(1.3.B63) Help Reveal Fog of War

[Dark Thoughts]

Our group frequently runs into problems with Fog of War and I'm hoping you guys can help us keep things straight so it works as it should.

Our biggest problem seems to be players not being able to reveal it as they should. We've played a number of games where everybody could reveal the fog as they should except for one player who constantly ran into black boundaries and had to wait for the GM to reveal what was beyond.

We've checked various...

Day, Night, Off settings
Light Sources...
Allow Players to Reveal Fog...

What would be the ideal settings so that everybody could reveal fog while moving? Should we update to a newer version?

[mfrizzell]

Our group frequently runs into problems with Fog of War and I'm hoping you guys can help us keep things straight so it works as it should.

Our biggest problem seems to be players not being able to reveal it as they should. We've played a number of games where everybody could reveal the fog as they should except for one player who constantly ran into black boundaries and had to wait for the GM to reveal what was beyond.

Your player can always hit Cntl-I to reveal fog.

We've checked various...
Day, Night, Off settings

Night- it's dark and you will need light to reveal fog.
Day - it's light and VBL will block your vision but no fog to reveal

Light Sources...

At least one player will need a light source if vision is set to Night

Allow Players to Reveal Fog...

Add to that-
Your Maptool preferences need to have 'Auto Expose Fog' checked
'Center Players on current view continuous' should not be on.

What would be the ideal settings so that everybody could reveal fog while moving? Should we update to a newer version?

Try my suggestions and see how it goes.

[Azhrei]

Your player can always hit Cntl-I to reveal fog.

As long as the server was started with Players Can Reveal Fog.

Center Players on current view continuous' should not be on.

Um, why not?

[mfrizzell]

Your player can always hit Cntl-I to reveal fog.

As long as the server was started with Players Can Reveal Fog.

Center Players on current view continuous' should not be on.

Um, why not?

When I first started using Maptools (B63) I had the same exact problems and I posted the same basic question in this thread
http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13641

After trying all the answer supplied the problem went away when I turned off 'Center Players on current view continuous'.
It may have been a coincidence, but it worked for me.

[Azhrei]

Probably just coincidence...

[Darinth]

My answer would be that being constantly forced to follow the GMs point of view is annoying? :)

[aliasmask]

With the movpad lib, I can see a use for auto reveal fog as a function. I can imagine many other uses for this as well.

revealFog() - defaults to currentToken and it's vision with vbl
revealFog(id) - same as above, but with id (trusted macros only)
revealFogXY(json) - reveal specific spot on map (vbl not considered. trusted macros only)

• x - X map coordinate (required)
• y - Y map coordinate (required)
• shape - (circle, rectangle, ...?) (required)
• radius - radius of circle at x,y (default = 0)
• width - horizontal distance from x,y (default = 0)
• height - vertical distance from x,y (default = 0)
• units - 1/0: true - use map units for distance (default = 0)

[neofax]

@aliasmask: That would have been a cool feature to have in a recent game I played in. (Think CotCT gaining a certain artifact on a island). Also, it would be nice to have in reverse. Wizard casts darkness and you can actually place a darkness blotch at that spot. Although, putting a super dark aura on a item would probably work better for this.

[aliasmask]

@aliasmask: That would have been a cool feature to have in a recent game I played in. (Think CotCT gaining a certain artifact on a island). Also, it would be nice to have in reverse. Wizard casts darkness and you can actually place a darkness blotch at that spot. Although, putting a super dark aura on a item would probably work better for this.

I started to comment on the reverse, but realized that's more of a special effect and shouldn't be related to FOW. I was thinking of a token walking through "obscurement" where vision is reduced to the surrounding 5', but that's more of a Wiki: setSightType() function.

[Azhrei]

Darkness can now be done in a rather ugly way by creating an aura and then setting the Preferences so that auras are 100% opaque. But Preferences are client-side and the change would apply to all auras... Not a useful solution.

I suppose those settings will get moved to the campaign file some day, but I dread making that change because when the campaign file format changes there is major potential for screwing up peoples campaigns. And I don't like that.

[jfrazierjr]

I started to comment on the reverse, but realized that's more of a special effect and shouldn't be related to FOW. I was thinking of a token walking through "obscurement" where vision is reduced to the surrounding 5', but that's more of a Wiki: setSightType() function.

Agreed. When someone has vision limits such as a darkness spell or a blindness condition, changing the sight type is the right way to go (perhaps with an aura used to denote the area for a darkness spell so that people OUTSIDE the Area of Effect knowns where the demarcation is.) Thats one of the main reasons I decided to put in an option for vision range when I worked on adding square and conic vision to the maptool code last year. Of course, then someone (Craig????) added Wiki: setSightType() which made it so much easier by allowing it to be done via macros.