Drawing tool selection ought to be persistent.

Did a trial to see how quickly I could set up a room and furnish it. Couldn't find any wall sprites suitable for the walls of an academic's office by searching for "wall". Tried using the drawing tools. Found it slow and inconvenient to have to re-select the "rectangle" draw tool before drawing each section of wall, then re-select the fill colour after drawing each one. Same with free-hand curve drawing: having the tool re-set itself to the select tool every time I let up the mouse button, so that I had to re-select draw (freehand curve) before each line segment), was irritating and slowed me down a lot. Drawing tool selection, including the selection of outline and fill colours for rectangles, ought to persist until something else is selected.

I'm finding it a lot easier/faster using Paint (or similar program) for any free-hand map drawing, then dragging it to the page, before adding clutter/"dungeon decor" via the art library, if you want to give it a try? I don't think the drawing tools available as-is are really intended for anything other than very very rough map-sketches anyway.

Sure, but even on map sketches.... If I want to draw an "X" to mark the spot I don't want to have to re-select the draw tool between the strokes of the "X".

This make sense. Noting it. Brett, I'm excited about some of the ways you try to use the system. Not sure if we'll end up being an end-all, be-all solution for you with map making and the like, but I'm really hopeful that we'll be an asset to the kinds of games you're trying to run. Because they're interesting as can be.

in some cases all you want to run with is a whiteboard and a few hastily drawn lines and some markings for foes and pcs. believe it or not, this is more important to me than being able to import maps, as sometimes you really are running a game on the fly. i'm not looking for a map making utility, just a user friendly whiteboard and marker ;)

@erik Exactly. My GMing kit contains a bundle of dry-erase and wet-erase markers, a big folding whiteboard (one side has a hex grid ruled on it with paint), and some A3 document display cases that I can put a map, grid, character-sheet or whatever inside of and scribble on with whiteboard and OHP markers. Making elaborate maps (except of, you know, cities and countries and the PCs' homes and headquarters that get repeated use) is not a lot of use to me because I never know where the PCs are going to go to. That's true with pencils and paper, and it will remain true with an InterNet virtual table. For on-line gaming up until now I've been using on-line shared-whiteboard facilities such as Scriblink and Twiddla (beside a video conference solution running in another window). Those have had the problem that they didn't support character position markers that we could move. Erasing and re-drawing was a pain, and we were looking into mounting a webcam on a retort stand and putting it over a hex-grid. The problem with that would have been that only the GM would have been able to move the markers or minis. Roll20 is looking pretty good for us. But I'm very likely to use it like a whiteboard with a grid and markers than to prepare maps. When you use a whiteboard you "pick up" a marker of your choice and then you can draw with it until you put it down. It doesn't teleport out of you fingers and back to the pencil-case each time you take its tip off the whiteboard. Similarly, with an on-line whiteboard you can select a drawing tool and then use it freely, drawing multiple figures, until you choose something else. Your mouse-pointer doesn't change back to a select tool every time you mouse-up. Neither ought it to do so with the draw tools in Roll20.

I have a special alphabet I'm using in this campaign, so I have to hand-write it... I tried in roll20, but had to switch over to paint instead. Same with drawing the map--all those little pieces, and when I was done, some of them I'd accidentally moved... so I had to start over in paint. That's easy enough, but for just drawing letters and shapes, a persistent tool would be so much better.

+1,000,000 to what Erik and Brett are saying. The ability to sketch out a dungeon (or whatever) on a whiteboard is more useful to me than map importing, although I do the latter too. I don't want Roll20 to be a mapping tool (there are loads of those), just a good sketching tool. And good to me is no more than: 1. Line 2. Square/Rectangle 3. Polygon 4. Circle/Ellipse 5. Freeform 6. Text 7. Tool Selection Persistance. That's it. :-)

Agreed. Drawing tool selection should be persistent until the tool is deselected.

I'm quite happy with freeform+text while in the game. The other tools I'd only use while preparing. For the freeform, I'd very much prefer to have 8 different pens to directly access. That'd be what I also use at a real table, I have a box of 8 colored wet-erase pens. When I put it on the table, it is there, and I can directly reach for every pen that is in there. I would put all tools at the borders of the virtual table and have the "main menu level" buttons expand the tool selector until clicked again. So you don't have a clutter of tools you don't use, but those you do use are just one click away, not 2.

i'm not a programmer, but a simple white board has been a feature of just about every VTT i've explored. without it, Roll20 doesn't offer anything i can't accomplish with Maptools or Fantasy Grounds with skype or google+ hangout running on the bottom of the screen. I've always preferred having the basics in hand before the bells and whistles, and in my eyes, the white board is basic

i'm not a programmer, but a simple white board has been a feature of just about every VTT i've explored. without it, Roll20 doesn't offer anything i can't accomplish with Maptools or Fantasy Grounds with skype or google+ hangout running on the bottom of the screen. I've always preferred having the basics in hand before the bells and whistles, and in my eyes, the white board is basic I've run a few games with videoconf + whiteboard. Compared with running a game face-to-face with a whiteboard on the table it notably lacks the ability to move tokens around on the board, and that in my experience is important. Erasing and re-drawing character positions on a sketch is clumsy, slow, and error-prone. A year ago that would have been all I wanted: videoconferencing + a whiteboard with movable counters. Now I see poker chips as basic too, and can see that cards are necessary for some games.

One suggestion I have for the drawing overhaul: it'd be nice if I could select the color ahead of time, instead of drawing in black, selecting it, then changing it to a different color.