Question regarding token underlays

[jayboots]

Oops. I seem to have posted my question in the wrong section of the forum. I will re-post this same question in the workshop section where it belongs...


Hello everyone,

I'm thinking through the creation of a new ruleset and have a question regarding something i want to achieve with token underlays. I see that the addUnderlay variable shades an area around a token based on the map's grid size. For my ruleset, i would like to use maps that do not have grids, and i would like to use the token underlay(s) as movement range and attack range templates. Is there a way to 1. get the shaded area from the underlay to be circular, and 2. be based on a size fixed by the map or token dimensions?

Please bear in mind that i don't have experience yet with xml or lua. In other words, i wouldn't be able to follow a detailed technical answer. At this point, i'm not looking for a "here's how to do it in code" type answer so much as "yes that should be really easy/really difficult."

Alternately, but less ideally, the move/range templates could be achieved with a circular template token that snaps to the center point of a "unit" (player piece) token.

thanks,
jayboots

[Dachannien]

I believe that underlays are disabled altogether if the grid is turned off.

I was hoping to implement something similar to what you want to do - get a circular underlay under a token - although I was going to use the grid also. The goal was to attach a light source to each token via the combat tracker, and use that to display a large underlay of some sort to indicate the area lit by the token's light source.

Unfortunately, FG doesn't support circular underlays... yet (aside from the "token active" circular highlight, which I don't think counts as an underlay). I'm hoping it's on the feature request list

I had thought of some other ways to approach the problem as well, including a bitmapwidget attached to the imagecontrol that shows a map (yeah, this is getting a bit technical, but there are other folks who might be interested in the gory details). That didn't work because imagecontrols apparently don't support the addition of bitmapwidgets, or possibly because I was doing it wrong.

I also thought of using a large circular token that gets automatically placed wherever the associated token gets placed/moved to. This would *probably* work, but there's one major flaw: it makes it extremely difficult to deal with the map because there's only one token layer, and the height of each token (i.e., which one is on top, on the bottom, etc.) "cycles" each time it is moved, which means that players would end up grabbing the light source when they were going for their own token. While you can make tokens immovable for players, you can't set that for the DM. What's worse is that if you use the mouse wheel to scroll but you happen to be over a token, it will rotate the token instead, making extremely large tokens inconvenient to deal with.

Using a circular pointer would work, too, but there's no method exposed in the API for manipulating pointers (yet - another feature request ).