I forgot to mention this in the video but the world map and the battlemap are both from Caeora on Patreon! They're an excellent world/battle map and token artist that I'd highly recommend checking out :).
5:14 *throws monitor off of desk* Jokes aside, I know that it's one of the potentially planned features of Foundry but I''m glad this module exists already! This kind of Fog of War works so much better for certain maps than standard dynamic lighting. (Also, I'm totally going to do that to troll my players)
I'm glad that you appreciated that :D. And absolutely. I've seen so many people asking for this kind of functionality and Vance really knocked it out of the park functionality-wise. It's one of the most useful and feature rich modules I've seen outside of combat automation modules. Best of luck in your trolling!
Yet another masterful script. While I'm sure these take longer to prepare and deliver onto your channel, each video's lifespan is increased immeasurably because the content is concise and structured. Excellent work.
Thank you so much for saying that! I agree 100% that scripting it makes it a lot more consumable and shows things off better. I'm glad that it's making the videos better for you all :D.
This would be incredibly useful for any sort of outdoor scene where you have global illumination active, but don't want your players to see inside a building, and being able to leave a shadow means you can even make it look dimly lit when you do reveal it!
This seriously saved me last night when a player rolled a 30 on an INT (Investigation) check and it was the DM (that’s a me!) that jumped ahead of the plot and my map wasn’t ready! Without this video and SimpleFog I would have been toast.
That's awesome :D. I'm in the same position keeping it installed just as an emergency back up haha. I haven't had to use it yet but we'll see how long that lasts!
Its so embarrassing how "single developer" foundry vtt wipes the floor with "many years long developed with million users and subscribers" roll20. They were so lazy for so many years and now they are run over by a bus.
It honestly doesn't seem real. I'm having trouble articulating just how good of an idea it was to let users make modules to make up for the fact that he's flying solo. Roll20 just seems absolutely archaic after using this for a single week.
agreed its great! calling it single developer is taking away from all the talented people who make all thosecool modules for this great open system though
@@diamend85 Fact is vanilla foundry is still better in so many parts as roll20, to create it as an open system is another win for the developer. This doesnt in no way harm or ignore all the talented and motivated module makers nor all the talented and motivated gm's building worlds and adventures and leading games for their players. in this case i just didnt compared achievements of the communities (there are API developers in Roll20 too) but from the professional developers
@@diamend85 the og developer deserves the utmost credit for making his API as accessible as it is. It’s like praising valve for the wonder that is their source engine games, because it allowed a thriving community of modders to exist. The fact that this dev was self aware and humble enough to know his limitations and allow the community to fill in the blanks is amazing.
I can see doors on the map despite the fog, which unfortunately makes the module a no-go. Is there a way to fix this? I'd love to use it if that one issue can be corrected. Thanks!
Guessing the module's not supported anymore because you can now see token names & health bars, doors, loot piles, etc, through the Simple Fog. Which makes its functionality heavily limited. :(
I'm going to be getting this purely for the grid-based reveal. I've got a hex-crawl game coming up and that'll make things super, SUPER easy to reveal where the party has been.
I'm not a huge fan of roll20s fog of war system - but I'm considering getting this module so I can use it specifically for spells that hinder the PCs vision (Darkness, Cloud of Fog, etc etc)
It's a great option for that! It's much more flexible than using a negative radius light since you can provide a *little* bit of visibility if you want to as well.
This was an amazing module when it worked and was one of the reasons for deciding to go with Foundry as my VTT of choice. Unfortunately, it no longer works. The original developer no longer maintains it and updates to Foundry have broke it. The League of Extraordinary Developers has taken it over, which seemed to have fixed it for a bit, but again, it is no longer working well. This really needs to be part of the core software. Without decent manual fog-of-war capabilities, I'm back to using Map Tool for on-the-fly situations. Foundry is so amazing in many ways that it is frustrating that such a basic feature is not supported.
What issue are you having with the League version of the module? I just installed it and used some of the features as a test and it's all working for me. You may have a module conflict or something may be out of date. I would check in the League discord or the Foundry Discord to see if anyone else is having issues as well. Unfortunately Simple Fog of War like this has come up in Patreon polls for Atropos to focus on but it hasn't come out on top yet though I think it is a good feature for making life simpler for Roll20 and MapTool converts. I think it will be within the purview of the core software eventually but I don't have any idea when that may be.
I've encountered similar frustration with Astral. Both Foundry and Astral aim to displace Roll20, but neither of them will implement such a simple core feature that even a hobby-level VTT like Tableplop can manage. It's baffling and maddening. :P
Thanks for this! Can you specify the default settings we should have, as far as the specific Scene Vision & Lighting and also any Token-specific Vision settings?
