BETA: Line of Sight
Well after years of not supporting line of sight in Shard, the beta version of line of sight support is here! There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make this complete. Your help and feedback is needed for us to get this ready for broad consumption.
See Using line of sight article for instructions on using line of sight.
Advances in performance of common devices along with the updated map control provided the enabling pieces to do this work. There are a few key points that we need to ensure before release.
Great user experience. We need to ensure that line of sight will provide a better experience for everyone while playing games. We want to make sure that line of sight can reduce fiddling with things like, fine grain fog of war changes or constant changing visibility states of monsters. At the same time we want to ensure that gamemasters can manage telling the story.
Need to make adding walls/doors to have minimal overhead. Adding walls can be a time consuming and tedious process. We want to ensure that users creating/importing maps as well as publishers are can add walls with minimal time and effort.
Performance needs to maintained. We don’t want to exclude play from devices due to poor interactive performance or rapid depletion of the battery.
User Experience
There are a variety of differences from other platforms that we are investigating to simplify the user experience. User input will be important for determining if these are good choices or if there are better alternatives.
Combine Fog of War with line of sight instead of stopping token movement due to walls. If you only depend upon line of sight to reveal hidden areas then it is easy for players to purposely or accidentally just move all over to see the map. Limiting movement to stop at walls helps, but can still allow early exposure to areas before the GM is ready. Additionally, this limitation makes it difficult to just rapidly move across maps. By combining with Fog of War, GMs can expose new rooms or regions as needed to control the story, while leaning on line of sight to eliminate the need to make fine-grained changes to the fog.
Simplify the process of selecting perspective for line of site. Players see line of site for all their characters and companions without having to flip between them. The GM can decide if players can see what all of their party can see for a shared experience or if each player can only see what their characters see.
Planned addition: we are planning to change the visibility of enemies based on if they are in line of site. This will allow monsters to disappear even if the area is still visible with exposed fog regions.
Creation Experience
Creating different wall types can be a tedious experience, especially when combined with our existing fog regions. Instead of creating a separate experience for walls from fog regions we have combined them into a single process and developed tools to make it easy to combine them.
The basic idea is to treat the edges of fog regions as solid walls, at least initially. After creating regions pick a wall paint tool to change the type of walls for the edges of the polygons or select doors to place doors on existing walls. The wall paint tool will ensure that regions get updated to provide the expected results.
Additional changes:
Stacked vertexes move as a group by default making it difficult to accidentally separate walls. (Hold ctrl key to only move corner from selected region.)
To collapse points just drag them on top of another point.
When creating a polygon there is a dot to show were the next point will be placed. This reduces cases where you get surprised about where a point gets placed.
New cut tool to cut any wall into multiple. This can allow a wall to be split into different wall types.
Autocomplete of a region. When building a new region that is next to other regions the code will try to identify a path to complete the region without requiring clicking on all of the points in the middle. Look for a green path with a green point. Click the green point to complete.
Planned additions:
Allow import of maps with walls.
Allow quickly marking walls of a region to a single type (solid, one way, invisible).
Performance
There are a variety of performance optimizations that have been performed. Currently it seems that the performance even with complex maps is roughly the same as using fog of war currently. We really need some feedback about performance in different browsers and on different devices.
There is one big restriction that we did make. The line of sight is not updated during the movement of tokens and only changes at the end of a move.
Big Question
We are undecided on how to handle light sources. The current version just allows the GM to configure a range for line of sight. Adding light sources adds another whole level to creation of maps as well as increasing the configuration for characters to have various light sources. Light sources also increases processing 2-4 times the current model.
Questions:
How important are light sources?
Would identification of light level by fog region be a replacement for general light sources?