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

Replace Fog Of War with an image

Score + 246
Yes, please! 
This is a great feature suggestion. I'd love this to be added.
Even if I could just change the FoW color that would be great. Grey (or a mist texture) would be great for spooky campaigns like Curse of Strahd.
Julix said: I've thought of this before. Imagine a village with houses that have roofs that automatically disappear when you step in the door (i.e. can see the inside) That would be a very useful option! I sometimes put a "roof" image over the building floorplan that I send to the GM layer once the player's token moves inside.
This could also be useful in cases where you're using an old style BW map where the walls are jet black like the fog of war.  Instead of changing the exposure on the image and washing everything out, you could just assign the fog of war image a 1x1 gray pixel png. Multiple fog of war layers could be useful, but there's a point where you should share your screen while using an image editing program if you're getting that fancy.
+1
+1, there's so many applications for something like this!
+1
+1
+1
+1
The rooftop idea is how I ended up here. I have tons of maps I've made where I have a PNG overlay of a "foreground" that I can peel away, things like roofs, or sails, or upper floors. If I could just set that single "rooftops" png to the custom fog of war layer over the base map, then rooftops of buildings would naturally peel away as players pass windows, giving the effect of peering into a space. This suggestion is a pretty big deal for me. It'd very quickly positively impact my games.
@Dave Yes, that token or "as Drawing " option would be excellent. Too bad I can't vote this more than once.
+1 per my inquiry here . Details: I'm trying to achieve use of Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls with roofs that remain visible over yet-unexplored areas of buildings, on an exterior map that has many buildings with interiors.  Using an image of the roofs as the map's fog of war would be one approach if it were possible.  This would allow a common practice on physical tabletops with drawn / constructed maps—opaque roofs of buildings act as shorthand for what characters can see before exploring interiors— while allowing use of the full Dynamic Lighting features. The use case for me would be to use the Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls features with an image of buildings' roofs as the fog of war. In this case, the map beneath the fog of war shows both the interior and exterior of buildings in an area. As players explore the interior of a building, the fog-of-war "roof" image disappears bit by bit, showing the explored interior. Transparent DL Walls and DL Doors could then be used to block tokens from moving through building walls and locked doors and seeing through the same, while keeping each building's roof visible over areas not yet explored. This could allow easy use of Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls to keep players from seeing into areas their tokens can't without the entire area of an unexplored building appearing as a uniform and somewhat mysterious black shape (instead of the building's roof), and, similarly, without the Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls of the building blocking visibility of an exterior map just to hide the interior of an unexplored building. (Think: using DL Doors and Walls on a map of "three tall, round stone towers surrounded by short, round thatch-roof huts," where otherwise players would be confronted with a collection of opaque circles blocking lines of sight, prompting repeated questions of "Is my character in front of a tall tower or a tiny hut right now?"  The use of overhead roofs as visual shorthand for a ground-level view is a practice going all the way back to the genesis of TTRPGs.)
N. said: +1 per my inquiry here . Details: I'm trying to achieve use of Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls with roofs that remain visible over yet-unexplored areas of buildings, on an exterior map that has many buildings with interiors.  Using an image of the roofs as the map's fog of war would be one approach if it were possible.  This would allow a common practice on physical tabletops with drawn / constructed maps—opaque roofs of buildings act as shorthand for what characters can see before exploring interiors— while allowing use of the full Dynamic Lighting features. The use case for me would be to use the Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls features with an image of buildings' roofs as the fog of war. In this case, the map beneath the fog of war shows both the interior and exterior of buildings in an area. As players explore the interior of a building, the fog-of-war "roof" image disappears bit by bit, showing the explored interior. Transparent DL Walls and DL Doors could then be used to block tokens from moving through building walls and locked doors and seeing through the same, while keeping each building's roof visible over areas not yet explored. This could allow easy use of Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls to keep players from seeing into areas their tokens can't without the entire area of an unexplored building appearing as a uniform and somewhat mysterious black shape (instead of the building's roof), and, similarly, without the Dynamic Lighting Doors and Walls of the building blocking visibility of an exterior map just to hide the interior of an unexplored building. (Think: using DL Doors and Walls on a map of "three tall, round stone towers surrounded by short, round thatch-roof huts," where otherwise players would be confronted with a collection of opaque circles blocking lines of sight, prompting repeated questions of "Is my character in front of a tall tower or a tiny hut right now?"  The use of overhead roofs as visual shorthand for a ground-level view is a practice going all the way back to the genesis of TTRPGs.) It's sort of possible to do this already, although it's tedious and requires Eplorable Darkness and a lot of pre-setup by the DM. What I do is I have a map on the Map Layer of whatever it is I want the players to see when things are out of sight, and over that map I place a different image of essentially the same map, minus whatever it is I want to "hide" when it is out of sight. This means that they only see things on the token layer when they have LoS, and the map layer provides the image for whatever they have seen but which is now in the dark. For things you want them to always  see, whether they technically have LoS or not - but let's say it's the roof of a tower or a mountain far away - you can wall off whatever it is with  Dynamic Lighting walls,  and place a transparent token within said Dynamic Lighting walls. Then you give the token Vision and assign it to All Players, and now they will always have vision on said roof or mountain. This takes a lot of time to set up though so I don't recommend it unless you'll reuse the map several times. Either way, I like the idea of letting the players be able to draw their own maps in the game. I asked my 7yo niece to draw my players a hand drawn version, but they should be able to use their agency and cooperate, as their characters would in their world. Here's the map my niece drew btw:
yes please
+1
1701626940

Edited 1701627192
+1 Yes, even the white fog as I am planning Reign of Winter as well. 
But the roof idea is great also great if it didn't bog down too much. I have a problem with a player on an older machine that lags too much with dynamic lighting.