Area of Effect Tricks

[Tanthos]

Hello, fellow code wizards!

I am trying to decide how to go about coding a system to allow for area of effect to be hard-coded into the system. It need only be as simple a return as grabbing a list of token IDs, but sometimes it's hard to figure out how to do that. It's easy enough to pick a token as a central target and then get tokens within a certain number of squares. It's harder to figure out what tokens are affected by a line attack, or a cone burst. And what if you want to target an AoE from a point on the battle grid rather than from a token? Is there an easier way than having the player type in the exact location in X/Y into an input form?

Have any of you ever done/tried to put together some AoE targeting systems?

[wolph42]

In the bag of tricks I've created several area selection functions like line circle square cone triangle.

[Bone White]

If you are going to be setting up your own macros to control this, you may find this post useful, and the one that follows it, as they contain two functions to help with dealing with angles in maptool.