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Dynamic lighting + fog of war help!

I've been fighting with this for over an hour trying to read online how to get this to work. My players will be running around in a cavern carrying torches. I want them to give off 40/20 light. I've tried checking and unchecking each individual box multiple times but any time I load in as a player, it never reveals any fog of war for the token I have that is giving off light and is under my ownership. I even tried making a neutral torch and having it give off light that all players can see and it still wont reveal any fog of war. Is it that loading in as a player will never reveal fog of war and it will work for my players?  I can completely turn off fog of war and then it does keep the map hidden until players move around my sight boxes and then grays out sections of map they cant see anymore. But it lets them see forever in a straight line and I dont want that. Hence only letting them emit 40ft of light from their characters. side note, this is my first time playing around with roll20 so my newness and frustration is to be expected I guess. Everyone talks about it being so easy, I don't know why I am having so much trouble! Any help would be great.
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keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
To begin with, are you trying to use Fog of War, or Advanced Fog of War? They are two completely different animals.  Fog of War is completely manual, like laying a big piece of black paper over your map, and pulling up pieces of it to reveal as the players progress. Advanced Fog of War is a feature that allows players to clear away fog of war as their tokens move about the map. It's a bit trickier to use. Dynamic Lighting, of course, reveals or hides parts of the map in real time, based on a token's individual ability to perceive light sources, and block set up by the GM. What specifically are you trying to do?
ah. ok. I didnt know the difference between advanced FoW and just regular FoW. So I'd like to use advanced so that the revealing of the map feels more natural to the players. I just went and messed around with it after reading your post and while that helped a little, I am still struggling with a few things. First, is there a way to un-discover the map for a player? even if I "reset fog of war" when I go back in as a player, the map is gray instead of blacked out. Additionally, my token still reveals 50-60 feet out in a corridor. I only want the Dynamic sight lines to reach out 40 ft from the token they are controlling. That way, even if they have already discovered a section of the map, monsters could have shifted and are now just out of sight at 50ft per say. Thank you so much for the quick response. Im trying to get a tech demo ready for tonight so my play group can see what roll20 has to offer.
1539827404
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
Advanced Fog of War can be tricky, particularly if you are new to Roll20. That being said, you can click on the Fog of War tool in-game and "Reset Fog of War." This will reset it for ALL tokens however. There is no way to re-set for an individual token. You dynamic sight is controlled by Dynamic Lighting settings for each token. I'd suggest looking through the Dynamic Lighting Guide to get a feeling for what is possible and what changes with which setting. I would suggest reading the Token Settings part of the AFoW wiki page. My best advice however is to set up a dummy account for the purposes of testing. Using Ctrl-L to see through a token's eyes has some limitations for secure testing, same with Rejoin as Player. Open the game in a Private Browsing Window using the Dummy Account, and in a normal window for your DM account. You can practice re-setting Fog of War and adjusting light and sight in a real-time environment. You will need to give the Dummy Account control over whatever token you are testing with, and I would suggest doing it one at a time. Controlling multiple tokens can lead to confusing results, as they share sight and light.
1539888748

Edited 1539889529
Alright. I finally got it working. the problem now was that I global illumination box checked. the option we ran into while playing was that as the dm i was experiencing a considerable amount of lag. 2-5 seconds for every mouse click, sometimes up to 10 just waiting for my mouse location to update so I could click on something. This wouldn't be a very huge problem If I just planned out everything ahead of time, but trying to make tokens and get pictures on the fly was incredibly clunky. I'm not sure what optimal internet speed is, but I do have 100up/down. Additionally, my AFoW was drawn with the polygon tool instead of boxes which probably contributed to the lag a bit.  edit: Im drawing my map over again and Im using boxes. Does the number of boxes matter? would 100 1x1 boxes have the same strain as 1 100x1 box in terms of calculating latency for dynamic lighting? Does it read overlaping and touching boxes as just whatever the outside edge is?
1539898997
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
You might have to do some lag testing to see which is more optimal. I will note that AFoW is notoriously power-hungry in regards to system resources. My guess is that RAM and Processor speed would matter more than connection latency, but that's entirely a guess. Page size and number of tokens with sight are important to keep low. Dynamic Lighting is usually much more forgiving speed-wise, and vanilla Fog of War is pretty much a non-issue. You can look into these links to try to optimize your speed: Optimizing Roll20's Performance Advanced Fog of War: Processing Power