Shadow Casting Feature Release

By Tobias Drewry - June 29, 2016

Hello All,

Tomorrow (June 29th) is the day we’re hitting the shiny red launch button on our production Shadow casting engine for D20PRO! There are a few additional tweaks and features we would have loved to have rolled into it, however, due to time constraints and other tasks on our list, we’re slotting those features into the future build path.

For those of you who are adverse to very long, dense posts — the short version.

Shadow casting is live as part of 3.6.6 which you can download tomorrow (June 29th)
Lights as Gradient – Single Light with two stage lighting (bright / shadowy – (3.6.6)
The Rules engine work proceeds according to plan albeit slightly behind schedule – (3.6.7)
Mobile Character sheet support in D20PRO is ready, however, the actual mobile sheet is not. Coming Soon! (3.6.7)
Feature Library support (extension of the Rules Engine) is well underway and will be available in Alpha/Early Access soon (3.6.6.x)

Below I will attempt to give an overview of the updated Fog of War and Lighting system’s core features. This is a brief introduction and should not be considered as full documentation.

A Region for each and every one of you

As with the previous Fog of War system, Shadow casting is based on a polygonal region system. We’ve worked hard to optimize the region types in an effort to minimize clutter and confusion. Many systems which implement Shadow casting suffer from holes and sudden reveal problems. Our system is designed to provide the Game Master with the maximum amount of control over what is revealed and when avoiding such problems. While we’ve had the current system in beta for nearly a month, I expect there will be tweaks to make based on use case stories in the upcoming future.

Now, on with the article!

Shadow Casting is optional

One point I’d like to make out of the gate is that Shadow casting is optional. Just like with any fog of war system, you can choose to use it or not.

There are two core options for map usage with Region based FoW being split into two types.

Easy Fog of War
Region Based Fog of War
1. Passive Fog of War
2. Interactive Fog of War

Preexisting maps should default to using Masks for their Region Type. This will make more sense as you read more below.

Easy Fog of War

I’m not going to go deeply into Easy Fog of War here. Suffice it to say that the only major change to this feature is that we’ve removed the one-or-the-other nature of Easy Fog of War. Easy FoW is now simply a tab on the Game Tools which lets you use that feature along side Region based FoW.

(click on images to enlarge them)

Regions Based Fog of War

Regions are broken down by function and provide various behaviors based on Passive or Interactive Fog of War modes. For the truly adventurous, we’ve enabled a per-region toggle to enable Passive or Interactivemode. This allows for a mix of all-or-nothing hide/show regions along side Interactive, shadow casting enabled, regions. A good use case for this system is indoor/outdoor mixed spaces.

Take an old building which has had it’s windows boarded up, or a cavern in a hill side. You can use PassiveRegions to mask the unexplored areas around the building or outside the cavern. As the players explore these open spaces, the GM can reveal large sections of the map. However, when the players venture into the darkened interior of the building or cavern, these Regions can be configured to be Interactive only responding to Light sources to reveal their secrets.

Below are two images showing a cave map (from The Lost Lands: Stoneheart Valley (2/3): The Crucible of Freya, Frog God Games) which is using both indoor and outdoor, Passive and Interactive Regions. The interior of the cave is made with Interactive Mask Regions while the outside of the cave is made with Passive Mask Regions. There are two Lights in the scene. One attached to a player token and one attached to the fire pit. The fire pit light is owned by the dweller within the cave, while the other is owned by the player. The reason to apply ownership is to allow for the light inside the cave to be hidden from the players until such time as the dweller is revealed.

** NOTE** The configured maps used below were made for this blog article and are not included with Stoneheart Valley or other associated products.

A quick note on Lights and Regions. If a Light is marked as Public and it overlaps a “Shown” region, the light will illuminate the Region. This is great for torches and other area sources but needs to be thought about when using Lights with NPC’s or bad-guys. See the below revamp of the above map for an example of a better Region layout to control the reveal from the Fire Pit as the player advances down the stairs into the cavern.

Now lets delve into the nitty-gritty of the Region system.

Masks

The Mask is the workhorse of the Fog of War region system. Masks are used to Hide areas of the map from players which you want to reveal as they explore. In Passive mode, a Mask will Hide or Show the entire region outlined when the visibility of the Region is toggled. In Interactive mode, a Mask will Hide everything beneath it until toggled to Shown. When marked as Shown, the Mask region will show only the section of the map where a light source overlaps the Interactive Mask.

Masks are intended to be used to define traversable. Interactive Masks extend this concept to produce Shadow casting within the Region.

Note – Masks are required in order to properly use Shadow casting. You can use Lights without Masks or Regions, however the result is a bunch of radii which might not be that useful — then again, depending on your game it might be perfect!

