FGU masking and doors

[Valatar]

So the demo of dynamic line of sight in FGU is really spiffy, but it does raise a question in my mind: doors. Locked doors, secret doors, barriers that should be opaque. There should be some sort of GM-removable 'plugs' that can be inserted into doorways that will prevent an area from being revealed until the GM removes them, as automated masking isn't going to be a huge help if it unwittingly exposes the whole map to the players.

[Zacchaeus]

So the demo of dynamic line of sight in FGU is really spiffy, but it does raise a question in my mind: doors. Locked doors, secret doors, barriers that should be opaque. There should be some sort of GM-removable 'plugs' that can be inserted into doorways that will prevent an area from being revealed until the GM removes them, as automated masking isn't going to be a huge help if it unwittingly exposes the whole map to the players.

I'm pretty sure that the masking will not go through closed doors or anything else that it shouldn't.

[Full Bleed]

The LoS preview isn't really clear... but I do wonder how the vision blocking mask will be implemented. We've seen that we will be able to import a mask prepared outside FG (which is awesome). But how it's applied (tools similar to FoW?) and where (will it just have it's own layer? Will there be an option for multiple layers? Can it be attached to objects?) is unknown.

I'm also curious about if/how it will interact with vision/light... that is, will there be a variety of possible vision types and light sources? That may be a topic for another thread though.

[pindercarl]

There's no definitive answer, since these things are in active development. However, I can assure you that these scenarios are being considered. Currently, occluders are attached to layers. In the simplest case, there would be one layer (an image of the map) with the occluders attached to that layer. A layer could be added that was a door with the occluders attached for the door. The occluders of all the visible layers are concatenated for line-of-sight calculations. Visible door? Vision is blocked. Hide the door? Vision is unblocked. Since the occluders are attached to the layer, they also inherit the transforms of the layer. So technically, moving, rotating, or scaling a layer would also affect the LOS.

Since there is support for n number of layers, there is also support for n number of occlude layers.

Line-of-sight and lighting are related and the terms are often used interchangeably. LOS calculates the potentially visible area. Lighting is typically the LOS masked by the lighting radius. But, yes, lighting and vision types is a conversation for another day.

[Valatar]

I sorta figured that something as basic as "don't reveal all the hidden stuff to the players" wouldn't have escaped developer notice, I'm glad to hear that it sounds like the system behind that will be pretty easy to use.

And yeah, lighting and vision would both be exceedingly cool to actually render for the players. As long as the GM drops a grid on the map so FGU understands the distances involved I imagine it'd be relatively straightforward for it to only show x amount of feet for a player with normal vision, y amount of feet for another player with darkvision, etc.

[pindercarl]

And yeah, lighting and vision would both be exceedingly cool to actually render for the players..

Lighting with a radius and falloff is not a technically difficult system to implement. From the 5e SRD on torches, "illuminating a 20-foot radius and providing shadowy illumination out to a 40- foot radius." That's fairly simple and would pretty straightforward to expose to a ruleset.

Also from the SRD on darkvision, "[w]ithin a specified range, a creature with darkvision can see in darkness as if the darkness were dim light, so areas of darkness are only lightly obscured as far as that creature is concerned. However, the creature can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of gray." Also technically feasible, but defining that within a ruleset? I'm not able to comment on that—and I'm pretty certain that John wouldn't be too happy if I did ;).