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  1. #101
    A nice feature would be... While mapping, if you select all the points of a line (et al.), and click on a different visibility type, it would be nice if FGU switched that line (et al.) from the original type to the new type, facilitating tweaking of existing maps quickly, easily, less redo, and less error-prone.

    Quote Originally Posted by ddavison View Post
    Here are some thoughts I shared with Zacchaeus already for the Alley maps in Waterdeep Dragon Heist. The map has a bunch of roof lines. Using terrain provides some interesting options for simulating hiding on the other side of a pitched roof. The GM may need to turn on and off roof terrain pieces during play to handle specific scenarios, but it gives some fun options.

    Original map with walls drawn. No ability to get up on roofs. Players leaving the map would accidentally see to the other side.
    Attachment 28961

    If you redo each major plane of the roof, you get some simulated 3D effects. Players can actually see much of the roof from the ground -- at least for roof lines that are facing them directly. Players can also climb up to a roof, bust through a basement window/door and enter buildings or fly up there.
    Attachment 28962

    In play:
    Attachment 28963

    These sort of scenarios are almost always going to fall to the person creating the adventure conversion and what they think makes the most sense. As a GM, you can always override the built in LOS by double-clicking to select LOS definitions you don't like and replacing them with something you prefer.

  2. #102
    ddavison's Avatar
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    Thanks Guoccamole for your suggestions. See my responses below.


    Quote Originally Posted by Guoccamole View Post
    A few suggestions after doing some more mapping.

    1) Please make terrain lay down a line (not a closed shape). The spurious closing line is counter-productive when plotting a stairway, or cliff, ledge, and on complex rooftops. It’s also inconsistent with the ‘line’ selection. Perhaps add a ‘polygon’ selection for that behavior.
    My understanding from Carl is that the method used to handle these in the visibility engine requires that terrain be a closed polygon. Once you know that it needs to be a polygon, I find it to be very intuitive. The "closing" line is continually redrawn as you add additional points and when you reach the 2nd to last point on the line, it takes its final appearance. For something like a complex cliff, you need to determine how far along the cliff edge is visible from the ground and also how far back from the cliff edge people can be before they can see the ground on the other side. I tend to think that a 5' buffer is appropriate in most cases. This 100% needs to be a closed polygon to make sense for stuff like that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Guoccamole View Post
    A few suggestions after doing some more mapping.
    2) Please add single letter keyboard shortcuts to all the mapping modes, so mouse is not required to change modes. Easy mode access is key, especially for the simple pointer which would be very valuable to flip on/off at will.
    I'm generally a fan of keyboard shortcuts wherever possible and multiple ways to interact with a program (mouse, keyboard, mouse+keyboard). We will see what John and Carl think about this and if we can come up with some that make sense and don't negatively impact other areas. One of the challenges is that we don't currently have the concept of a window with focus. If we set it to T for terrain mode, but you were trying to type in chat, then every time you typed the letter T in chat it would change. That leads to options such as CTR+T or ALT+T, but then we need to review against all other shortcuts to avoid clashes. We will review and report back at a later date.

    Quote Originally Posted by Guoccamole View Post
    A few suggestions after doing some more mapping.
    3) Please support general text input from windows devices. I have a drawing device whose input seems to be ignored by FGU even though normal mouse/keyboard input works. (pie in the sky?)

  3. #103
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    Quote Originally Posted by Guoccamole View Post
    FGU Mapmaking Feature suggestion - Map triggers (automated, or manual hidden door triggered) + layer visibility reveals.
    With these features (trigger + layer visibility mechanism), Fantasy Grounds could provide simple tools for FGU cartographers to solve sticky map issues yet keep the playtime simple and familiar (or automated) for the GM.
    I had submitted some thoughts in a similar vein to Carl and John for consideration a while back to handle things such as teleports. This is when we were designing the secret door functionality. In some cases, there are maps where you go up the stairs on one map and then you essentially teleport over to a 2nd map on a new floor. For now, we have opted to stick with a simple implementation of the secret doors that works much like current doors and then we will handle jumps by having the GM Shift+drag the tokens to the destination.

    I plan to revisit the idea of triggers in the future since I think they open up a lot of new functionality. The UI for defining these would need to be pretty involved to allow for all the different types of flexibility. It's too much scope creep for the current phase of development.

  4. #104
    Doug, Thank you for rapid, thoughtful replies. I have a few observations based on your information.

    Quote Originally Posted by ddavison View Post
    My understanding from Carl is that the method used to handle these in the visibility engine requires that terrain be a closed polygon. Once you know that it needs to be a polygon, I find it to be very intuitive. The "closing" line is continually redrawn as you add additional points and when you reach the 2nd to last point on the line, it takes its final appearance. For something like a complex cliff, you need to determine how far along the cliff edge is visible from the ground and also how far back from the cliff edge people can be before they can see the ground on the other side. I tend to think that a 5' buffer is appropriate in most cases. This 100% needs to be a closed polygon to make sense for stuff like that.
    Hmmm... the editor allows me to make ‘broken’ terrain (edges, instead of polygons). Also, the first segment is meaningless then (just a line)?
    I would suggest preventing any creation which is not polygon then, and I would suggest shading the interior since apparently that means something? Up to now, I thought terrain worked like a permeable wall. I did not know it had extra meaning. Interesting.

