#roll20 app

[blueberrymess-art]

BLUEBERRYMAPS in the Roll20 marketplace!

In case you didn't know I now have a place at the Roll20 marketplace and you will be able to buy all my map bundles there. Right now all the collection of desert battlemaps are available as well as the giants maps so far. I will be sumbmitting more in the following weeks, so please check them out!

I'm also at DriveThruRPG and DM's Guild.

[roll20]

Stay At Home, Play At Home

GAME NIGHT IS STILL ON

Staying in? It doesn't mean you have to cancel game night. As your virtual tabletop, we are here to help make sure you can still connect with your friends and family... And loot those dungeons, fly your starships, run away from eldritch horrors, or even just doodle together.

Below are some helpful pieces to get you started. Happy adventuring!

FOR FREE USERS

Play From Home pack of tokens and maps FREE until July 14, 2020

Call of Cthulhu Quick-Start Rules FREE

Call of Cthulhu: The Lightless Beacon FREE

D&D 5e: The Master's Vault FREE

The Strange: Starter Pack FREE

If you’re looking to play right away, check out the ever popular Lost Mine of Phandelver for only $14.99 USD

FREE FOR PRO SUBSCRIBERS

Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage Adventure Preview

Rrakkma - Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes Introductory Adventure

A ton of map and art packs, both in the Art Library and as Addons to existing games

These links will take you to the Marketplace listing for these products. If you’re a subscriber - they’re already in your account!

To use the free content:

Create a new game and see the free modules on the right hand side of your screen while creating a game.

After creating a new game, check out the Game Addons section to add in free addons like the Roadside Ambush Map.

Inside any game, check out your Art Library to see the tokens available for you to use!

ADAM KOEBEL HELPS YOU DM

Learn more about prepping your tabletop games and how to play on Roll20 with the Roll20 Presents Waterdeep Dungeon of the Mad Mage DM Prep overview video.

Looking for more free resources? Check out our other blog posts in the Stay at Home, Play at Home series!

Stay at Home, Play at Home: Round 2

Stay at Home, Play at Home: Round 3

[roll20]

A New Light

At the start of 2019, we helped Roll20 Get a New Look with an update to Advanced Fog of War. While our data showed that the changes made the system run faster for many users, it also highlighted structural problems with the original design and architecture of that feature.

It became clear that we couldn’t bandage up this feature. We needed to rebuild it from the ground up, leveraging modern tools and designing with an eye towards our users' needs. Thus began work on the project we called “A New Light.”

Today we’re ready to unveil the results. Meet Updated Dynamic Lighting, a completely refurbished Plus and Pro subscriber feature which integrates all the functions from our existing lighting system with one streamlined name and future-ready code. It runs faster, supports more use cases, and represents the single biggest Roll20 upgrade since… well, the original Dynamic Lighting.

The old system (Legacy Dynamic Lighting) will run alongside the new system (Updated Dynamic Lighting) at first, to give you time to adjust, and then the old system will be retired later in 2020. We’ll give you lots of advance notice when its retirement party is coming, but for now, just know that you can switch between systems when you’re ready to try out the new update.

Because of its size and importance, we have a lot to say about Updated Dynamic Lighting. We front-loaded the features list for those of you who want to get right to the point, but read beyond that for a more robust explanation of what changes we made and why.

Overall Features:

Performance boost

Plus and Pro subscriber only

More robust technology that will work with modern hardware and browsers more efficiently

Change in tech will let us deliver more, highly requested features

New Lighting Features:

Light radius and Vision radius are now two separate settings

Dim Light and Bright Light are individual settings

All Light can be seen by all players' tokens with Vision

Tokens can now have “Night Vision” that doesn’t require light

Explorer Mode Features:

Replaces “Advanced Fog of War” with a toggle

Reveals in a radius around a token (no more grids!)

Saves revealed areas that a user has seen for all tokens they control

Visit the Roll20 Forum Bug Thread for more details and known issues about Updated Dynamic Lighting! We’d love to hear your feedback.

Parallel Systems: Legacy and Updated Dynamic Lighting

Currently, 51% of Roll20 games use some form of Legacy Dynamic Lighting or Advanced Fog of War. With a feature that touches so many of your lives, the last thing we wanted to do was make a sudden switch on you. Therefore, we’re introducing Updated Dynamic Lighting feature as an opt-in feature that will eventually (but not for some time yet) replace Legacy Dynamic Lighting. These systems will remain active side-by-side until we feel confident that we’ve met your expectations and given you enough time to switch.

Please be aware: Legacy Dynamic Lighting WILL be going away, but not until later in 2020. Given its structural problems, it would be untenable for us to support both versions of this system going forward. So we encourage you to try out the Updated Dynamic Lighting as soon as you can! We’ll make sure to give you a reminder well before the final change takes place.

We’re also confident that you’ll like it. The new system leverages WebGL, the same system that Legacy Dynamic Lighting always used. What’s new here is that the feature set from Advanced Fog of War has been integrated into the same system, and rebranded as “Explorer Mode,” a new setting for Updated Dynamic Lighting. In essence, this means that if you can run Legacy Dynamic Lighting, then you can run Updated Dynamic Lighting with the benefit of new features and substantially faster processing time.

