What are your thoughts on overhauling the pen/drawing tools?

There really isn't as much control over the pen as there ought to be. We can't easily remove some of the squiggles without damaging our maps or accidentally removing tokens and, for some reason, I can't get the pen to switch colour. So I have an idea - we expand on the options we have. First of all, we get the colour working. Secondly, we have an eraser tool - works as the freehand tool except it ONLY removes lines. Thirdly, player eraser - if they can draw, so they can do some whiteboarding to discuss plans of battle and work out their tactics or just doodle, I'd like to be able to quickly remove it when they're done without damaging any maps I've drawn up. So I'd suggest a player eraser - possibly to tag for certain players (to, say, remove someone's doodling) or all players (to get rid of communal plans once they're done with). Fourthly, a colour eraser. If we can draw in multiple colours, it'd be nice to be able to remove things of one specific colour. Fifthly, a line tool so I can quickly draw up non-standard dungeon rooms - not all rooms are created equally. Additionally, a quick and easy option for the ruler that lets me measure walls and not just distance from the center of tokens would be nice. Sixthly, Size Variation, if only "thin" and "thick" lines so I can draw out things without always holding a felt-tip pen - then I could draw thick lines for dungeon walls and thinner ones for furnishings. Finally, we can select free formed lines and shapes and move and rotate and resize them but as is, I really don't get why. I'd honestly rather just draw directly and have that removed unless it serves a purpose. My proposal is the option to Tokenize selections so we can quickly draw up a monster, in program, and make that a thing. Otherwise? Get rid of it. It only slows down my ability to scribble out my maps.

Ah, I hadn't considered the possibility of using a cone. However, I don't really have a protractor to hand so having a shape-generator would help if ever I need to cast burning hands or something. I think I'd rather not have shapes that move, myself - I'd rather be able to quickly hit Control-Z and undo the original and slap a new cone on than have a drag and drop, resize and rotatable cone. As for the idea for tokenizing, that was just really to think of a use for the existing tools instead of just suggesting it moved more towards rasterized - I felt saying "I can't think of a use for it" would seem like a slight against all the hard work you'd put into a program I'm really happy with. For me, personally, its not significant as I'm an amateur artist and I'm tending towards making simple sprites to represent my monsters at the moment, to make them stand out on the backgrounds and standardize my tokens. Mostly, I just want to be able to quickly and easily draw and then edit the work I've done if and when (which is often) I mess up. And I don't mind the thread hijack, I'm happy if the points raised help the development of Roll20 =)

Originally I was going to vote for vector, but the more I think about it, both methods have a lot of pros and cons. I like being able to move & re-size, since about 90% of what I draw is diagrams of area type attacks (bursts, blasts, cones, trap radiuses etc. I don't do any "mapping" with the drawing tool, and probably never will. There's better, dedicated programs in existence that I'd rather use, and just import my completed map background onto the table. Sure, if things go completely off the rails, and I suddenly find myself in the middle of a forest that I have done zero planning for, I might whip something up ad-hoc, but in that situation, I can guarantee it'll be ugly, since even if I was doing it in real life, it'd be a bunch of quick scribbles on a battle-mat or a sheet of poster paper Now, on the flipside, I would need two hands to count the number of times one of my players, or myself have accidentally deleted tokens while trying to erase art ( I've started dragging them off to a blank section of board first to prevent accidents ) I think vector still wins out for me, since the biggest benefit I see for raster (the eraser tool) would be almost useless to me the way that my group uses it, since when we want to erase something, it's almost always the entire line/box/object, so highlight + delete saves a lot of time.

If the main reason for vectors over raster is template use, since it appears Roll20 handles transparency via .png, my initially reaction is go raster. Blast/Cone templates could be handled via a token that is re-sizable. In that case, the draw tool could distinguish its use by being raster.

Can Roll20 handle both? A "paint brush" for on the fly raster drawings, and a "pen" for vectored? If I HAD to choose between only one of the two, I would go with the vectored drawing tools as being more versatile.

