Making Maps in Advance (w Tokens, FoW, etc)

[Hawkwinter]

So. After doing a bit of research and reading and watching some videos, yesterday I took the plunge [or rather, dipped my feet], and put ~the $5.75 into a standard subscription to test it out (International purchases and exchange rates!).

So... I've installed the image improvement extension with the 3 layers.

I'd like to do like Hankerin is doing in this video on Roll20, but in FG.

Load up an image, plop down a bunch of terrain as tokens on the bottom layer and *make* a battle map in advance, complete with Fog of War, perhaps pre-load enemy NPC tokens & scatter terrain - and then somehow save that whole multilayered arrangement with the positions of everything so I can quickly pull it up when the time comes to use it with for my group - thus far I've been unable to figure out how.

Can somebody help a newbie out? How would I go about doing that?

[Zacchaeus]

You will need to start with a proper map which you either draw in another program or which you have found on the internet. The map drawing tools in FG are limited to pen and ink type drawings. Once you have your image loaded in FG if you want to add furniture etc then you'll need to find some tokens to represent them. You can place tokens directly onto the map in either the first or second layer of the layers extension.

For encounter (i.e. monsters) you do that by creating encounters. Pre-place the NPCs from the encounters on your map and then close the encounter. You can link the encounter into a Story entry or you can drag the Story entry to the map to create a pin so that you can open it quickly during the game session. You place the encounter by clicking the down arrow on the encounter sheet (bottom left). I believe in Roll20 all the tokens remain on the map at all times but FG handles it differently as described above. Encounters placed like this persist when you exit FG, you can even exit in the middle of an encounter and come back to where you left off next session. You can also during preparation add the masking to the map. During the session you can unmask the portions of the map that the PCs visit. Masking also persists over sessions.

Combat in FG is all handled via the Combat Tracker, so you need to become familiar with it.

If you say what ruleset you are using I can point you to some helpful resources that you might want to read up on.

[Hawkwinter]

You will need to start with a proper map which you either draw in another program or which you have found on the internet. The map drawing tools in FG are limited to pen and ink type drawings. Once you have your image loaded in FG if you want to add furniture etc then you'll need to find some tokens to represent them. You can place tokens directly onto the map in either the first or second layer of the layers extension.

Yeah. That's what I was thinking I want to do. I just want to make a bunch of terrain pieces as tokens as well. So a pit, or a section of hallway might be a png-based image transparency I'm pulling up as a token, and then scaling and rotating to whatever size I need, and plopping it down on the bottom layers.

In theory that should work, no? (I havent tried it with terrain image tokens yet but it seems like it should work like furniture).

For encounter (i.e. monsters) you do that by creating encounters. Pre-place the NPCs from the encounters on your map and then close the encounter. You can link the encounter into a Story entry or you can drag the Story entry to the map to create a pin so that you can open it quickly during the game session. You place the encounter by clicking the down arrow on the encounter sheet (bottom left). I believe in Roll20 all the tokens remain on the map at all times but FG handles it differently as described above. Encounters placed like this persist when you exit FG, you can even exit in the middle of an encounter and come back to where you left off next session. You can also during preparation add the masking to the map. During the session you can unmask the portions of the map that the PCs visit. Masking also persists over sessions.

How do I make things persist between sessions, exactly? If I have furniture and the like, do I make those part of the encounter as well? (That's what I'm stuck on and why I made the thread). Is there a link to a tutorial about this you could point me to?

Combat in FG is all handled via the Combat Tracker, so you need to become familiar with it.

Noted. I'll have to familiarize myself with that.

If you say what ruleset you are using I can point you to some helpful resources that you might want to read up on.

To start I'll probably mostly just monkey around with the free 5e stuff and the UA module on DMs Guild. But I expect if we like it I'll quickly end up buying the paid modules for convenience rather than type stuff in.

Gonna need to figure out how to get the extension for my houserules I started on working though. I tried to add another attribute to characters (a scaling per-level bonus equal to level/4 rounded up, and while the box and number show up on the character sheet, the label does not, and it throws errors if I try to access it anywhere else. Changing proficiency from a derived number to a flat number was easy. Adding a variable level-bonus that applies to all checks and saves and attack rolls and spell DCs and AC for everyone, less so.

[damned]

Welcome Hawkwinter - separate layers that you can place tokens on dont really exist in Fantasy Grounds. There is an Enhanced layers extension - that does enable this stuff - with some caveats - that you might look into. Tokens on maps will persist between sessions but cannot be exported in place on maps into a module.
The mapping features of FG are not as good as those on Maptools or Roll20, but character sheets and combat are way better.

Making changes to Character sheets should be done in an extension or your ruleset will get overwritten bu updates or it will become buggy over time as CoreRPG updates and your version does not.
Making an additional field and label on a Character sheet is pretty straight forward - once you work out how things are done in the XML - but changing something that applies to checks/saves/rolls is totally non trivial as there is so much code defining these actions in so many places. Perhaps investigating using an Effect to manage this might be easier.

