FOW- blur

theboynurse

Bit new here- so if this has already been discussed point me in the right direction. Any chance of fog of war giving a blurring effect rather than simply blacking out in daylight? I want my players to be able to see that something is there, but maybe not know what/who it is. Ideally I could set individual token visual acuity, the elven ranger seeing farther than the dhampir in bright light  for instance.

simonjhudson

I'd be up for having blurred edges, but FoW shouldn't really show the underlying map at all IMHO.
There is already support for different characters having different view, with different light sources and types of vision (darkvision for dwarves etc.), which is cool.

Smitemeister

Hi theboynurse, thanks for the suggestion. I will forward it to our coder Javi as this topic is his department.

theboynurse

Don't misunderstand me, for darkness black-out is the way to go. Additionally if there is blocked LOS it should also be blacked-out. However I run many encounters in which a character could see to the edge of the map, general terrain would be visible to anybody w/ normal vision, but details would be difficult to make out, FWIW.

simonjhudson

That makes good sense - for distant objects blurring reduces the clarity of what the players can see, until they are close enough to resolve details

Smitemeister

Indeed. It would give a more realistic touch to the field of vision in wide open spaces like cities,etc.

CJ569

While on the topic of FOV, Smitemeister, are there plans on adding Utterdarkness (Magical Darkness)? I ask cuss in my campaigns I use Magical Darkness to throw my players, that have Darkvision, off guard cuss they can't see anymore and it puts them in a Internal Conflict of sorts to build character. Or perhaps there is a way I could use the already established mechanics to get this desired effect?

Smitemeister

That would already work in the open beta... let's say you want your players to experience magical or complete darkness just reduce their vision radius to 0

I guess this could be handled in a more elaborate way in the final release but the bare function itself already exists.

Knucklehead

Just adding on to this idea, if possible it would be handy if such an FOW blur was adjustable with various settings.

For example options for the blur spread range and how it reveals the map itself or different types of objects/tokens.

One possible setting might be to reveal enemy tokens right at the edge of the FOW blur, but have the tokens themselves heavily blurred out (so they basically just show up as blurry blobs on the screen), only revealing that there's something there and roughly what size it is, but not revealing any other visual details whatsoever.

If a blur filter is applied to the target tokens or props, one could perhaps also adjust the amount of blur and also be able to desaturate it completely, if you don't want to even reveal the overall color of the object/enemy.

Speaking of desaturation, if FOW blur allows for things to be revealed in the dark, if possible it would possible to desaturate them, as darkness has a desaturating effect on the human eye/vision.

Also, the token/oject blurring effect could also with proper settings be used to simulate radar or some types of vision, for example a character that might be visually blind, yet has a sonar ability to detect and locate the position and size of an enemy and nothing more.

Anyway, just a thought.

/K

simonjhudson

I added a comment about darkness yesterday, elsewhere in the forum, but just noticed it in here. The idea of reducing vision to 0 only works if the characters are in the darkness. Darkness can also be used to obscure an area the characters are not in, but which suddenly they can't see through. The same would be true of an obscuring fog or a raging fire. So the option to add a zone that blocks sight and/or light on the fly would be great help