I completely forgot to add a note about it in the video, that's my bad! It's the map 'The Lake Castle' by Caeora on Patreon :D. He's an excellent battle map, world map, and token artist :).
Is it possible to put tokens on top of the fog layer? I use this for exploration in a hex crawl, and I reveal the hacks after the players have explored it. This means, however, that they’re to can sometimes be hidden underneath the fog.
I got a question: In standard foundry, I can have different characters have different fog of war states. Is this still somehow possible with Simple Fog of War or am I being stuck with one fog of war state for all players? How would I create different fog of war states for different characters?
I have done so with FGU, but this combination is considerably more robust than what I have in FGU. I ended up buying everything from DndBeyond so I could use it in foundry... It's all around that much better.
I've never actually had an opportunity to try Fantasy Grounds but it might be worth picking it up if only to understand the general VTT space better. I'd appreciate any thoughts you have on it if its worth checking out :).
@@EncounterLibrary Though it somewhat pains me to say it, wouldn't spend time investigating FGU. Not after you've used Foundry. I have been a very vocal supporter of Fantasy Grounds. I've spent close to $2k in materials I can only use there. That money that is very much just wasted as of right now. To see my review that compares FG with other VTTs, you can check out the steam review I wrote a while back and then edited after I found Foundry VTT.: steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970434765/recommended/252690?snr=1_5_9__402 However, I saw Foundry a few months ago, watched your videos on how it works, bought it immediately and then worked to see if I could make it work well for my two groups. One of my games has 9 people, it has about 2 years of a huge campaign with hundreds of hours of custom stuff. Foundry was SO much better than FGU (once you install a bunch of critical mods), it was worth investing roughly 200 hours to learn Foundry and build my player's histories and all the hundreds of custom items along the way just so we can switch. Foundry is faster. Prettier. More compatible with people's existing computer systems - even mobile, with the right mods. Easier for my players to use. Has much better visual options for how map walls and lightings work. Did I mention it is faster? I can't overemphasize the speed thing. FGU is a freaking bear to load and everyone needs a copy of the software and usage wildly varies. I've had people unable to play because they can't run it. Only thing FGU has on Foundry right now are the sheer number of beautiful extras people wrote for FG. Custom weapons and spells (I've got thousands of them, hundreds of purchased modules). This is, in fact, why i spent so much time migrating. I had to create those things myself in Foundry so they can pick up where they left off. Full disclosure - I think I use some 20 mods in Foundry, but it works amazingly well together, and I've never seen another system even come close. Without the mods, some things in foundry are not intelligently sorted, imo. Compendiums frankly suck OOB. Poor method for organizing, lots of weird criss-crossing where your stuff is likely to be held. But with the right mods and some time sorting, you can make it work well. Oh, and encounters are better in FGU. But it's a minor thing, and I bet Forien will write a mod to make it great soon enough. That guy's brilliant.
@@olivierdulac Hello Olivier, I hope this isn't too much I'm putting in here, but there are closer to 60 mods I actually run now a days. I was probably closer to 40 back when I wrote this, I just hadn't gone and counted. But to be clear, MANY of what I do is just for some extra little "nice to have". I found myself reading modules like they were a software gift shop, and have downloaded way more than I needed. that being said, I've had zero conflicts, which is pretty impressive for 60 concurrent mods. Ones that I think are required, though are as follows: Autocomplete Whisper 5e Sheet Resources Plus (if you have custom character stuff, otherwise, not required) Chat Images (if you have players that love posting goofy gifs or whatever else to illustrate something one of you described) Combat Enhancements Combat Template Cleanup Compendium Browser And/Or search Anywhere. Data Toolbox for FoundryVTT Deselection (simple, but should have been core system, honestly. ) East Target Forien's Unidentified Items, but ANY of his stuff is great. i have it all. Lazy Money Magic Items Midi QOL (one of THE most important ones) Pings Polyglot Show Drag Distance The Furnace (mostly cause you can drop whole groups of players onto the map very easily, great if you have split groups and stuff). The whole sweet of Virtual Tabletop Assets. Tidy UI Beyond that, I have a bunch of others that are even less "critical", but my groups are large. One game reliably has 8+ people, and it means everything I can do to make the experience better for them, I try. Things like Scenery, for example.. Might not be critical to running a game, but it's VERY helpful and I'm all about that! hope that helps you in some way.
It's not really mentioned in the video (which kind of hints at the answer), but just to confirm - does this work in conjunction with the current FoW system or as a replacement? Specifically, is it possible to have player movement auto-reveal the Simple FoW?
