+1, would love to have it even if it works only for the current session
Dresden_Kurosaki said:
A possible solution to this was Warcraft 2's answer to fog of war. Not only do PCs get the "in control" (sight) benefits of dynamic lighting, but they are also treated to a dimmed path they have taken throughout the Dungeon crawl, so that they can remember where the have been and the general lay out of the dungeon (while dangers creeping up behind the are still "invisible" to the PC's sight).
Put simply, the characters use their sight bubbles to "open" up the map, while still being blind to areas normally restricted by the current structure of Dynamic Lighting. However, the players could now look back over the "darkened" map and not just see utter blackness, but the serpentine track they took to reach the area they are currently in.
What if you, on drop, tested what grid positions were at least 50% revealed, and then record the grid position as revealed or not. Reduces the data set in your example from 49,000,000 positions to 10,000. On reload, the Fog of War would appear jagged, but most game systems I've used compute line-of-sight in a similarly binary system.Riley D. said:
We are definitely looking into this as a possible feature for the next big update -- I think it's a cool feature as well...however, the main thing that might keep it from happening is figuring out a way to do it that doesn't require massive amounts of data. For example, if you have a 100x100 grid map, that is 7000x7000 pixels. Keeping track of exactly which "pixels" have been exposed or not would be a massive amount of data. Really the only way I can think of that this would be feasible from a technical standpoint is to have some sort of "polygon-based" system, where we could "merge" polygons together as you explored the map...but I'll have to give it some more thought.
Ray M. said:
What if you, on drop, tested what grid positions were at least 50% revealed, and then record the grid position as revealed or not. Reduces the data set in your example from 49,000,000 positions to 10,000. On reload, the Fog of War would appear jagged, but most game systems I've used compute line-of-sight in a similarly binary system.Riley D. said:
We are definitely looking into this as a possible feature for the next big update -- I think it's a cool feature as well...however, the main thing that might keep it from happening is figuring out a way to do it that doesn't require massive amounts of data. For example, if you have a 100x100 grid map, that is 7000x7000 pixels. Keeping track of exactly which "pixels" have been exposed or not would be a massive amount of data. Really the only way I can think of that this would be feasible from a technical standpoint is to have some sort of "polygon-based" system, where we could "merge" polygons together as you explored the map...but I'll have to give it some more thought.
You can also use the shortcut CTRL+L. :) It allows you to see "through the eyes" of the selected token.Kobold said:
This is why i always test lighting on each map via the "rejoin as player" button & assign at least one sighted token to myself (NPCs work great).
Kobold said:
great inovating!
On careful testing though, only objects in the token layer can grant sight to players or shed light visible to them; even though it may appear otherwise to the GM (at least at the plus level). This is why i always test lighting on each map via the "rejoin as player" button & assign at least one sighted token to myself (NPCs work great).
Sorry/ thank you! I hoped you had something there. Got me all excited for a moment.
Joseph I. said:
As for your thought though, (and I really like it) to keep the torch from wandering, maybe place it in a light cage, ie put it in a box on the lighting layer made of dotted lines, It would still shed light in the areas it needs to and be visible to everyone no matter where they are, but it would not be able to move outside of its box.
Kobold said:
separating the tokens is a genius idea too... though i don't know how necessary it really is, at least for my current group.
Riley D. said:
Note that I'm talking about if we want this to work and be persistent between sessions (which I think is pretty much the only way it makes sense) -- it would be much easier to do this if we could just store the data locally and discard it when you leave the session.
John T. said:
I would love to spend a little time before the game to save myself loads of time messing with the FoW or placing "memory tokens" all over the map.
Kobold said:
John T. said:
I would love to spend a little time before the game to save myself loads of time messing with the FoW or placing "memory tokens" all over the map.
enthusiastically agreed.
~ ~ ~
Separately: I'm not sure I understand how "+1" works.
Eric G. said:
+1
Just started a paid membership to get DL. Yeah, realized after trying to explain to my players that most of the screen would remain black, and go back to black. Please implement this Warcraft2 method or something similar, that takes very little GM work. I already have a huge overhead of time I have to allocate for diddling up maps and tokens and whatnot, please don't make it worse. Thanks.
PS: I also don't know if there's something else I have to do to "+1" this idea, other than this post...
Lloyd J. said:
After another session where I (the GM for D&D 5e) spent as much time managing the map as I did running the game, the next day (today), I went looking for this solution and see it has been requested. I am a paying member and have been since I started running my current game. I never used FoW, just Dynamic Lighting.
I also am starting to run into those who can see invisible and those who cannot. It would be great if I could some how give a condition or something, and then give another token the counter to that condition (ethereal, invisible, etc) so that this can be managed with much less headache.
I would not say this is a top priority for me, but it would be in the top 5.
My top is I would love to see all ove the D&D 5e spells and creatures ported into Roll20 officially, so I can stop referring to books when searching the content is so much faster in Roll20... but I will find that feature request and comment on it also.