First-Person View Mode for 2024

[ddavison]

Happy New Year!

The year 2023 for us was a down year for us, but a year of big investments. Our team has been working on several cool features and we are close to releasing one of these major features - First Person View.

How does First-Person View work in a world of 2D flat RPGs?

The best thing I can do is show you two small sneak peek videos I put together. The first is from the D&D Dragonlance module. It shows an encampment and the occupants that the players would face within. The 2D map of the area is provided within the module and placed at the feet of the players, complete with rendered line of sight, lighting effects, and even special Fx layers. The NPCs all use the provided art from the book and these are rendered as transparent stand-ups that face towards the camera. They are scaled relative to other creatures and positioned in a way that makes sense. The result is a sort of psuedo-3d environment that allows players to look around (up, down, behind, etc.), target foes and move within this space.



This second video is from the Fallout 2d20 ruleset. This ruleset has been lighter on maps in general, but it has great NPC artwork we can tap into. We plan to support all rulesets with this new mode.



Is this going to be time-consuming to set up?

We don't think so. We plan to work with internal community developers and module developers to prepare the art from the books to have transparent backgrounds and all the necessary metadata that is needed to properly scale and position everything in first-person view. When that is done, you simply click on the view mode to toggle between 2D and 3D modes.

What if I don't use a map at all? Will this support theater of the mind style play?

Yes! This was my original impetus for developing the mode. In planning for that, it turned out that it also supports modules that already have good maps. In some ways this made it more complicated, and in other ways it made it easier. We plan to support it with additional features that let you quickly generate a scene with some NPCs and players in it when you don't have a map at all. Essentially, these automation functions will build a quick and basic map by painting some graphics on the map floor and auto-positioning NPCs and players to save GM time.

Can I still use 2D mode if I don't like this feature?

Sure. There is a toggle to switch modes. For now, we are undecided if we want the GM to control that toggle exclusively or if we want it to be a per-user toggle. Testing and feedback from our community will help us make that determination.

What are some other future plans for this feature?

We want to support props, terrain, and other objects rendered into the 3D space that are not NPCs. We still need to finalize the UI and data retention for these objects, but it is on our roadmap.

We also want to start looking (probably much later in 2024) into other 3D assets. Perhaps we can allow for full 3D content, walls that extend up from the floor, 3d special Fx, and maybe more.

[ddavison]

Sorry for the repost, but I wanted to restart this conversation in a more centralized space with some more context surrounding it's release.

[spoonhead]

How will you ensure it’s not a memory hog bearing in mind the current FG build can slow down in game pretty quickly with a few assets on the map.

[ddavison]

Drawing images, even in 3D space is very easy for Unity 3D to do. Any sluggishness you are experiencing within FGU in the current version is most likely related to all the implementations of RPG rules calculations to determine LOS and visibility within the 2D space. Work on improving and optimizing that will continue separate from here, but will benefit both modes. This will also have a toggle option, so you will be able to stay in 2D mode if you prefer. We suspect you won't see any difference in performance between the two modes.

[LordEntrails]

Very nice! Initially (as of an hour ago) I was thinking this wasn't going to be much of a use case for me. But I'm thinking it just might be more fun than I was thinking.

To comment a little; I do think it should be a per player mode toggle. Some folks are going to have distinctly different preferences and if the calculations are done locally, independent modes would not tax the server/host with any additional computations. I can imagine a lot of challenges around LOS, but I'm sure you will explore and address those are you get there. Good luck

[Zacchaeus]

I like it!

[Tooting Dog]

I'm curious to see how creatures in-flight would appear

[LordEntrails]

I'm curious to see how creatures in-flight would appear

Good question! I assume any token with an elevation would be shown an appropriate distance above the base image. Not sure what would happen with negative heights :O Or if their would be some sort of shadow, silver string, or tether to indicate where on the base image they are above.

[HywelPhillips]

I'd put my penny's worth in for this being a per-user toggle as well.

I don't think I will like it as the GM, for example - I think I will want to have the complete overview as I do now.

But as a player I might want the greater immersion that it brings, and I might want it in some situations and not in others. NPC conversations at a party - brilliant, will bring an almost visual-novel like sensibility to those scenes and a big improvement on a flat map with a big grid and consequently big tokens as now. Being the barbarian stuck into an intense combat - great. Being more of an area control/buff/commander character - probably would favour the ability to have the 2D top-down overview especially in combat.

There's a human being brain processing power limit at work as well as Unity's rendering and I can see it being quite different for different use cases and configurations, too. Some of my players play via a laptop in a hotel room sometimes and for these people screen real estate is at a desperate premium - I just don't think they will have the real estate to make the 2.5D a pleasant experience. They need to be able to see where they are and navigate and target foes efficiently with as little on-screen information as possible, because pixels are precious. Whereas some of us are on multiple monitors and can devote a large number of pixels to appreciate the immersion, and the hell with efficient transmission of information.

If it is at all feasible to do from a performance point of view, I really think there are many reasons why one might want to allow this to be per-user; the only one I can really see as valid for it not to be is so the GM controls the view and synchronises when everyone switches. But there's a good reason why we don't lock all players viewport on the map to the GM's view, and I think this is just an extension of that. Each player is going to have different needs - and different preferences - for what they look at through the course of the game. So I don't see much sense in locking them into the 2.5D mode. Or, more to the point, locking them out of 2.5D mode if that's what they prefer because I as the GM want to be having the traditional top-down map view where I can see everything, including the hidden foes behind the doors and stuff that's in the darkness and so on.

Cheers, Hywel

[ddavison]

I'm curious to see how creatures in-flight would appear

Our meta-data has an option to define the floor space and an offset. For flyers, we make them "float". Elevation will also move them up or down.