I'm more or less the opposite of Ken Bauer in that sketching maps is about all I do with drawing tools during the game. (And that applies to a real table as much as a virtual one.) And preparing maps before the game is not very practical for me since I seldom have much idea of where the PCs might go in the course of any adventure. For example, in the last adventure I ran the players decided to go to Colombia. Anyway, the functionality that Samael Butterdragon described sounded pretty good to me, though I also want a "fill with colour" tool. I'm not very practiced with the existing tools, and maybe I'll get used to them. Besides, I can always fire up a separate paint package and import the result when it's done. It doesn't take much extra time, and the only real loss is explaining things as you draw them. So I reckon the question comes down to "what functionality do I want to share with the players? ". I don't have an answer to that right now.

.Finally, we can select free formed lines and shapes and move and rotate and resize them but as is, I really don't get why. When you have selected lines you can also set their colour and thickness. I found that out by accident.

I'm in a similar position as Agemegos, in that I use the drawing tools to sketch or annotate maps / images. For things like blast radius, cones, etc, I'd rather make a nice-looking token, and because the need for such things is more predictable, I could take the time beforehand to generate them. On the other hand, I tend not to run pre-planned scenarios, so making maps ahead of time is usually not an option. Being able to quickly create maps in game (adding more details as players request them) would be great. Now, it's true that such maps could be either vector or raster, but in my experience (which is basically GIMP vs. Inkscape), I prefer raster for such quick sketches if only because such vector drawings can become cluttered with accidentally movable objcects. Side note: a ~huge~ added bonus, for me at least, would be if you could draw on images/rectangles themselves, in addition to drawing onto the table as a whole.

I just spent a while using the drawing and text tools to construct a layout for my Fate game. This is supposed to work like a roulette table in a way, consisting of a spread of labelled areas for people to put chips in representing their use of Fate Points in the game. I had a little bit of trouble with the rectangles that represent the areas of the table popping above their labels in the token stack (it happened whenever I moved them), and I couldn't get them to the back again without creating a new label. Also, I would have liked a green baize background to the spread (so that the boxes and writing looked like a roulette table), but that wasn't possible because the background won't show up in the interiors of the rectangles. For both these reasons, and others, it would be nice to have either an outline rectangle drawing tool or a transparent fill colour.

First, to answer the question of usage, I don't use the drawing tools for anything (I never have in any VTT; the drawings always end up clunky and jarring, compared to the nice maps I work with; I've just never had a use for them). From the theoretical standpoint, though, I would vote for raster drawings, though, rather than vector to save processor time and to avoid any interaction between drawings and tokens. The question of tool availability to players is also important, though. I also have generally wanted the VTTs I've used to prevent the players from having access to the drawing tools; the power to draw has never been used for good by my players, and I know them all personally and am related to some of them. I'd prefer if players didn't have the option unless I specifically check a box.

My preference is vector, for the simple fact that it scales infinitely with the map size, whereas raster takes up a quadratically increasing amount of memory and storage space in the most general case (it can be more efficient than this if you do a quad-tree decomposition of the whitespace, or get people to mark certain areas as 'canvas' or something). I'd be worried that raster would both slow down the engine (and it makes new layers really expensive, and 'logical' layers basically impossible) and would make large maps impossible.

I suspect that the best route would probably be vector for space issues, as Nicholas says above. However, I would suggest both a vector (multiple point) polygon tool, a vector square tool, a vector freehand pen tool, and a points editor. Not unlike Inkscape (<a href="http://www.inkscape.org" rel="nofollow">www.inkscape.org</a>) and how it did its basic tools. Rather than adding raster, which could balloon unintentionally to huge sizes with enough scribbling, vector is rendered on the fly... it would look a lot cleaner and be more fitting for r20's simplistic style.

As far as erasing goes, there's tablet note-taking software that uses vector storage of the pen strokes but allows erasure. When the eraser is moved over a stroke, it splits the stroke in two, so it is possible to create an eraser feature while still having vector graphics.

