Isometric house...possible?

[xavram]

Is this possible? I have an isometric house, that I put VBL around the edges of the floor...



The house is an image using the "Figure" shape. If I move the player token to the bottom left or bottom right of the house, I see it just fine.

But if I move to the sides of it or above it, I get stuff like...



Not good, I want to be able to see the house...but not anything I put inside of it. I understand that its got something to do with not being able to see the bounding box of the "Figure" of the house...or something like that.

I was thinking I could draw the floorplan on the house inside the VBL and when a player enters the house, move/hide the house image itself (or set it to Visible to Owners only) and then the players see what's IN the house...in this case, another character.



Not sure if there's a way to accomplish this or if I'm asking Maptool for a bit too much...

[Jagged]

Have you made the house a figure token?

You can do that for objects as well as tokens and it should behave properly.

Must admit I never tested anything as large. So I will be interested in what you produce.

Thinking about it, I never combined a figure token with vbl within the token, so that probably does behave strangely.

To achieve what you are after I think you are going to have to keep tokens on the hidden layer and swap out the building and swap in the furniture when the players open the door. That way you don't need the token vbl

[xavram]

Yes, the house was a Figure token.

Okay, didn't really think this would be possible...bummer, but that's the breaks.

[JamzTheMan]

Jagged, it's probably the 5/9ths check (I believe you use that to test if you can see the token). I have a 2/9ths check now, you can try and use that for figures and see it it helps or makes it worse?

Even with 2/9th, I notice in my tests, if you have a VERY large object, like a building, you may never see 2/9ths of the token because of sight/light limitations...

[Jagged]

Maybe we need to rethink the logic for large tokens / stamps?

[xavram]

Too bad there's not a way to tag an object as "ignore VBL" or something like that. So that its not obscured by VBL at all, but fog and distance still effect it.

[JamzTheMan]

Too bad there's not a way to tag an object as "ignore VBL" or something like that. So that its not obscured by VBL at all, but fog and distance still effect it.

Well.....

That's exactly what I have in 1.4.1.x dev-build. It's also basically what Jagged has for Figure Tokens (I pretty much cloned this). However I was stuck with what looked better:

1. Show the token if ANY of it can be seen, ie if you see 1 pixel of the cell that the token occupies, you can see the whole thing. It caused some test tokens (statues) to show up even though you physically couldn't see it (LOS crossed 1 pixel of the corner of a cell the token occupied, but with transparency, the statue was only a circle around small size in a medium cell).
2. Only show token if 2/9 of the token can be seen. This divides up a given cell like:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 7 9

So if you saw two or more of those sections, eg 2 & 3 or 6 & 9 you would then see the whole token. However, on the other extreme side if the token was VERY large, lets say, 100ft x 100ft cells, and you can only see 30ft due to light, you may only see 1 of 9 sections. So in this case, you can obviously see the building but it remains hidden.

So this is what's possible within the current system of MT. Like jagged said, we may need to go back to the drawing board and see what other tricks we can come up with...

[xavram]

Note that in my screenshots with the house, it is a Figure token. Not sure if that helps or not, but since the check is 5/9th of the token's "base", I can see why its not showing up once the PCs token is above it; can't see through the VBL to see 5/9ths of the base.

I have not tried this but I bet if I used just a line for the VBL (like for a door), it would work...but that would the defeat the purpose of having VBL inside the house, you know?

[JamzTheMan]

Note that in my screenshots with the house, it is a Figure token. Not sure if that helps or not, but since the check is 5/9th of the token's "base", I can see why its not showing up once the PCs token is above it; can't see through the VBL to see 5/9ths of the base.

I have not tried this but I bet if I used just a line for the VBL (like for a door), it would work...but that would the defeat the purpose of having VBL inside the house, you know?

Agreed. I'm sure the original concept was for "token/figures" and not larger objects. I'm not sure if 2/9ths would be overzealous for figureTokens, I haven't done a lot of testing with Iso stuff...

[Jagged]

Yeah, putting a VBL around the base of the house, is going to break the figure token logic.

It simply wasn't designed to achieve that kind of effect. To do that you'd need to swap the house and interior using a macro.

[xavram]

That could very well be the way to go, although that's a lot of "custom" macros if you have a bunch of different houses/buildings with different sizes. Still, totally understand why this doesn't work "out of the box", just thought I would raise the issue as a possible feature for (way) down the road.