Suggestion - Vision "penetration"

[ShirraWhitefur]

Greetings!

I've been tinkering around for most of the week, waiting for my ISP to unlock the port so I could properly set the server up and give it a heavier test with friends.. So far, I haven't really encountered any heavy bugs, and any little ones were already covered for the most part. (Beyond being unable to set the line thickness of the topography freehand or polygon tools, and that it draws a little to the left of the line.)

While I was looking up things on vision distances for characters, I thought about the use of Maptool with an overland map. That's sort of a given usage, one would think, then it occured to me, what about a campaign where the PC's are exploring, with no maps to tell them where they are going? Vision would be definitely useful there, except a small flaw.. while a very few things will totally block thier vision on a large scale, most will just hamper it.

The thought in this case was setting up topography 'blocks' with vision properties, along the lines of, 'This connected freehand block over here is forest, and reduces visibility to 30% range'. So when vision hits an edge of it, the remaining distance that would have been shown is reduced to 30% of the original value, letting a player only peek a bit in.

This would allow for all sorts of tricks for an overland map, not to mention some for normal dungeon uses. Heavily damaged wall that allows a 5-10% vision, a thorny bush that's hiding monsters on the other side, but only allows 25% vision range.

Now, I'm not going to kid myself and think that it's possible without likely a whole recoding of the vision and topography stuff, so I don't expect it to happen.. but it was a neat enough thought that I had to mention it.

Thanks again for making such a nifty tool, I've been having fun working with it so far. .. Admittedly, it's trial by fire.. err.. gaming group hasn't quite happened yet here, but still. ^_^

- Addendum - As I sit here, fiddling with the topography tool, something else that goes on my suggestion list, something in theory much much more doable.. A bigger variety of shape-tools. At the very least, an ellipse tool. Also, ponder making the colors of the line tools changable, and allow for a changing of the opacity on the shape tools, since a big bright solid block is not always easy to line up with fine details. Thanks!

- Shirra Whitefur
.. If I draw one more pillar outline by hand, I may scream. Who needs that many bloody pillars?

[trevor]

Thanks for the ideas.

The vision penetration idea is an interesting one. It wouldn't take a rewrite of the vision system, but it would take a lot of computing power I think. I'll have to let it stew in my mind for a bit so see if something comes up to simplify the coding.

LBL shapes. You give the example of oval, what other shapes would you think would be good?

The reason ellipse isn't in there is for performance issues. At least that was the original reason. I've since greatly improved the speed of the lbl, so just need to drop it in and see how it goes. I'll also be implementing a way to import an lbl image mask in 1.3 and the ability to assign lbl to tokens/stamps in 1.3

I'll go ahead and drop an ellipse tool in there.

[ShirraWhitefur]

Thanks for the ideas.

The vision penetration idea is an interesting one. It wouldn't take a rewrite of the vision system, but it would take a lot of computing power I think. I'll have to let it stew in my mind for a bit so see if something comes up to simplify the coding.

Not a problem. I just had to mention the idea, because it was too neat to me to pass up rambling on. ^_^

LBL shapes. You give the example of oval, what other shapes would you think would be good?

That might be a thought for pestering more than just I, a poll or such. I can't think I would be wanting much else beyond a hemisphere though. Between the rectangle, oval/circle, and hemisphere, -most- situations are covered, an' for those that aren't, there's the polygon/freehand. I would request a filled / border only version of each though.


Another side question.. yeah, I like cluttering threads with rambling.. Is there a way to make a macro that basically goes, 'select <name> token -> expose last path', for the players to set up for thier character movements? .. Or more likely for the GM to tap after people have done thier movements.. ;)

I know there's one for centering view on a given token-name's, but beyond that.. :shrug:

Thanks again.

- Shirra

[trevor]

Is there a way to make a macro that basically goes, 'select <name> token -> expose last path', for the players to set up for thier character movements? .. Or more likely for the GM to tap after people have done thier movements..

Not as of right now. Look for heavy scriptability in 2.0 (right after 1.3)