Help--Vision Behavior Changed; Why?

[Darakonis]

I recently jumped from MT version 63 to 74. In 74, as GM, I have issues with fog of war.

From a Player View, 63 and 74 are identical, so there is no issue. From a GM View, however...

63:
Player view:
- Currently visible area is fully illuminated
- Previously revealed area is darkened
- Undiscovered area is black

GM view:
- Currently visible area is fully illuminated
- Previously revealed area is darkened
- Undiscovered area is darkened more

74:
Player view:
- Currently visible area is fully illuminated
- Previously revealed area is darkened
- Undiscovered area is black

GM view:
- Currently visible area is fully illuminated
- Previously revealed area is darkened
- Undiscovered area is darkened. No difference between undiscovered and previously revealed.

Here is an image to further clarify:



The images on the right (player view) are fine. On the left, in b74, I cannot see which areas are unexplored, as I could have in b63 and every previous iteration of MT. They appear the same as areas that have been previously explored but are not presently visible.

Is something wrong with my configuration of MT? I tried messing with the opacity of fog, but that didn't make anything better.

TLDR: In GM view, I can no longer see where "hard fog"/undiscovered area/totally black areas are. What did I do wrong?


EDIT: the b66 to b67 switch is when the above change occurred.

Peace,
-Darakonis

[PinkRose]

Seeing the same thing.
Using b73.
Actually had this problem last weekend and didn't realize this was the problem. Was just frustrated that I couldn't see what I wanted.
But didn't realize that in the past we could see it.

[DeviantNull]

It's this way in b70 as well, I think it changed around b69 but I'd have to DL the older versions to check. I honestly hadn't noticed before now, but most of my recent sessions have been pretty FOW and vision free. After fiddling around with settings and checking everything I can't find any way to make it behave like it did before. I sort of miss it.

[Darakonis]

Just went through the past several versions, and b66 was the last version where things worked "as normal;" ie where, in GM view, you could differentiate between unexplored and previously explored areas.

Peace,
-Darakonis

[Darakonis]

Went through the b67 patch notes in the wiki.

• Four different opacity levels on Preferences dialog (halo, aura, light, fog). This effectively allows removal of soft fog by specifying a value of 255 for "fog".

This looks like the culprit. Once this was introduced, we lost the ability to differentiate between unexplored and "explored but not presently visible" areas in GM view (I'm guessing "hard fog" and "soft fog"). I tried messing with the opacity levels of all four settings, and none of them restore that functionality.

Peace,
-Darakonis

[jfrazierjr]

Weird. I still can't reproduce this(at least the way I understand it!). Just for reference, the preferences I have on client and server are:

Halo: 60
Aura: 60
Light: 60
Fog: 100
Auto-Expose Fog on Token Move: true

FOW is on
Lights: on
Vision: on
VBL: on

I have all options turned on when the server started. I played (and it worked correctly as far as I can tell) on 8-20 using b71(I think, perhaps b73 if it was out).

[Phergus]

Reproducible here between b63 and b73.

See attached campaign file. Open in b63 and look at the bottom corridor see the two different shadings for explored and not explored. Load in b73 and the bottom corridor is just the one shading.

3b63 Vistion Test.cmpgn

(382.23 KiB) Downloaded 70 times

[skester]

I just noticed something wierd with my campaign. Just upgraded to build 70 from 63, and in a new dungeon I just made, vision isn't revealed properly. The autoshow fog isn't going off. What's really wierd if I put the token in an enclosed room it works, if I drag him out of my dungeon into "the void" beyond my VBL it works, but if I "open the door" to the room - remove the VBL the player goes into darkness. Can't see a thing even though the previously exposed area is dimmed like it's out of the light range.

Wierd.
Skester

[Darakonis]

Sorry for not explaining this properly...

Just follow these steps to reproduce what I'm talking about.

1. Open a new campaign.
2. Drag a token onto map.
3. Set token to PC, check "has vision."
4. Ensure FoW is on, Vision is set to Night, and view is GM view.
5. Add a 5-square light source to the token.
6. Select token and press Ctrl-I.
7. Move token 3 squares to the right and press Ctrl-I.

Here is a pic showing what following the above steps results in in both b66 and b67:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

And thanks for uploading a campaign displaying this, Phergus.

Peace,
-Darakonis

[aliasmask]

Something I noticed as well is with multiple light sources. I had small red lights at the end of a hall, but when I use another larger light, it washes the color right out. I thought in previous versions, this wasn't the case. I'll have to go back to b63 and see if it does the same thing and post my results here.

[skester]

Got it working now. Redid the vision blocking layer. That was wierd. I was starting to panic, my game is in a couple of days..

Skester

[skester]

Now that I got the fog of war working, I see exactly what you mean.

This is going to be a pain to see where the players have been without switching to players view.


Skester.

[wolph42]

indeed, funny I hadn't noticed it, but then again I easily hit ctr+p twice to check where the players have been. Still its a bug.

So... has anyone reported this yet as a bug?

[jfrazierjr]

Got it working now. Redid the vision blocking layer. That was wierd. I was starting to panic, my game is in a couple of days..

Skester

This is typically caused by bad VBL. I would be willing to bet anything that if you ran Maptools from a terminal (on windows, change the .bat file from javaw to java) and looked at the output, you would see a bunch of "weird, can't find an island for an ocean" (or something like that) messages dumped to the console. This is caused by bad VBL where lines intersect (3 or more???) and there is no way to tell whats "in" and whats "out". To reproduce I believe you can draw 3 lines which intersect each other AND the other line(so as to form a triangle in the center.) At least that is where I have seen this problem.

[jfrazierjr]

Sorry for not explaining this properly...

Just follow these steps to reproduce what I'm talking about.

1. Open a new campaign.
2. Drag a token onto map.
3. Set token to PC, check "has vision."
4. Ensure FoW is on, Vision is set to Night, and view is GM view.
5. Add a 5-square light source to the token.
6. Select token and press Ctrl-I.
7. Move token 3 squares to the right and press Ctrl-I.

Here is a pic showing what following the above steps results in in both b66 and b67:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

And thanks for uploading a campaign displaying this, Phergus.

Peace,
-Darakonis

Thanks for the detailed steps and sample image. I see what you are talking about now. Guess I was just dense. Anyway, I expect your estimate on the cause was probably correct, so Azhrei will need to take a look when he gets some time(as I believe he made that change and thus would know where to look to fix it quickly)