Occluding on purchased modules

[Milke]

I love being able to purchase the pre-made adventures and save myself tons of time.
My question is.. on the occluding that's done, is it possible for the people doing the work to move the markers in just slightly? So that the players can see an edge of a wall, and know better what the room looks like.
I've run into instances where they're in a circular hallway, and it looks like a big black pit in the center.
It'd be cool if the markers were just barely moved back so they could see the texture of the wall or building.
If that's too much work, I understand. Just wondering, is all.

[MaxAstro]

Definitely second this, at least for adventures going forward.

[avistileto]

Agreed, I usually find myself having to go through the maps and move a lot of the LOS boxes so that the players can see what's going on.

[Gwaihir Scout]

Agreed. It's much more important that players have a better sense of the space they're in then preventing them from seeing around a corner a little too far.

[vonBlashyrkh]

Agreed, going forward having the occluders ever so slightly further back from the walls so the players can see the map art of the space they're in would be a nice change.

[Montis]

I read somewhere that FG already has a function where occluding walls can be "looked into" for a few pixels, maybe it could be a general FG setting (or a per-map option) that increases this by a variable amount up to a square or so.

[ddavison]

There is supposed to be a peek through that shows the wall beyond the edge up to a certain distance. What is the map example you recently saw and we can look at the peek through setting to see if we can adjust it further.

[Zacchaeus]

I read somewhere that FG already has a function where occluding walls can be "looked into" for a few pixels, maybe it could be a general FG setting (or a per-map option) that increases this by a variable amount up to a square or so.

That is correct; it's about 5% of the pixels per grid - so if your grid is 50px then the peek through would be about 2.5px. See video thirty one here where I discuss this in some detail https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?55797-How-do-I-in-Unity

The issue, sometimes anyway, is that if the wall is drawn in black then the wall is going to be black no matter how much peak through there is. Coloured walls on the other hand should have some peak through.

I cannot speak for other developers on this but in the last couple of modules that I've developed I have been putting the occluders much further back from the wall edges so that players can see that there is definitely a wall. In some ways I did this as an experiment to see what, if any, reaction this had. So far there's been none at all (either positive or negative). The official guidelines (which were drawn up at the time when LoS was first introduced) was to draw the occluders right up against the wall. And indeed in almost every case to draw an occluder on each side of the wall as well.

This isn't the first post on this matter, and indeed it does come up fairly often. So maybe it is time for the guidelines to be loosened a little or as Doug says above to increase the peak through.

[ddavison]

John, Carl, and I are discussing it now. the LOS peek-through got turned back to 0 pixels back in February because of some issues that had bubbled up with it. We meant to revisit it for a further discussion, but that didn't happen.

[Milke]

Cool. I appreciate the responses, you guys. This came up in the catacombs in book 2 of Agents of Edgewatch (PF2e), and my players were grumbling about it in our Discord voice chat, that all they saw was blackness. And they never knew whether it was a wall or a pit until I described the room.

Thanks for looking into it =)

[ddavison]

Okay, Moon Wizard and I discussed this some more. We have a feature called LOS peek-through that we originally designed as an attempt to solve this. We rolled it back all the way in February 2021, but we never revisited the issue. You can test it as the GM and look how it would impact the player view. If you do this, please note that your setting doesn't currently update the view across the network that your players would actually see. For that to work, we would need to update the network messaging and maybe some other stuff. Long term, the best solution would be to have a setting per map and this would require a greater development effort and also probably production work on DLC.



/lospeek 0
/lospeek 10
/lospeek 20
/lospeek 50


These commands would set it off, at 10% of a grid space, 20% of a grid space, and 50% of a grid space, respectively. Once you turn it on, you should also right-click on a player token and choose Reset FOW and Reset LOS.

Potential Issues:

It may reveal the existance or contents of rooms on the other side of thin walls
it may reveal secret areas on the other side of thin walls
it has a fish-eye like experience for the active player token as you move around. The FOW will mostly look fine after you leave an area
it may have unintended reveals for maps where a line was drawn in the middle of a wall already


There are probably other issues as well. We have it marked as experimental for this reason.

There are a lot of maps where I really like how the feature looks. There are some other maps where it breaks things. Try it out and let us know what you think. If you see specific map or images where you think it looks good or bad, feel free to post screen clips from there and share your thoughts.

