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.

  1. Easy Fog of War
  2. 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)