Fog of War and Line of Sight Ideas

[YamaShintaku]

I absolutely love the new fog of war and line of sight stuff. Not to mention the lighting options, and view obstacles. Awesome stuff!

Here are a few ideas thoughts for enhancing LoS and FoW:


Considering that variable lighting and multiple light sources are built in to Unity, I'm wondering if they will offer a range limit on viewing, such as a wall mounted torch lighting, which would show only part of a dark room, or within 15' of a player carrying a torch?
I see the option to make objects obstruct views (e.g. piles of rubble and tables). Currently, the GM needs to select the items to allow players to see over them on a case-by-case basis. Wouldn't it be cool to set the height of the sight obstruction and then correlate that to a PCs size/height? This would give automatic viewing over a pile of rubble to a tall barbarian, yet limit the view of a Halfling thief...

[Three of Swords]

I'm hoping #1 becomes reality. Roll20 already supports it. Things like a 5e torch can have 20' of bright light and an additional 20' of dim light. Or a character with darkvision can be set up to only be able to see 60' away in darkness and it's all dim light. Things like that are awesome. With the current FGU implementation, as DM I still have to mask and unmask maps, which is time-consuming.

While #2 would be cool, how often would it come into play? Not often, I would think. So it would be a lot of programming work for very little return. I'd rather they spend resources elsewhere for now. Maybe down the road though...

[LordEntrails]

#1 has already been talked about by SmiteWorks. It is in the development plan, but not for the initial release of FGU.

#2 might be cool, but its also not how any ruleset handles line of sight RAW. So would have limited adoption among gamers.

[Moon Wizard]

The concept of height and where visual organs are located becomes an increasingly complex topic. It creates a lot of fiddling for the GM to make everything "perfect".

And, most RPG game systems don't even handle height, let alone eye level. Just look at D&D 5E, every token is designed to fit in a box for simplicity, but many creates are obviously not as tall as they are wide/long. (Ex: Any Medium or Large four-legged creature (hellhound, basilisk, hippogriff, etc.) is 5x5 or 10x10 according to rules, but not all stand 5 ft. or 10 ft. tall. And the rules don't specify how tall these creatures are usually.

Lighting and vision will not be looked at for first release of FGU.

Regards,
JPG

[Bidmaron]

Then there is highly variable individual visual acuity. There is no end to it. What about fog? Wouldn’t a heavy fog reduce sight ranges? What if you are drunk and seeing double? It never ends. That is why it is a role playing game. It would be nice to have the basics but moving beyond that just gets ridiculous. What if the light in use is a green flame that distorts the visual spectrum and reduces ability to see other colors? What if you are a lizard man and your nictating membrane kicks in and reduces your sight range?

[Kelain]

With regards to #1 did they give any sort of timeline?

[Targas]

...

Lighting and vision will not be looked at for first release of FGU.

Regards,
JPG
If Lighting and vision will not be looked at, for the first release of FGU, will it be possible to combine the current fog of war with the new fog of war method? E.g. not to show the party the entire map to infinity and limit line of sight, not to show hidden/important areas which are far away? Can the GM manually adjust area of visibility?

[Moon Wizard]

Kelain,
There is no timeline for #1; because anything outside of launch scope is not prioritized, and won't be until we release the first version.

Targas,
Our expectation is to have the existing hard mask work in conjunction with LOS information. We'll need to see how it works in practice during alpha/beta before I can say definitively.

Regards,
JPG

[Targas]

Targas,
Our expectation is to have the existing hard mask work in conjunction with LOS information. We'll need to see how it works in practice during alpha/beta before I can say definitively.

Regards,
JPG
Sounds great. Alternatively have a field in the options, where you can set the max. range of view in pixels/feet, or better set it individually with hotkey+mousewheel to increase or decrease the range dynamically on the fly for all tokens at once (or if you want to go wild, let it adjust this way for each token individually - similar as changing the token size with the mousewheel currently) on the GM side..

[Midknyte]

Just started using FGU this week and I'm running into a lot of these same questions on LOS. Have there been any updates on any of this?

[Zacchaeus]

Just started using FGU this week and I'm running into a lot of these same questions on LOS. Have there been any updates on any of this?
LOS has no limits. You can use the mask in conjunction with LOS to put your own limits if you want