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Anyone else hate the new fog of war

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Thrillba, Nov 4, 2012.

  1. Thrillba

    Thrillba Member

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    Not ranting...well i guess I am, and let me preface this by saying that I will be downgrading to the version with the good fog of war.

    I have quit using the fog of war and am just telling my people not to look over the map.

    The new fog of war is a lot of extra work. Very counter intuitive. I am spending 10 times the amount of work just because of this new feature as I would have before.

    Before when I wanted to show something I could say 1x1 or however big I needed the reveal and show what I wanted to show.

    Now you have to have all of the vectors correct or then you have to split a section, and you usually have to split it two or three times to get the proper sectioning that you need.

    It is just a very bad upgrade IMO, what are your thoughts.
     
  2. Golkiwu

    Golkiwu Member

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    Sorry, I love it. Hated the old one. Getting to set up areas that wil prompt for removal with character interaction save in game time for me. Takes a little more time to set up, but well worth the extra time for how smooth it lets the game flow, instead of saying "wait a sec so I can uncover what you need to see".

    I thought that there was a legacy mode for FOW?
     
  3. Wesley Gorby

    Wesley Gorby Production/Community Manager
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    Yeah agreed, the new system is 100x better than the old system.. it is also much less resource heavy..
    hmmm 500x500 single layers vs 50x50.. now why would that make the map less laggy and chunky?
     
  4. bigkilla

    bigkilla Member

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    I hate the new fog of war as well. To much hassle. The old way was so nice and easy.
     
  5. LordValerius

    LordValerius New Member

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    Unfortunately, I can't say I hate the new FoW because I have not even bothered to upgrade yet...but, my guess is I would most likely be ok with it. That being said, it is still not the FoW I would like. Dynamic FoW with Lighting/Vision like Maptools is what I think should be the standard. I liken it to d20Pro being the pretty nice car I bought, but then it got hot outside and not having AC as a feature of my car, I rolled the window down. Inquiring at the car dealer why my car doesn't have AC, the salesman told me that feature may be available in the future, but until then, here is a little fan you can plug into your cigarette lighter.

    I do love the program, I bought it, I use it. But not having that feature and seeing the slow progress and the resulting "upgrade", I hold out no hope for an actual dynamic system in d20Pro's future. Either the programmers don't know how to implement a system or they don't want to be compared to Maptools. Either way, it's a gamebreaker for me in the long run.

    Val
     
  6. Entola

    Entola Member

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    Fog of War works fine for me.
     
  7. kridak

    kridak New Member

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    I would rather have had the devs spend their time creating a real FoW mechanic. The new one is a piecemeal solution.

    Devs please go see Maptools FoW and see how it should be done.

    Please.
     
  8. lexluthor

    lexluthor Member

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    I hate it too, much preferring the original method. It just takes way too long for the payoff. And flooding the map with 1 by 1 squares makes the map difficult for me to see accurately. This has actually driven me to map tools, I hate to say, because I have been afraid to tackle that software with its esoteric macros (esoteric to me, I am not macro savvy).
     
  9. Lonewolf147

    Lonewolf147 Member

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    I agree completely with you. I am a long time user of MapTools specifically because of their D-FOW and Lighting/Vision. I bought d20pro when I received a kickstarter package that contained maps for it. If I could convert them to MapTools I would in a heartbeat. But sadly I can't, so I'll continue to use d20pro and hope that the devs upgrade the FOW system and add lighting/vision. :cool:
     
  10. Wesley Gorby

    Wesley Gorby Production/Community Manager
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    Maptools may do FOV well, but is far from not having it's own set of faults and drawbacks..
     
  11. Lonewolf147

    Lonewolf147 Member

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    I don't claim it's perfect, it has memory and CPU resource issues for one, but I feel it is a superior and more realistic FOW that my players and I greatly enjoy.
     
  12. vanith

    vanith Member

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    I love the Fog of War in this system, it is so easy to draw the way points out and snap it to the squares that I need. It takes me very little time to set everything up and with the remove negative space, the players can't figure out how big the map is or look around it because it eliminates the extra parts of the map that I don't want the players to figure out. I don't even use the stamp tools because it's way easier for me to snap it and draw how big of an area I want.
     
  13. Lonewolf147

    Lonewolf147 Member

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    What would be really nice then would be to have both systems and the GM could set in preferences Simple FOW or Complex FOW. lol
     
  14. edwardcd

    edwardcd Administrator
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    This is exactly the direction we are gong. Improve the previous basic fog of war (that was seen in 3.0 and before) and improve the polygon based fog of war, then bring them both as options. This is currently on the slate for v3.4.
     
  15. Lonewolf147

    Lonewolf147 Member

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    Awesome! You deserve some bacon! [​IMG][​IMG][​IMG][​IMG][​IMG][​IMG][​IMG][​IMG]
     
  16. phloog

    phloog Member

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    Yeah...I messed up, and upgraded without thinking...it's been a long while since my gaming group got together, and I am doing some last minute scrambling to get things set up.

    That's when I hit this new Fog of War...let me say that I freely admit that any problems I have with it are entirely because I don't know how to use it, but I am also having trouble working through the tutorials, and when I search for an instructional video (not just little animations on this site) on Youtube I only find how to do the OLD way.

    So I'm stuck right now, and it's looking like we go without D20Pro. I REALLY loved this product, and have supported it for quite a while, but I have no idea why they would have the long term GOAL of having both methods, and yet they would completely toss out the familiar one in the interim....that makes zero sense to me.

    When I try to do things I get bizarre reactions from the interface - things turn green or purple seemingly in reaction to something I've done, but never what I intended.

    Here's the critical thing - -this isn't calculating to-hits or armor classes, this is Fog of War - - if I can't trust that what I'm doing on my machine is generating the right result, then I have to worry that everyone is seeing things I don't want them to see, or (almost as bad) not seeing things they should.

    I will also admit that I'm a reactionary, and in all likelihood if I can't get this to work I'll likely go back to Map Tools or Fantasy Grounds or something (I own almost all products like this)...

    Is there a QUICK tutorial anywhere out there - ideally VIDEO, that explains this, so I'm not clicking on square shapes then when I touch a region I've drawn with knots the whole things goes green and then......feh...

    I'm set to go to Gen Con, and if I can't get this working out I'm either going to spend my time talking to the competition, or spend my time giving the d20Pro folks an earful...Not sure which they'd prefer at this point.

    Switching to gain power is fine, but don't move from something intuitive to something that (seemingly for more than one person) is not.
     
  17. phloog

    phloog Member

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    Oops - -forgot this - - can someone tell me the best way to do what the original poster mentioned - - going back to the old version?
     
  18. edwardcd

    edwardcd Administrator
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    http://www.d20pro.com/about/index.php#download
    Expand "Older Versions" 3.1 and before
     
  19. Godfrey Mason

    Godfrey Mason New Member

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    our question has already been answered but I just wanted to welcome you to ecf. Not hard to see why it is so special to me. The people.....always here to help. I love that. Good luck and happy vaping to you.
     

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