[Zacchaeus]

For the furniture just open the module that your tokens are in and drag them onto the map. They will remain there between sessions.

In theory sections of terrain should work but remember this all has to be shared with players and png files take up a lot of memory and could impact on player's memory (FG can only use about 3GB of memory) so I would go easy on that.

[Hawkwinter]

The mapping features of FG are not as good as those on Maptools or Roll20, but character sheets and combat are way better.

Hmm. TBH I'm breand new to VTTs. I used to build levels for other games I've played, (NWN and Graal online) back in the day, and have dabbled a bit in some paid graphic design / illustration work - but my experience with gaming has all involved printing it out.

You've heard of the basic drag & drop & scale workflow I'm looking for for terrain. I may also lean gridless. I *COULD* make a colossal PSD file with all my assets and then make duplicates of it for each new battlemap I decide to use, but that would be cumbersome and would quickly consume far too much harddrive space. What's your opinion from experience for what tool I should use to build my gridless battle maps quickly? Would you suggest maptools?

Making changes to Character sheets should be done in an extension

Yep. Gathered that. That's the approach I've taken. Is there a way to do an extension without replacing entire XML and LUA files, for when you only want to change a single section or function, or no?

Making an additional field and label on a Character sheet is pretty straight forward - once you work out how things are done in the XML.

Agreed. That part took me about an hour, including the time trying to figure out where it was.

but changing something that applies to checks/saves/rolls is totally non trivial as there is so much code defining these actions in so many places.

Yeah. That's where it's throwing errors. When I try to have it grab the information from the character sheet to add into a calculation, it tells me the value is nil. I thought I was storing on the character the same way as profbonus. That's what I was trying to do, but evidently not. I'm not familiar with all of the functions. I'm also not super familiar with Lua or it's functions, but the syntax difference didn't take too much to get used to.

Perhaps investigating using an Effect to manage this might be easier.

I haven't looked at effects, because I had assumed they're applied to individual targets, and it seemed far to cumbersome an idea to have to apply an effect (or several) to literally every creature mid-session. I'll check them out to see if I'm wrong about that. But if not, changing the code for where the field is stored and how things are calculated seems way more manageable.

FG can only use about 3GB of memory [It's only a 32bit application] - so I would go easy on that.

Oh. I hadn't even considered that. Thanks for the heads-up, If I don't switch to a different workflow for quick mapmaking, I'll be sure to run the numbers on my maps and make sure I don't overdo it on image filesizes or number of placeable chunks of terrain.

[LordEntrails]

If you are looking to make maps in advance, rather than on the fly, I really think you want to use a map making program for each "setup". I'm not sure where making a map/image for TAvern A and for Tavern B from a set of tiles/assets is going take up any more hard drive space than building it in FG (though it might).

But, though you can do it with the enhanced layers extension, FG really isn't optimized for map making. I use CC3+ myself. You can see a good listing of various map making programs here; https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...ftware-summary

[Zacchaeus]

Images should be kept below about 1Mb (for faster uploading to players) and resolution should be not higher than 2048x 2048 if you can manage it. You can exceed these 'limits' but not too often and not with too many images. You don't need super high quality maps for VTT, as long as you have something which the players can battle monsters on. Oh, and they should be jpg files.

[Hawkwinter]

Images should be kept below about 1Mb (for faster uploading to players) and resolution should be not higher than 2048x 2048 if you can manage it. You can exceed these 'limits' but not too often and not with too many images. You don't need super high quality maps for VTT, as long as you have something which the players can battle monsters on. Oh, and they should be jpg files.

I was going to make them .jpg files. Why the resolution limit, out of curiosity? the clients only load one image at a time, as you're sharing them, right?

If you are looking to make maps in advance, rather than on the fly, I really think you want to use a map making program for each "setup". I'm not sure where making a map/image for TAvern A and for Tavern B from a set of tiles/assets is going take up any more hard drive space than building it in FG (though it might).

I was thinking of how bloated PSD files can get when you start having lots of smart objects and layers loaded in that you're not using. But I might be able to come up with a more space-efficient workflow if I decide to go that route.

But, though you can do it with the enhanced layers extension, FG really isn't optimized for map making. I use CC3+ myself. You can see a good listing of various map making programs here; https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...ftware-summary

Ooh. Thanks for the comparison chart.

I tried out CC3+ one time, a friend had a copy. Monkeyed with it for about an hour, couldn't get results I was happy with. But we were working in the large scale map mode, not the closeup battle map mode.

[Zacchaeus]

Anything shared with the players is loaded into memory at their end in an uncompressed format. This eats memory and might also cause slowdown in things like unmasking and other undesirable effects