    Quote Originally Posted by ddavison View Post
    I'm generally a fan of keyboard shortcuts wherever possible and multiple ways to interact with a program (mouse, keyboard, mouse+keyboard). We will see what John and Carl think about this and if we can come up with some that make sense and don't negatively impact other areas. One of the challenges is that we don't currently have the concept of a window with focus. If we set it to T for terrain mode, but you were trying to type in chat, then every time you typed the letter T in chat it would change. That leads to options such as CTR+T or ALT+T, but then we need to review against all other shortcuts to avoid clashes. We will review and report back at a later date.
    I see what you’re saying. Challenging. The reason for my simple characters request is that I am having trouble getting FGU to recognize input at all from windows device, so I’d prefer to keep the input super-simple rather than even more complicated. Getting the device buttons to work in FGU would be a boon... to avoid having one hand on the keyboard (by necessity) while using a pen with buttons that FGU won’t recognize... for whatever reason. However, I see your point about the windowing input ambiguity.

    Thank you for the insights. More to chew on.

  5. #105
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    Quote Originally Posted by Guoccamole View Post
    Hmmm... the editor allows me to make ‘broken’ terrain (edges, instead of polygons). Also, the first segment is meaningless then (just a line)?
    I would suggest preventing any creation which is not polygon then, and I would suggest shading the interior since apparently that means something? Up to now, I thought terrain worked like a permeable wall. I did not know it had extra meaning. Interesting
    I'm not sure it does allow a broken terrain. If you draw a jagged line with four points and end on the fiftyh point a line is drawn from that point back to the first. Depending on how the line is drawn this might not be immediately noticeable. As Doug says to draw an irregular shaped terrain use the line shape to trace the contour and then place points back to the first. So for a contour of a hill I'd draw the points along the contour and then point back to the first point to close up the polygon. When LOS is turned on the players will be able to see the leading edge of the polygon but not be able to see what is beyond until they enter the polygon. THis emulates the player climbing thee hill and seeing over the ridge at the top at what lies beyond.

    For stairs I either use the square tool or just the line tool to draw a square or rectangle across the width of the stairs. As long as the sides line up with the wall line then you get no leakage and the terrain is blocked until a token ventures up the stairs.
    If there is something that you would like to see in Fantasy Grounds that isn't currently part of the software or if there is something you think would improve a ruleset then add your idea here https://www.fantasygrounds.com/featu...rerequests.php

  6. #106
    Quote Originally Posted by ddavison View Post
    I had submitted some thoughts in a similar vein to Carl and John for consideration a while back to handle things such as teleports. This is when we were designing the secret door functionality. In some cases, there are maps where you go up the stairs on one map and then you essentially teleport over to a 2nd map on a new floor. For now, we have opted to stick with a simple implementation of the secret doors that works much like current doors and then we will handle jumps by having the GM Shift+drag the tokens to the destination.

    I plan to revisit the idea of triggers in the future since I think they open up a lot of new functionality. The UI for defining these would need to be pretty involved to allow for all the different types of flexibility. It's too much scope creep for the current phase of development.
    IMO...

    I understand the scope creep issue, which is why I suggested the simplistic yet pragmatic door ‘fix’.

    FYI, the mapping issue I raise is different than teleport. In this case, the map is 1) visually leaking information (about areas undiscovered), and 2) the PC tokens are already in location (really “in locations” since there are two locations colocated on the map; no dragging required). Hence the visibility toggle to reveal additional information about the existing map, i.e., bridge/tunnel above and/or tunnel below.

    Also, my suggestion is beneficial to map conversion... which is happening now presumably by the thousands of maps. I believe mapmaking should be a priority as its a huge undertaking, and giving map converters the tools they need to deal with simple yet frequent (enough) map features would be important... rather than having to redo maps later for ‘simple stuff’.

    In other words, I suggested the door trigger + map layer reveal since it’s not much of a technical challenge (trigger would be DM interaction on existing ‘secret door’ mechanism) and because I believe it would help get SmiteWorks over the hump on map conversion now, rather than have lots of loose ends (on maps which are close but not quite right). I realize the maps have worked ‘as-is’ up to now, but the new tools should afford us advantages. This trigger+reveal would be one such example, and a good trial for (simple) triggers helping with maps.

    I don’t know if map conversion outweighs scope creep in this instance, but I think the map conversion effort is a rather huge undertaking not to be taken lightly. So perhaps that perspective could weigh in favor of helping with map conversion despite a ‘minor’ (?) scope creep.

    Whether this feature is scheduled now or later, I’d suggest prioritizing this feature according to map support rather than ‘teleport’.

  7. #107
    Quote Originally Posted by Zacchaeus View Post
    I'm not sure it does allow a broken terrain.
    TY for illustrating how you make terrain work with your examples.

    You could be correct about the lack of ‘broken’ lines. Perhaps my ‘broken’ terrain is lines which double-back on themselves?

    Before replying what works and what doesn’t, I’m going to have to experiment to see what’s happening with the way I’ve been doing it... treating the terrain like a wall at, e.g., the edge of a cliff or the banister of a stairway. I am particularly interested in what’s happening inside any terrain polygon. I did not realize that space was special.

  8. #108
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    Here is an example of how you might do the Dragon Hatchery map.





    Terrain.jpg

  9. #109
    Questions. Apologies if these are stupid questions, but I don’t seem to be having much luck (skill?) for now.

    1) What is the trick to get a player FGU to connect to a GM FGU (locally, lobby, whatever)?
    2) If FGU player is not yet available, then what is the trick to checking LOS in GM FGU?

    Thanks.

  10. #110
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    Quote Originally Posted by Guoccamole View Post
    Questions. Apologies if these are stupid questions, but I don’t seem to be having much luck (skill?) for now.

    1) What is the trick to get a player FGU to connect to a GM FGU (locally, lobby, whatever)?
    2) If FGU player is not yet available, then what is the trick to checking LOS in GM FGU?

    Thanks.
    Make sure you have the latest update first. Once you have that, you will host a game (Private game is best) and then you will launch a 2nd instance of FGU. Click Join Game and you should see your localhost entry to connect to. Just click it and then Start.

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