Walls, Edges and Doors

The remaining Region types are for containing lights and controlling how lights cast into your Masked areas.

Walls provide fill and edging to large sections of your map. Filling in the cliff sides on the cavern example above is a task for a Wall Region.
Edges are designed to be used to add light blocking shapes to objects in your scene like a statue or crate.
Doors are used to define quickly toggled objects which are meant to provide transitions between Regions — like a door or curtain, however, Door objects can be used to provide elevation effects such as in the cavern entrance in the example above. Because it may not be quite as obvious after the previous statements, Doors can be used for Doors and Windows as well!

Doors

Doors are fairly common as a means to control flow and transition on a map. As such, we’ve given Doors some special properties!

When clicking on regions to toggle viability, if a Door is in the stack of Regions clicked, then only the Door Region is selected. Regions behind the Door will not be selected. The normal click-and-drag-to-reveal behavior is still present so you can start a reveal gesture from a Door and move it outward. For those not familiar with this gesture, it allows for a GM to click and drag the mouse along Regions they would like to reveal to the Players.

The core reason for the special click behavior is to allow doors to be effectively placed on top of other regions creating transitions without having to carve holes in existing Regions. The benefit of this will become obvious when you experiment with it, but, unfortunately is hard to relate in text. When we get our video tutorials rolling, if you don’t have it already, you’ll definitely see how cool this feature is.

GT paint tab In addition to the ability to Draw Doors from the Draw Menu, we’ve added two (2) Door Shapes to the Paint Menu. The two shapes are H. Door and V. Door (Horizontal and Vertical). These shapes have a unique property as well. When you change the “Size” value for either of these shapes they will grow either taller (Vertical Door) or longer (Horizontal Door) by the number of units you’ve selected.

draw-mode-toggles Before we move on to Edges and Walls, I should take a moment to talk about Open and Closed regions. With this release we introduce the ability to draw your regions as either Open or Closed. What this means is simply that a polygon region will be connected by the last segment (Closed) or it won’t (Open).

The effect is that you can create Regions which do not leave an edge open, or even simply straight lines. The method being used is to effectively “walk” back along the path to create a zero width closed polygon.

In the above example, you can see a Closed Wall on the left and an Open Wall on the right. Click on the image to enlarge it for a better view.

Now, because these objects are effectively unwrapped lines, you can do some fun things with them in Manipulate Mode. If you unlock the Region and enter Edit Mode, you can drag around some of the extra points to create fills around an open Region.

Unlike with the Region Type toggle and the Interactive and Passive toggle, Open/Closed object draws are not alterable through the Manipulate Mode.

TIP!

Region Type and interaction mode can be changed once an Region has been drawn. For instance if you draw an Edge but needed a Wall you can either just click on the Region Type drop down in the list entry or switch to the Manipulate Tab and with the Region selected click on Wall. Using the Manipulate Tab’s buttons you can perform a multi-select and change the Region Type or Interaction Mode for many Regions at once.

Okay, back to Region Types.

Edges

Edges are a lot simpler than Doors, Walls and Masks. You either use them or not. The main reason to use anEdge is to add light blocking elements to a map which you do not want to be able to toggle visibility on. The behavior of an Edge is as follows:

An Edge does not block the Map (however, it does block light which can cast a shadow over the map).
A Locked Edge cannot have it’s visibility stated toggled.
An Unlocked Edge can have it’s visibility toggled.

The result is that you can use Edges to create Light containers. A Light inside of an Edge will not cast out of theEdge, however it will reveal the map inside of the Edge area where the light illuminates if inside of a Mask. To make this much more clear, here’s a picture!

Until we have time to resolve the “Light inside” model more thoroughly, the suggested use of Edges is shown below

Walls

Finally, we have Walls. Walls are the fill object and bounding object which allow lights to exist without giving away all of your GM secrets. Walls have the following traits and behaviors:

Walls block Lights
A Light whose center enters a Wall is disabled while it is contained within the Wall
A Locked Wall ignores request to toggle visibility
An Unlocked Interactive Wall which is toggled to “Show” allows light to enter the area but still does not reveal the map below
An Unlocked Passive Wall which is toggled to “Show” reveals the map beneath it

How does this all go together?

Apparently quite well!

Lights

Shadows without Lights is clearly not going to happen so lets talk briefly about the final implementation of the Lights engine.

Lights are controlled and managed by the GM only. A Player can have lights assigned to them or tokens they control, but cannot otherwise add Lights to the scene. One of the major reasons for this is to prevent reveals of the Map which the GM may not be inclined to have happen. The other core reason is that the tool systems required to access lights are not currently part of the Player model. If we discover a solid reason to make a shift, we’ll consider doing it. For now, GM’s, have fun!