We chose WebGL because it leverages the power of your computer’s graphics processor instead of taxing your CPU. We measured, and 99.9% of Roll20 users already use WebGL, and if you’re not sure whether that includes you, you can check with this webpage.

As with all Roll20 features, Dynamic Lighting has been designed for use on our officially supported browsers, Firefox and Chrome. You will need to use one of these browsers for the features to perform correctly.

What Happens When You Switch?

If you already have Dynamic Lighting barriers drawn on your Dynamic Lighting layer, those will stay. The new system uses that same layer to create line of sight for your map. However, if you were using Advanced Fog of War to remember where your players have already explored, their memory of revealed portions of the map will not carry over to Updated Dynamic Lighting. For that reason, it’s best to make the switch when moving your players to a new Page.

But don’t worry: if you want to switch back, you can. In essence, both Updated and Legacy Dynamic Lighting have separate memories of where your players have been, so what’s revealed in one system will not be revealed in the other. When you switch back and forth between them, however, they will each retain their individual memory of areas revealed while that system was active in your game.

As mentioned above, the feature set from the old “Advanced Fog of War” system has been integrated and renamed “Explorer Mode” for Updated Dynamic Lighting. It functions in the same way: as your players move their tokens around the play area, those sections of the map will be revealed and remembered. You just need to toggle Explorer Mode on.

Several other features have been rebranded for Updated Dynamic Lighting. You can read more about them on the Roll20 Help Center. Lots of newer GMs told us they had trouble understanding how the different pieces of the lighting system interacted with each other. We hope that the new names help shine light (!) on those issues, but hey! Let us know your feedback on the forums.

How to Turn on Updated Dynamic Lighting

Updated Dynamic Lighting will exist alongside the old systems for now, but you can’t use them both at the same time. When you enable Updated Dynamic Lighting, the old system will be disabled - but don’t worry! It only applies to the page you change the setting for, and you can revert if you wish. Make sure you read the “What Happens When You Switch?” section above for more detail on changing systems!

How to enable Updated Dynamic Lighting on a map or page:

In the Page Menu, click on the Gear Icon for the Page you want to edit.

Find the section in Page Settings labeled Updated Dynamic Lighting and switch it on.

Optional: If you want your players to retain visibility of the Map Layer after they have left their vision radius, turn on Explorer Mode (replaces “Advanced Fog of War”)

Optional: If you want to avoid placing lights, or it’s an outside, sunny kind of adventure, turn on Daylight Mode (replaces “Global Illumination”)

Click Save on the Page Settings

How to give an object Vision on an Updated Dynamic Lighting page:

Select the object (such as a character token or a pet controlled by a player)

Make sure that it’s Controlled By the correct players

Navigate to the “Updated Dynamic Lighting” tab

Turn on Vision

Optional: Turn on Low Light Vision radius

Optional: Turn on Night Vision radius

How to Light up an object on an Updated Dynamic Lighting page:

Select the object (such as a torch or character with a flashlight duct-taped to their head)

Navigate to the “Updated Dynamic Lighting” tab

Set the Bright Light radius to the distance that bright light should be emitted

Optional: Set the Low Light radius (usually larger than Bright Light)

Optional: Set the Angle and Starting Degree of light emitted (for a flashlight, etc)

Voila! Or “que la lumière soit,” if you want to get fancy. As long as you have Dynamic Lighting barriers set up (and you can learn how to do that on this Roll20 Help Center article), your page is ready. You can also check your work by selecting a token and hitting Ctrl + L to see what that token would see.

Support for Roll20 Marketplace Products

When you switch over to Updated Dynamic Lighting for your existing products from the Roll20 Marketplace, you may notice that some areas of your lighted maps have light leaking through corners and around walls. We'll be fixing this for all products (including Marketplace Creator products) with future patches to Updated Dynamic Lighting, so please don’t worry that you will need to correct this by hand for all your maps!

What’s happening here: Updated Dynamic Lighting is far more precise about detecting the exact length and placement of barriers on the Dynamic Lighting layer. In places where the lines of a corner don’t join up 100% precisely, light will now shine through that small gap. Sometimes, Updated Dynamic Lighting, you do your job too well. We’re scoping out some tweaks to close those gaps moving forward!

You can still start or continue playing on existing maps during this time, but we recommend checking for light leaks before you let your players loose on them. The last thing any GM wants to hear is “Uh, I think I can see the boss through this corner?” Keep your secrets hidden, and we’ll keep you posted on the patches that will correct this problem in the future.

The Future of Dynamic Lighting

So what’s new in Updated Dynamic Lighting? Everything! And nothing. Under the hood, the code has been entirely refactored. Although the whole system is smoother and more efficient, we designed it to parallel the existing feature set of Legacy Dynamic Lighting. Explorer Mode (previously Advanced Fog of War) has gotten huge performance upgrades that are really cool if you’re the type of person who gets excited about the fact that it now renders revealed areas in a circle instead of a square. (FYI, we’re the type of people who get excited about circles instead of squares. CIRCLES, everyone! Round happy circles!)

