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Passive/Interactive/Something Inbetween

Discussion in 'Feature Requests' started by Tay-Dor, Oct 23, 2016.

  1. Tay-Dor

    Tay-Dor Active Member

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    I know, like you guys really need more things to try to do. :)

    Okay, so my party travels down the hallways with their lights and the areas behind them are dark. Players may not be able to remember all the twists and turns they've taken. Of course the easy solution is to make the mask passive which will show the areas they've visited. Akin to a PC creating a map for reference. However, it makes it hard to have creatures sneak up on the players through these passive areas without having to make creatures invisible.

    I was wondering if it was possible for the mask to have an intermediate stage (or change the Passive condition) that would reveal the map but keep tokens from being revealed unless they intersect an active light source? Something that could be triggered after a party has explored a room or hallway.
     
    #1 Tay-Dor, Oct 23, 2016
  2. Wesley Gorby

    Wesley Gorby Production/Community Manager
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    Actually if memory serves this was the original idea, it's just not there yet in scope. I'll ask T about it.
     
    #2 Wesley Gorby, Oct 24, 2016
  3. Tay-Dor

    Tay-Dor Active Member

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    That'd be cool. Was just something I wanted to suggest before I forgot. :)
     
    #3 Tay-Dor, Oct 24, 2016
  4. Wesley Gorby

    Wesley Gorby Production/Community Manager
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    I talked to T yesterday about this, yes it is on the shelf of things to do, however there is no ETA at all.
     
    #4 Wesley Gorby, Oct 25, 2016
  5. Tay-Dor

    Tay-Dor Active Member

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    That's cool. :)
     
    #5 Tay-Dor, Oct 26, 2016
  6. owlbear

    owlbear Administrator
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    Sorry 'bout that. Yeah, true fog of war history is totally something we want and logically *can* do. However, there's a pile of other tasks on the heap right now that have to be addressed before we can add that functionality.

    Here's the considerations which make it difficult to manage without a re-work:

    * Creature/Item visibility in the explored-but-not-visible region.
    * Effects and non-player lights in said region.
    * Tile and/or map changes in the region.

    One way to solve this problem would be to snapshot the area and use it as a solid fill for explored areas. So you know what it looked like, but until you move there again, you only see what you've already seen. If you left a creature in the area, than that creatures image/token would remain where you last saw it on the map.

    This is probably the easiest of the techniques since we encountered such significant performance issues with alpha blending.

    The correct way to handle the problem involves alpha blending, and per-element rendering toggles (on the code side at least). To do this right, we'd need to rework the creature/item tokens as well as update the grid mechanic to be grid cell aware. Fortunately that work is in progress so ... you probably see where I'm going with this :)

    We can hack something together now; or, we can complete the roadmapped updates and add the additional functionality as an option in the future.
     
    #6 owlbear, Oct 28, 2016
  7. Tay-Dor

    Tay-Dor Active Member

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    Please...take your time. After the alpha blending lag nightmare, I'm fine with waiting for you to release quality tested features rather than releasing slapdash features to cater to us fanboys. I for one am much happier with things that work as opposed to half-working. :)

    Besides, its easier for us to convince people how great this program is if it works as great as we are professing.
     
    #7 Tay-Dor, Oct 28, 2016
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