How do I create these things?

There are two ways to add lights to a map. The first is to open the token menu by either right clicking on a token or selecting a token and using the “+” menu; Then navigate to the Light option and select Create. This will give you a list of default light sizes in radius. A notation of 5’/10′ means a light with an inner radius of 5′ and an outer radius of 10′. If you select a Light without an outer radius, you’ll get a simple light with a flat gradient.

Here are details of the Creature/Token Light Menu

Using the Clear All option will delete all lights associated with a given Creature.

To control visibility of a Light, you can toggle it’s Visible status or change if the Light is Public.

An example of a Player owned non-public Light is something like Darkvision. A Creature with 60′ Darkvision would have a non-public 60′ Light Owned and Tethered to them.

To customize or create complex lights, you will need to use the Game Tools->Fog of War->Light tab.

This menu has changed a lot from the Beta builds. The Preset selector has a collection of common light sizes and the “new” type. To Add a light, simply select the size or “new” and then click on Add. If “new” is selected, then you’ll be dropped into the Light editor. Otherwise you’ll end up with a two step gradient Light of the chosen radius.

You can also Duplicate any Light or selection of Lights already created. Duplicated Lights will not be owned, tethered or visible by default. You can drag them around and toggle them to visible or double click on their entries to enter the Light Editor and change the ownership and/or tethered status.

Delete also works on a single light or selection of Lights. We will be adding in some additional group selection toggles such as group visibility in a future build.

Lets dive into the Light Editor. There’s a lot in here!

Name – Set this to anything you want. Defaults to Light
- Lights can have any name you like. Number, letters, special characters, etc.
Radius – Grid Unit representation of the Lights Radius
- If you’re not using a Game System, this defaults to integer values 1, 2, 3, etc.
Visibility – Toggle on/off
- Controls the global visibility of a Light. When disabled, a Lights handle turns Black.
Public – Toggle on/off
- Controls the shared state of the Light. If only the Owner can see the light, set this to off.
Fill Color – Set the color and opacity
- Sets a full light fill color. If using Gradients, the fill color is overlayed on top of the Gradient.
Ring Color – Set the color and opacity
- Sets the Outer Edge ring color. This traces the Light shape creating an outline in the specified color.
Inner Ring Color – Set the color and opacity
- Sets and enables an Inner Ring of the specified Color. The inner ring is always 1/2 the radius of the Light.
Use Gradient – Toggle on/off
- Enable or disable the gradient for this Light.
Range – Set the Gradient transition points
- Set a Minimum and Maximum value which is used to determine the transition points of the Gradient. A normal two-part Light would have a Range with the Minimum and Maximum close together in the middle of the bar. A gentle “whole Light” gradient has the Minimum and Maximum values near the edges of the Range. Range is from a scale from 1% through 99% and Minimum and Maximum cannot be equal.
Center – Set the Gradient Center color and opacity
- Change the starting color for the Gradient. This color will blend toward Inner.
Inner – Set the Gradient Center-to-Inner color and opacity target
- Set the first color target for the gradient. The Center color blends toward Inner. This color is represented on the Range Slider as Minimum.
Outer – Set the Gradient Inner-to-Outer color and opacity target
- Set the second color target for the gradient. The Inner color blends toward Outer. This color is represented on the Range Slider as Maximum.
Edge – Set the Gradients Outer-to-Edge color and opacity target
- Set the final color target for the gradient. The Outer color blends toward Edge.
Owned by – set the Owner for the given Light
- Provides a list which allows for a Token or Item to be selected as a Lights owner. Tokens and Items can own more than one Light, but a Light cannot be owned by more than one Token or Item. An Owned Light is not specifically Tethered to the owner. An example is a scrying sensor which can be moved around independently of the owner.
Tethered to – set the Tethered Target for the given Light
- Provides a list which allows for a Token or Item to be selected as a Lights Tether Target. Tethered Lights travel around with their Target. If no Owner is specified, the Tether Target will become the owner. However, Owner and Tether do not have to be equal.

Below is a small sample of the kinds of lights that can be generated using this system. You’ll definitely want to experiment with different combinations of settings to get the look and feel you’re after.

Finally, the new color picker is very powerful, however, changing the opacity is not immediately obvious.

To change the opacity of a Lights color, you’ll need to enter the “Custom Color” panel. For now, the best way to do this is to select the color you want from the main Color Picker, then click on the color a second time and click on “Custom Color”. Then you’ll be presented with the Opacity slider. A value between 8% and 30% tends to work best.