Even if you don’t care about circles, the new system opens up a whole range of possibilities for the future. With A New Light complete, we can add more graphics features: specifically, the Layer Up update that was delayed last year and remains the most popular user request of all time. We also have a ton of exciting user ideas on the Suggestions Forum for lighting improvements that are much more doable with the added power of WebGL.

We also did some tinkering under the hood to add new features. One of the requests that drove us to embrace the need for a new system was our users' desire to have lighted objects be visible outside a character’s immediate vision radius - like the glow of a faraway campfire, beckoning you through the dark. The old system made this possible through some twists and contortions, but Updated Dynamic Lighting allows any object with Vision to detect any object with Light. Simple as that.

This is just the beginning, and we’re excited to shine A New Light on Roll20’s future. Please give our new Updated Dynamic Lighting a try, and let us know what you think on the forum!

[roll20]

Get Ready for Wildemount

Get ready adventurers-- Wildemount awaits! That’s right, the official setting made in collaboration with Critical Role will be released on March 17 in the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. Preorder your copy now to not waste a moment diving in at launch. 

The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount will have everything you need to craft your own stories, discover secrets from Matthew Mercer, as well as uncover new subclasses, items, spells, and more. All we can ask is: How do you want to do this?

Preorder your copy on the Roll20 Marketplace today!

Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, their respective logos, and the dragon ampersand, are registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC. ©2020 Wizards of the Coast. All rights reserved.

[roll20]

Custom Token Markers on the Dev Server!

Hey Pro subscribers-- you can now play around with Custom Token Markers on the Dev Server!

As the most upvoted open suggestion from the Suggestions Forum, we suspect more than a few of you would like to test out the new feature. So, time to customize your games (even more) and please give us your feedback! 

If you’re not a Pro subscriber yet and want early access to new features like this when they hit the Dev Server, or you want to join us in Roll20’s Pro forums, you can upgrade to a Pro subscription.

[roll20]

Holiday Cheer from Roll20

Roll20 is officially in winter mode now that December is here and that means a few things - time to cozy up, play some games, and hopefully spread some cheer! 

We thought we’d give a little something to our Roll20 community so we present to you a beautiful Cozy Cabin Map Pack from David Hemenway to set the mood for your next game. David has created a winter forest featuring a cozy cabin, a sweet sled and lots of other fun items and it’s available for free to all Roll20 users!

Our annual Holiday Charity Art Pack is also launching today and in the spirit of all things cozy, our marketplace creators have developed a pack centered around this years’ theme of “hygge”. A donation of any amount to Take This through the Roll20 Marketplace will earn you all the goodies inside.

If the gifting spirit moves you, don’t forget about your game group and GM - maybe surprise them with a gift subscription to Roll20? **hint hint!**

[roll20]

Rolling Back the Zoom Tool Update

Yesterday, we released an update to the Zoom tool on Roll20. Our intention was to address user requests by simplifying the existing tool and more closely aligning with modern standards.

Unfortunately, the update missed the mark - and more critically, created usability issues for users. As a result, we've decided to roll back the update and revert to the previous version while we continue work on the new Zoom. The code released yesterday is still available on the Dev Server, including yesterday’s hot fixes, for your continued input. 

We apologize for the inconvenience to our players and GMs, and are grateful to our community for the quality and volume of constructive and passionate feedback we received.

The rollback is effective now. Please see our forum post for more information.

[roll20]

Zoom. Zoom? Zoom!

Update: we’ve rolled back the Zoom update. You can go here for more information on that.

We pulled out the magnifying glass and leaned in for an examination of.. well, another magnifying glass. The Zoom tool is up for renewal, and today we're releasing some changes that will make it much simpler and more useful!

Our first step when enhancing a tool is to look for user feedback, and many of you told us that you found the Zoom tool clunky and difficult to use. You needed the tool to move more smoothly and interact more naturally, so here's what we did:

Changes

Added a + and - Button to the tools on the VTT, replacing the Zoom Slider and giving better information about your current zoom setting

Added Hot Keys to zoom in (+) and out (-)

Mouse Scroll Wheel now controls zoom by default

Right Click quick selects the Pan Tool from all other tools

AND you can control where you zoom by pointing your mouse

Because rolling the mouse wheel will zoom you in (or out) on wherever your mouse is pointing, you can now move around and explore the page with just one action. Gone is the Zoom Slider that many found difficult to control, replaced with a simple + and - that you can access either from the Toolbar or through Hot Keys. And wherever your mouse is pointing, that's where you will zoom.

All that work gave us an opportunity to smooth the Pan Tool as well, adding a shortcut to Pan Tool by right clicking with any other tool selected.

The new Zoom tool released today after a week of testing on our Dev Server, integrating the feedback we received there. Put it under your own magnifying glass and let us know what you think in the forums!

Legacy Option

Prefer the old way of doing things? You can revert the functionality with a checkbox under game settings.