[Gwaihir Scout]

In my case, it's Age of Ashes. The buildings' walls are often just black, so that's fair enough, but there's plenty of caves with stone after a black outline.

I'll experiment with the peek-through once an appropriate map comes up.

[Zacchaeus]

Very interesting. I'd not recommend 50 but the 10 and 20 produce very good results where the walls are thick enough (that's on the basis that the grid is 50px). It seems that /lospeek 0 switches the feature off. Am I right on that?

[ddavison]

Very interesting. I'd not recommend 50 but the 10 and 20 produce very good results where the walls are thick enough (that's on the basis that the grid is 50px). It seems that /lospeek 0 switches the feature off. Am I right on that?

Yes, 10 seems to work even for relatively thin walls. A setting of 0 effectively shuts it off. I updated the post above to include that option.

[Moon Wizard]

Yes, that’s correct. The number is the percentage of a grid square that the occluder points are offset from the token.

In my very limited testing, even 20 will reveal extra information if two squares adjacent and separated by thin wall. Trying it at 10 was about the maximum that worked in most cases; but it doesn’t reveal much either.

One of my concerns is that how peek through is managed, since all maps built since FGU releases use the 0 peek through assumption.

JPG

[Moon Wizard]

@Zacchaeus,

Plus knowing how many maps you’ve done, I didn’t want any change to require updates to all those maps….

JPG

[Moon Wizard]

Just to clarify, since Doug and I were discussing some more about the nuances.

Our LoS guidelines were originally put together assuming some level of peek through (i.e. occluders to follow wall edges). Many of the LoS definitions built for modules (including 5E) use these guidelines, so should work with minimal peek through settings. However, all the reviewing and testing of how LoS looked to make sure it was working and displaying as expected has been done with zero peek through (actual application behavior).

So, while the peek through may work with many/most maps; none of the LoS on current map definitions was tested with peek through greater than zero.

Regards,
JPG

[Zacchaeus]

@Zacchaeus,

Plus knowing how many maps you’ve done, I didn’t want any change to require updates to all those maps….

JPG

I'd echo that sentiment :)

[Milke]

Gonna try this out when I get home tonight.
Again, thanks so much for the quick response to this issue, guys.

[Milke]

Hey. This is a lot better now. Thanks a lot Doug, Moon Wizard, Zacch, and SW gang.

[timg]

I have wanted this feature for a long time - currently I end up hand editing every map I use and it is a huge timesink. Much better than millions of confused questions from my players about what that black region of the map is though.

[Bolorokenpay]

/lospeek is probably the biggest time saver for me, thanks so much for implementing.

[Moon Wizard]

As mentioned in the thread where /lospeek was mentioned, this is a host-side only prototype to see what it looks like. It is not something that the players will see, and not tied to specific maps. So, it's not changing anything that your players see.

Regards,
JPG

[Bolorokenpay]

/sadface, lol, well hopefully it will be fast pathed into production.

[avistileto]

Also sad face :( There's a map in Strength of Thousands AP3 that looks really great with /lospeek 20. But I think with things the way they are, I'm going to run it with the LOS turned off.

[Surge]

Has this been addressed yet for any of the products in the store? Having zero peek-through with the way everything has been made makes all of the lovely maps and art kind of irrelevant for the players. They may as well be playing on a black and white grid, or with no visuals and the GM has to describe literally everything.

"In front of you is a brick wall. To the left is a wooden wall. No, not there - that bit is also brick. I know all you can see is a black shape, but trust me."

[ddavison]

Has this been addressed yet for any of the products in the store? Having zero peek-through with the way everything has been made makes all of the lovely maps and art kind of irrelevant for the players. They may as well be playing on a black and white grid, or with no visuals and the GM has to describe literally everything.

"In front of you is a brick wall. To the left is a wooden wall. No, not there - that bit is also brick. I know all you can see is a black shape, but trust me."

Thanks for your feedback. It hasn't been prioritized higher than other current tasks. If more people request this change, it would bump it up higher on our priority list.

[MaxAstro]

I think I've already mentioned wanting it somewhere in this thread, but I'll say it again just to be sure. This would be a huge improvement in my eyes.

[jharp]

Doug, does this not really come under the effort to get the LoS working better. The initial videos if I recall showed walls as boxes. However, as you know, you can't have two LoS boxes touch at more than one point (bug still to be fixed if I understand correctly). So for the original work we have boxes instead of lines. So in such a case peek thru was important. However, it seems that the prevailing opinion at SW now is that walls should not be boxes but lines. As such, the lines would tend to be inset into the graphic. In the case of single lines what would peekthru even mean?

