So @everyone -- I think I'm ready for tonight. Spent, as usual, what feels like too much time. But given that I knew the source material, and literally had made the maps myself, that went better. I wanted to share a few thigns though, because it was the lighting that threw me again. And I think I've grokked (many) of the gotchas. Putting this here for myself in the future as much as y'all:
- Advanced lighting, in fact, doesn't seem to support dim light at the moment. Which lead me for this encounter to want to go back to the old lighting.
1.a) As a note: When doing advanced lighting, you turn it on via the 'Dynamic Lighting' tab on the page. This is not ALL dynamic lighting, just advanced. Once turned on, the visuals for the characters are controlled by the similarly matching "Dynamic Lighting" tab on each character/token. Only those settings matter.
1.b) ALSO: (the main reason I went 'old' for this one), is that there seems to be an issue with the new lighting, where instead of looking at the 'middle' of your character to see what they can see, it looks at the edges. So no matter where you draw a wall line (most likely), when the character steps next to it, their vision blends past it, letting them see through. Old lighting doesn't have this issue, because it's based on center-of-mass
- To do 'old' lighting, make sure to turn off that setting on the page. (tokens don't matter). Then go to the main 'Page Details' tab, and you want the following settings (most likely)
Turn ON: Advanced Fog of War Dim Light Reveals All Tokens Reveal (GM) Dynamic Lighting Enabled Enforce Line of Sight Only Update on Drop (to stop players from dragging their character around seeing the whole map without tipping the DM off grin)
Turn OFF: Fog of War Global Illumination (unless you want that)
2.a) This is important, so I'll say it again because it's what got me. You have to turn on 'Advanced Fog of War' and turn OFF 'Fog of War' and the updated dynamic lighting. So it turns out that if you leave Fog of War on, even if you have ADVANCED Fog of War on. They 'both are active'. The original Fog of War is the type where the DM has to manually reveal everything. So basically if you have it on, that's what causes all/most characters to see nothing/black. Even when you think it should be working. (Theoretically it's so that you could have areas of the map you manually reveal, while letting the advanced Fog of War/Dynamic Lighting still happen....
- Character sight: If using the 'new Updated Dynamic Lighting', you control that from the dynamic lighting tab where it has options for night vision/etc.
If using the older/stable version, you control that via 'light emits'. On each character, choose them, make sure that you have 'Has Sight' checked or else it won't render for them. Then, you have to give them appropriate light settings. For example:
If they have nightvision: Emits Light: 60, Dim Start: 0, Visible to Players: NO
If they have a torch: Emits: 40, Dim: 20, Visible: YES
- OddShit
4a) There is no such thing as a workable window. Any break in a wall can be walked through by the players. Basically there is a 1-pixel collision detection right in the center.
4b) To ensure walls with no holes. Keep clicking once you start to make continuous bends in the walls.
4c) When you do need to 'lift' and start a new wall, make sure that it overlaps previous ones. No harm in doing this, and it stops vision (and movement)
4d) Doors: Personally I switched to a different thicker-line, to make it easier to completely close the space. I also overlapped it a LOT for each doorway. Again, no harm.
4e) We will see how this works tonight. But a trick I read about how to do the doors, was instead of moving/deleting them, is to just move them to the GM layer. Then when closed again, move back to lighting layer. You can do this manually with mouse. But there are also shortcuts. So in general you can switch between layers with the keys: m = Map o = Objects k = DM (Why k?) , = Lighting
Once you've selected an item, you can move it to a layer by typing 'l' and then the layer. So to open a door, use the following keys: , (move to lighting layer if you weren't there) click on door to open l k (move object layer to DM) o (to get back to object layer, if you want)
etc
This has a benefit of making the opened doors visible on your screen as a GM. Which is kinda cool if you forget.