Digital TableTops Player News

Pretty minor update. Fixed a few bugs. Specifically:

• missing grid lines when videos are played
  
• when in "worldview" mode for player screen (pressing "v" on the keyboard) it ignored lighting settings
  

There was a few other small ones but I forgot to keep track of them.
Here is a "roadmap" of features I plan on adding next. I am quite busy selling the hardware to use this on (peak holiday shopping season) so probably won't have another update for a month or so.
FEATURE REQUESTS:

• invisibility toggle for tokens
  
• filter tokens and maps by keyword
  
• movement radius when token selected in initiative tracker
  
• better window management (automatic refresh when new monitors plugged in)
  
• line of sight calculations for tokens hidden behind walls in already explored areas
  
• proper static lighting support (similar to LoS listed above)
  

The engine has been updated to Godot 4.5. There might be some minor performance improvements. I try to keep my program running on the latest stable version of Godot.

A few minor fixes:
- large/gargantuan tokens not centered correctly when "snap to grid" is active
- crash when importing tokens on Linux

2 sorta big features added. You can now manually remove/add to the fog of war. Simply click the "lighting" icon from the menu on the left (the one with the light bulb symbol). This automatically toggles brush mode.

When the lighting menu is active, left click and drag to remove/add fog to the map. There is a toggle in the lighting menu to switch between the add and remove functions.

You "remove" fog to make the map visible to players.
You "add" fog to hide that area from players.

It even takes into account walls/doors/etc. A nice touch!

In addition to that, the other big feature is there is now a "virtual" screen size setting. It defaults to 36x18, but can be adjusted from the settings in the main menu (not during a session though).

What's going on here is that normally only lights within that area designated by the green rectangle on the DM screen are actively being rendered. Since this area is at least as large as the player screen, that means the player screen is always being fully rendered.

However, areas OUTSIDE of the player screen are not being rendered. This isn't usually a problem, but can be if a token has light that extends far past the size of the physical screen. That area of the map never gets lit, so it is shown as unexplored.

Not usually a big deal as most people (and all of the ones who bought a TV case from me) are using 43" TVs. So you are not spending a lot of time at the edges of the map, in general.

But it has come up enough, mostly for those using smaller screens, that I decided to make the area being rendered for lighting adjustable. Simply enter whatever number you like for the size of the map you want the lights to work at. The default should be fine for most people.

If you have a particularly powerful GPU, you could set this all the way to 100x100 without breaking much of a sweat. That corresponds to nearly a 10 foot by 10 foot area in the real world.

Why not just set this area to the entire map size? Well that can be a huge problem if a giant map is loaded. Think a 120x120 grid map, with a screen at 100 ppi resolution. To render the lighting for that whole map, you are looking at 144,000,000 pixles or over 17 entire 4K's screens simultaneously!

Even though this is a relatively simple scene, that is a LOT of pixels to be getting processed. One way I have avoided that issue is by rendering shadows at only about 50 ppi. That helps a lot. But for large enough maps you would need to render at a terrible ppi and it is very noticeable.

Anyhow, feel free to ask any questions about this or anything else.

Next up is adding a filter for tokens and maps. That is probably a month or 2 away as sales are really heating up for the holidays.

It may have been working with Proton before, but now we finally have native Linux builds!

It's not something that people were clamoring for, but it's been a long term goal to support more than just Windows. I already have Android working and will distribute for free via Google Play soon. Next up is MacOS, but realistically that is months away.

As always, let me know if you encounter any bugs or have any feature request.

Just some minor fixes. The most noticeable will be numerical counters have been added to tokens and the initiative tracker. If there are more than on token of the same type, they increment to better keep track of which one is which.

Let me know if you have any questions!

I've added an initiative tracker! It was easier than I thought it would be. To active it, simply press "i" on the keyboard or the button labeled "Initiative" at the bottom of the "Tokens" menu

You can set each tokens initiative by right clicking the token. It uses a decimal point to differentiate tokens with the same roll (so 11.1 would go before 11.0).

Set the initiative to zero to prevent them from showing in the tracker.

Click on the token's tile in the tracker to highlight them. That way the players know whose turn it is.

Let me know if you encounter any bugs. Enjoy!