So really the solution to this is to get the LoS system working correctly, and I imagine that has a very high priority.

Jason

[ddavison]

We often debate internally on how high of a priority certain things are. I think it is a pretty high priority and the peek through was part of the original design that led to the LOS being created on maps for products. When I bring it up internally, though, Moon Wizard points out that it has been this way for over a year and we only have a handful of people that even seemed to notice or complain about it. That makes it hard for me to justify pulling people off of other projects to address it.

[Zacchaeus]

The initial videos if I recall showed walls as boxes.Jason

Can you expand on what you mean by this?

[jharp]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hoQzjBcZE4

Originally, the suggested LoS creation was a box/rect. This is prone to line overlap.

Jason

[Zacchaeus]

Ok, I think I get it. You mean that for a big thick wall you'd draw all the way around it rather than draw a single line down the middle? If so I'd still draw the occluders like that now except that I'd place them further into the wall rather than parallel to the edge. If the wall is very thin then I'd draw a single line since drawing around a thin wall isn't necessary. I'm not sure what line overlap means really. If I draw a line around a wall and it joins the start to the finish there's no overlap. Overlap would only occur if I drew a line across another line. I think I may still be misunderstanding the issue here since I've not really had any problems with LoS.

[jharp]

Ok, I think I get it. You mean that for a big thick wall you'd draw all the way around it rather than draw a single line down the middle? If so I'd still draw the occluders like that now except that I'd place them further into the wall rather than parallel to the edge. If the wall is very thin then I'd draw a single line since drawing around a thin wall isn't necessary. I'm not sure what line overlap means really. If I draw a line around a wall and it joins the start to the finish there's no overlap. Overlap would only occur if I drew a line across another line. I think I may still be misunderstanding the issue here since I've not really had any problems with LoS.

No worries. I've submitted my test cases before and I have hopes they will be fixed with the new LoS engine.
Jason

[Milke]

Obviously, I made the post. So it's important to my enjoyment.
Putting the /lospeek command into live action would be a huge help.

[Bolorokenpay]

We often debate internally on how high of a priority certain things are. I think it is a pretty high priority and the peek through was part of the original design that led to the LOS being created on maps for products. When I bring it up internally, though, Moon Wizard points out that it has been this way for over a year and we only have a handful of people that even seemed to notice or complain about it. That makes it hard for me to justify pulling people off of other projects to address it.

I seem to remember when LoS first came out, quite a few of us mentioned the "black walls" when the line was placed on the wall instead of resessed within the wall. None of us new that peek through was even a possibility. I think we don't mention/complain any more because we have discussed it already and we all just redraw the maps now or live with what we have. If you need a vote to implement the peek through, my hand is up.

[Montis]

I'm definitely in support of being able to set custom peek through on a per map basis! I think that would be a very good QoL improvement :)

[Milke]

The reason I never spoke up was I didn't know. I always GM, so I always see all the walls.
Then one day a couple months ago in a huge dungeon (in Agents of Edgewatch), my players started throwing a fit about it, saying that everything looked the same and they couldn't tell a wall from a pit in the ground.

[ScribblingRambler]

I also strongly support either allowing the peek options, or updating the standards so more of the walls show.
At the risk of going beyond the thread topic, I frequently find that I need to modify the preset LoS on purchased products, either for aesthetic reasons or to decrease lag. One thing I have found is the biggest contributor to lag is overly occluded maps, especially things like bars or columns. I usually end up having to delete the occluders in those areas. However, for things like bars, if I have time I will replace them with "windows", to block movement but not affect LoS and processing. I suggest this be considered as an alternative.

[Ludd_G]

+1 for the players to always be able to see the actual wall art and not just black, however that is best implemented.

Cheers,

Simon

[ShadeRaven]

When I do LOS, I like to put part of the wall within the LOS field because I think the texture and visual details add depth and context, but that was just how I personally preferred it. I understand why the literal interpretation of Line-of-Sight would indicate that the occluding would be done right on the edge. That said, when I was doing Agents, Unity and LOS was pretty new and I think I was experimenting in that particular period of the advanced techniques for LOS, et al. I definitely altered my approach later on (when I did AV).

So yes, I agree on having some technique available for seeing those edges.