Greetings gamers! We have some exciting news including a new compendium as well as a major update for a popular sheet! Developer Spotlight! Dungeon World Compendium is now available! You can access it from the compendium home page ! This new compendium supports Drag-and-Drop functionality for our Official Dungeon World Sheet! Various compendium fixes and new features going live Fix for an issue with default token settings on the settings page Fixed an issue that was causing some auto-calculations for attributes not to display correctly Hi, rollers. Now that we're on the other side of the Fog and Functionality I wanted to take a moment to talk about our experience with the update. First of all, I wanted to thank my Dev team for all of the hours they put in to make the update happen. Despite more than half of the team being new to the Dev team as of this year, they hit the ground running, took ownership of their projects, and delivered on time. This gives me confidence that Roll20 will be able to continue to ramp up our production schedule as the new developers come into their own and put their marks on the site and application. There's a lot to unpack from this update. I'll be talking more about Fog and Functionality and our design decisions in later Community Corners. Today I wanted to talk about Advanced Fog of War. The "Starcraft 2 Style" Fog of War has been a top 3 requested feature since the creation of the Suggestions Board. So, why did it take us so long to get around to implementing it? We already had Dynamic Lighting, right? Well, the difficulties of Dynamic Lighting and Advanced Fog of War are not apples to apples. Dynamic Lighting is generated by determining the distance from the center of a token the player controls to the edges of the token's range of vision, the map edge, or any lighting obstructions it might hit. That area is then snipped out of an opaque darkness layer giving the player vision of the area calculated. This isn't a trivial function but the vast majority of computers and browsers with WebGL can handle it, even in real time. This is the point in which the comparison becomes apples to oranges. The difference with the Advanced Fog of War is that this geometry would need to be persistent between sessions and shared between players, instead of only existing locally and for just the character's current location. Unlike Dynamic Lighting, every token of every character would need to have a history of the places it has been, that geometry ray-casted and computed and then melded together in real time. That data would then need to be uploaded to the Roll20 Firebase servers in real time and passed back to other players who share control over tokens, especially the GM who will need to get updates on all information from all players. Both the computing and data requirements proved to be way too high for the lower bound computers of our average user. It's in consideration for browser memory, processing power, and average internet upload speeds (something we crashed into hard with WebRTC) that we took a different direction that wasn't tied directly to Dynamic Lighting but would be compatible with it. We went with cells. But why not just use pixels? Let's take a real world example of software that does fog of war that's both persistent between sessions and can be shared between users in real time. Starcraft 2 uses the same approach we're using here, cells. The game's FoW is not pixel perfect, it reveals things in blobby chunks, just at a smaller unit size. So, why not make our cells smaller? Because having it match the size of the grid makes things simpler in a lot of math calculations. And more importantly the smaller you go with the unit size the much much bigger the data requirements become. If you cut the size of a cell in half, that doesn't double the number of cells, it quadruples them. And this scale continues multiplicatively. That means a normal unit which is 70px by 70px if taken at the pixel level is almost 5000 times as much data. Even still we're getting reports of some users still having performance issues with the Advanced Fog of War. Either hitting bandwidth limitations, their browser's memory running low, or not being able to process the changes in real time. Earlier this week we deployed some improvements that we think have resolved many of these issues for users experiencing poor performance. We're looking at future optimizations and a handful of outstanding quirks and bugfixes. In the meantime if you're not getting good performance please consider limiting the size of your viewport (window size) or switching to the Update On Drop mode. All in all we're really excited to have Advanced Fog of War in Roll20 and are happy with its initial release. I'm currently using it twice a week in my weekly sessions and love the feeling of exploration, mapping and charting new territory, that the tool provides. For more information on the tool check out our official documentation. As always we'd love to hear your feedback, questions, commends, and concerns on the Advanced Fog of War forum thread. Until next week, happy rolling! -Steve You can learn all about our Advanced Fog of War features on our wiki! Community Highlights! The big one for this week is a major update to the Burning Wheel sheet by Steve K. and Natha ! On the Marketplace! Creators have taken October into their own hands, and the horror themed packs are ramping up! Devils of the 9 Hells: Pack 1 by Riley Owens aka Darkwoulfe This token pack consists of 30 uniquely designed, 3D rendered tokens, depicting various Devils of the 9 Hells Halloween Haunted House by Sarah Helsley This classic haunted house tile set will get you through any last minute needs to drop something scary into your campaign! That is all for this week everyone! Good luck on your adventures! -Drespar