I'd add pen pressure sensitivity as well to this overhauling of the drawing tools in Roll20 --as an option if that is going to eat many resources. It helps a lot for making quality sketches for those having drawing tablets. This comes from the thread: <a href="http://community.roll20.net/discussion/comment/6427#Comment_6427" rel="nofollow">http://community.roll20.net/discussion/comment/6427#Comment_6427</a>

I'm more use to raster, but I'd really like to be able to "draw with a texture" I.E. a brick texture, that I can draw a box with for a brick walled room and fill with wood panels for a floor. If that can only be done with one or the other I would favor that.

What I'd really like, whether you go vector or raster, would be the ability to make shapes with defined sizes. For instance, center a circle on a token and draw it around them 30 ft out (for fireball area of effect, for instance). Or make a 20x40 rectangle (for an in-promptu building). For that kinda stuff vector would probably be better because you can then clear away the circle easily.

I'm going to second Paul on wanting shapes of defined sizes. Being able to make circles (preferably defined by picking a center point, then expanding the radius, instead of estimating from one "corner" to another like paint does) and rectangles, or really just plain old straight lines would be very useful.

My preference is for raster. I use the drawing tools for ad-hoc mapping and they are hardly effective for that. I think a rasterised system and a set of resizable templates in the tokens list would cover pretty much all the bases.

Why not make something called a "canvas token"? the canvas token would be either a square, hex, etc. and would be a pure white blank template. The user could then draw on this template, aka a token, where his drawing would be raster but the token itself could be resized, reoriented, etc. I know you said your'e not doing both, but would this be an acceptable solution?

raster please. If I needed to make re-sizable re-usable tokens for radius templates, i'd just make them separately and import them.

I would love the drawing tools to be on their own layer. A drawing layer per say. would make it easier to use and edit the items on that layer without cluttering what is on the other layers. The question begins what happens if I want it above/ below the Token layer, then either we make the layer position adjustable or we make multiple layers.

This is a kind of old thread, but it seems like a good place to post my support for better drawing tools. I created a suggestion thread myself for including the ability to select uploadable tileable textures to draw on instead of just solid colors, which would be a very welcome addition to the drawing tool for me since I'm used to using that to draw in floors in my map tool games. (So instead of drawing in a solid black 2x10 square box for a hallway, for instance, I'd draw in a solid 2x10 square box of seamlessly repeating flagstone images).

I know a lot of items are being overhauled in the next update, but I would love to know if this is one of those items.

This conversation is interesting to me so I'm going to revive it after six months of inactivity. The forum has at least eight posts (They should all be answered with a link to this post) asking for an eraser which is needed for any drawing tool to be useful as a "drawing" tool. Without an eraser it is just a vector shape tool. So if you want to keep cones circles squares and so on we should have a vector shape tool and a raster drawing tool or the code for erasing vectors needs to be figured out. I like Samurai Jack's Canvas token idea. In the end My vote is for raster drawing as it will not interfere with other layers and can be erased. It would be a great whiteboard tool and vector shapes like circle, cone, hex and so on should still be available in a shapes tool. No redrawing the shapes just scaling them and rotating them then its not really a raster and a vector drawing tool, its a drawing tool and a basic shape tool. I would say if you can't do both (As Riley has said he will not) then you need to add an erase tool to the vectors. This is difficult though as vectors use an array to store data so when you erase a vector at a point other then the end it causes the lines to shift on either side. However if the erase tool drew new end points to the vector and recalculated the curve from the new point to the next closest point it would be possible. After all you can erase in Illustrator, Flash, ink-scape and other vector tool-sets and new "blob brush" tools in adobe vector programs merge overlapping points of vector lines calculating only the outer shape. This however is complex code so if Riley wants to save himself the trouble of such complex code he should just add a raster drawing tool and use vector shapes, and shapes that could be drawn inside of as Samurai Jack mentioned would be great. I really like Samuel B's ideas for a DM eraser, player erasers and color based erasers. As for the Line tool. it could be one of the base shapes. a vector line, square, cone, hex (or PolyStar as seen in Adobe Flash), and a circle. With scalable vectors and rotation options I cant think of any other shape you would need. (Maybe a rounded square tool but you dont "need" that in roll20) Anyways, that's my two cents. A penny for my thoughts and you still come out richer.