Simple FOW Replacement with UDL?

Hi there, so having just seen the news that the legacy dynamic lighting is going to be retired I'd like to know how to use the old Fog of War feature going forward. I want to have a map entirely dark to all players which I reveal when I choose to when using the simple rectangular box. I don't want to have to set light and vision settings for every token. I have looked through the tutorials but I cannot make it work in this way without having to set overly complex settings for all the tokens. So what I have tried: Setting the page to UDL with explorer mode on. Setting the entire page to permanent darkness. On the side bar I select explorable darkness and reveal an area. To my players this area is just grey rather than black. The only way for them to see anything is to give each specific token vision. Is there no way to properly recreate the old fog of war mechanism? That was a good simple mechanism which I as the DM could easily control without setting a dozen fiddly settings for each token and map. Assistance greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I think you can get what you want with UDL. You need to have UDL turned on for the page, and everything on the LDL tab turned off. Then use the tool pallet to reset darkness. To do this, hover over the eye icon on the pallet to reveal the menu.  It has three parts: 1) conceal or reveal (eye with bar across it or eye without bar across it), 2) shape tools (rectangle or polygon), and 3) reset.  You MUST choose the correct one from the top before you can use either of the others. To make the whole page dark, select the eye with bar across it, and then click on reset darkness.  To make the whole page light, select eye without bar and then click on reset darkness. Finally, to control smaller areas, select either conceal or reveal as needed and then click on the shape tool to use. It's a little less intuitive than the old fog of war, but once you get started it's not difficult. You can then turn off all the sight and light settings on the tokens. I hope this helps!

I did see in the notes now I re-read that basic Fog of War is not being removed, just the legacy 'advanced' version from the old dynamic lighting. Is this true? Can I get confirmed? Because as long as I can use the old basic FOW I'm fine come May

Regular Fog of War isn't going anywhere. I'm not going to track down the post where that was stated, but I know that was from a Roll20 employee. It wouldn't make sense for them to remove it, because it is the only vision control available to free accounts.

If you click the bell icon next to notifications at the top right of this page, the most recent announcement is about DL, and it states in there that fog of war is not being removed.

This is good news, thanks folks for clarifying!