My Experience with the New FoW

Right now I'm using the new Fog of War for the first time, and I wanted to report on my experience. There are a few odd behaviors that I'm not sure are bugs or if I'm just not using them right. I figured other players might benefit from some of my mistakes.

The map was an underground cave complex consisting of about six caves and several connecting tunnels. The caves were fairly uniform, but the spaces in between them were more difficult. I started by painting a circle on top of each cave, then adjusting the circles to conform to the edges of the caves. Then I painted a series of overlapping hexagons or squares for the corridors, fused them together, and adjusted the edges.

I tried to get the edges of the corridor sections to line up with the cave sections. It took me a while to figure out how to get the knot snapping to work. At first, I couldn't tell when knot snapping was on or off. I would drag the knots around, trying to get them to snap often without being able to tell if it had really snapped or not. Then I'd hit O to toggle knot snapping and try it again. Sometimes I had to toggle knot snapping on and off several times before I could get it to work for sure. If I switched to a different FoW section to try lining it up, I again couldn't tell if knot snapping was on or off, and I had to go through the trial-and-error cycle of moving them around again. Finally, I noticed that when knot snapping was on, the existing knots would appear in a very-very-very faint translucent grayish overlay when I started moving a knot around. This allowed me to finally tell for sure whether knot snapping was on and also allowed me to know if they were actually snapping.

I still had some trouble. For example, when a knot was on top of a different FoW layer, I would sometimes miss clicking on the knot and hit the layer beneath instead and end up dragging that layer around instead of moving the knot, thus undoing all my work at aligning the edges of that section. Finally I realized that you have to make sure the knot you want to move is highlighted green before trying to click and drag it. A few times I still couldn't tell, because there were two knots virtually on top of each other (after fusing some sections together), and d20pro was highlighting the one underneath.

After laying down several sections, I noticed that the list of sections in the FoW window was getting long, and they were all named "Circle" or "Hexagon." So I started naming them according to the area of the map they belonged to. The first time I did this I happened to be in Manipulate Mode. When typing in the section's name, it became apparent that the shortcut keys were being triggered by my typing, as the section turned visible when I typed a V. As I typed in all the names, I wished I could reorder the sections in the list so they would be better organized. As it is, they automatically appear in the order you create them. If you get a lot of sections, it can be a little annoying to find the one you need (even with the cool search box). I just like to be organized.

I really like all the different shapes you can start painting with, along with the ability to merge and manipulate the edges at will. I was able to create a customized fog of war that worked really well for my map. It's a pretty sweet tool.

Of course, it also took me like 2 hours to get the FoW all done, but a lot of that was getting past the learning curve and probably being more anal than I needed to be. All in all, it's a really cool tool and definitely a huge leap from the old FoW.

 

That sounds awesome! Those two features would have cut down my time spent by a ton.

<goes and downloads beta>