. This is the perfect time to talk about how the foreground layer has gone in your games, how we can improve this feature and how we can better support your "tenacious" players. 

Don't mind me - I'll be posting this in the main foreground 'announcement' thread as well....

April 20 (3 months ago)
Kel
Pro

+1
Multilevel should be an obvious step to strive for without needing an outcry for it.

Elevation and Multi-level would save me hours of prep time for my maps (I use a lot of cliffs and ledges to give my players verticality in maps) AND would reduce a lot of scuff. So obviously throwing it in here that I would love for this.

May 05 (2 months ago)

+1. I've actually been using this feature not just for battlemaps, but for 'parallax' maps as well. That's where I'd take a single wallpaper-esque background, and split it up into multiple layers of overlay as to give the illusion of depth. While it works great for players that want to move around in the background part of the map (lowest level on map layer, PC tokens on token layer, higher level on Foreground layer), it unfortunately doesn't work for players wanting to go to or move on the foreground part. If you could either give players control over owned tokens on the Foreground or add multi-layer support, I'd really appreciate that.

I think a simple keybind for the GM to highlight (non hidden) tokens would solve your problem. 

May 20 (2 months ago)

Similar to how one-way walls work for dynamic light, could there be a feature that lets you draw "stairs" that would automatically change the elevation of a token that cross the drawn line, either up for down depending on which way it was crossed?


For example, if a player crosses under a bridge, where there are no stairs, their elevation stays low and everything above them fades like foreground. But if they go over the bridge, they cross the stairs on one side to raise their elevation and they are rendered on top of foreground. Then, stairs pointing the opposite direction on the other side that would lower their elevation again after they cross the bridge.

May 21 (2 months ago)

That's similar to what Keith and I suggested, about having a toggle on the Token to essentially turn its triggering of the foreground action to ON/OFF or "Above/Below". (When Keith pointed out my idea wasn't as dumb as I thought it might be, I did some additional reading...) 

If that were added, it would be possible to create a Mod that would trigger that effect. TokenMod would definitely handle  the changing part, but I think you'd have to use something else to Identify the Token Passing over the trigger area. I imagine it would work in a similar way to Trap and Teleport Mods, where a token passing over the specified area was modified so that the toggle was flipped every time you cross it.

You'd need to remember to manually (or Macro) change the Tokens toggle if they jump off a roof or something...   but if they introduce that Toggle the initial issue of stairs etc could be automated.

reed m. said:

Similar to how one-way walls work for dynamic light, could there be a feature that lets you draw "stairs" that would automatically change the elevation of a token that cross the drawn line, either up for down depending on which way it was crossed?


For example, if a player crosses under a bridge, where there are no stairs, their elevation stays low and everything above them fades like foreground. But if they go over the bridge, they cross the stairs on one side to raise their elevation and they are rendered on top of foreground. Then, stairs pointing the opposite direction on the other side that would lower their elevation again after they cross the bridge.




June 11 (1 month ago)

First of love the Foreground Layer and agree setting it up on Maps the ability to add things to Foreground Layer 1 , 2  and 3 and move a token to be on top of the Foreground Layer 1 , 2  and 3 would allow for multi levels, balcony's split level taverns where someone can be on the upper and still see the lower but not underneath would bring a dynamic to the games I think would blow people minds in dynamic fights... I have started with roofs and trees which is looking awesome but need to get a token on that roof up that tree to complete things... Thanks for all the good work... keep it up 

Layers:

I would like to be able to have a building with more than one floor and stair or ladder areas where players can choose to change layer. This would mean players could be in the same building in different places.

Reactions:

I would like one object to trigger an effect somewhere else, e.g. stand here and that door opens. push this and then you can reach a new area, flick this switch and trigger the acid spray trap with special effect.

Lots of creative ideas here. I definitely want to cast my upvote for multilayer features especially for multi-storied buildings and elevation tracking for flying characters or vehicles. Thank you to the whole Roll20 team for all your hard work, Bravo!

June 20 (1 month ago)

YES

+1

Can we get a turn counter on the Initiative Tracker?


+1 I would like multiple layer for light as well. Would be cool if the players could explore multiple layers at different "heights".

+1 Multi-level

and

+1 to what KatValkyrie said!

KatValkyrie said:

I played around with elevation a year or so back with a competitor of yours (*cough* Foundry *cough*), and I really liked some of the ways they (and their mods) have addressed elevation set up. Personally I would love something like the following:

  • Base Implementation: Dedicated Token Bar "Bubble" or Attribute for an elevation value that is used by the rest of the elevation system.
  • Base Implementation: Lighting walls can have an optional elevation value (or range of values) where the wall is visible to tokens at that elevation.
  • More Complicated Implementation: Art assets (including assets designated as Foreground) can have elevation values where they render in beneath the tokens.

additionally I would suggest, that it would be great to have all those "which Character can see what" questions would be answered at character level.
Not only for Multi-levels, but also for the things the foreground layer allows us to do. It would be quite funny if only the character who found something under this tree would see that and what he or she found.


July 05 (3 weeks ago)

Upvote on the multi-level desire.  :)

+1 to the Multi-Level!
that would make maps like towers or ships so much better
been using multiple maps and APIs to link tokens as a workaround for a missing multi-layer function