Sorry for not stating that explicitly because I could definitely see that being a desired use case. Unfortunately in the current version it doesn't work to have player movement reveal the simple fog of war. If you mention it to Vance in the Discord he may be open to it as a future feature though. I know he has a few other features he's looking to get integrated already!
@@EncounterLibrary Yeah, while there are times that I'd definitely love to be able to reveal the fog at my own pace and re-hide areas as needed, for the most part I prefer not to have to worry about it. Having both abilities would be ideal, but for now the latter trumps the former.
3 года назад
Thanks for the helpful video! I was wondering if anyone knows if this actually helps with client performance? Some of my players have older laptops that are struggling with foundry even after disabling all the available options in the settings. I was thinking that a simple FoW might be lighter than the dynamic lightning without animations and soft shadows?
I spoke with Vance who makes the module and if you don't use Foundry's line of sight system on top of Simple Fog you can definitely see a performance improvement because it removes a lot of vision calculations. That in combination with reducing the framerate as low as it goes should get you a significant performance increase if that was what was bottle necking your user's system. Installing the 'Haste' module might also net you some performance as it makes some additional tweaks that could be helpful. Best of luck with getting everything working well for them!
3 года назад
@@EncounterLibrary thank you very much for the reply. I'll check that haste module!
Question, does this module (or anything similar) have a feature where you can toggle FoW room visibility with just a click either on the map or on a side bar? While the grid and shape tools here look convenient, a tiny thing I do miss about playing through a Photoshop screencast was simply clicking layers to show on the screen.
You can *kind of* achieve that by uploading just a black image (or using the drawing tools with a fill color applied) and placing it as a tile over each room. Then you could click and delete them or toggle their visibility to make the room visible. It wouldn't handle token visibility or some of the other neat features but it might get you something similar to what you want :).
All of these videos are super helpful and awesome! Keep it up, they've helped my big time learning FVTT! I'm having trouble with the Simple Fog however. After I switch to another function (say the select tool) then Simple Fog simply won't open up anymore unless I reload the application. Does anyone else have this problem? Any workaround or am I doing something stupid?
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
I forgot to mention this in the video but the world map and the battlemap are both from Caeora on Patreon! They're an excellent world/battle map and token artist that I'd highly recommend checking out :).
So nice that you show off vance's module! It's awesome
I've been searching for so long for this exact feature!
I really appreciate these videos where you feature interesting modules from the community 😁
I'm happy to hear that! More like it is coming :D.
5:14 *throws monitor off of desk*
Jokes aside, I know that it's one of the potentially planned features of Foundry but I''m glad this module exists already! This kind of Fog of War works so much better for certain maps than standard dynamic lighting.
(Also, I'm totally going to do that to troll my players)
I'm glad that you appreciated that :D. And absolutely. I've seen so many people asking for this kind of functionality and Vance really knocked it out of the park functionality-wise. It's one of the most useful and feature rich modules I've seen outside of combat automation modules.
Best of luck in your trolling!
My favorite channel
Yet another masterful script. While I'm sure these take longer to prepare and deliver onto your channel, each video's lifespan is increased immeasurably because the content is concise and structured. Excellent work.
Thank you so much for saying that! I agree 100% that scripting it makes it a lot more consumable and shows things off better. I'm glad that it's making the videos better for you all :D.
I just bought Foundry today and this is the kind of easy functionality I am looking for fog of war. Thanks for putting together this video.
Just amazing! Vance is a genius! Foundry and its community are so freaking awesome! I'll 100% be using this. The Skyrim joke was great. xD
Thanks for doing this video, brilliant, I love the module and its UX looks amazing. I'm glad you showcased it for us! :)
This is a very handy tool to have! Well done Vance!! And well done Matt!!!
BTW: “Emergency Snack Break”? 😂🤣😂
Sometimes when there's a snacktastrophe you've gotta do what you've gotta do!
great video, keep 'em coming.
Excellent video detailing a very useful module. Many thanks for sharing
This would be incredibly useful for any sort of outdoor scene where you have global illumination active, but don't want your players to see inside a building, and being able to leave a shadow means you can even make it look dimly lit when you do reveal it!
Absolutely. I've had so many people on the lighting/walls video ask for this exact thing so I was ecstatic when I saw Vance had made it!
How on earth did I miss this module??? Life safer for large travel maps and exploration. Thanks for another awesome foundry video
This seriously saved me last night when a player rolled a 30 on an INT (Investigation) check and it was the DM (that’s a me!) that jumped ahead of the plot and my map wasn’t ready! Without this video and SimpleFog I would have been toast.
That's awesome :D. I'm in the same position keeping it installed just as an emergency back up haha. I haven't had to use it yet but we'll see how long that lasts!
Its so embarrassing how "single developer" foundry vtt wipes the floor with "many years long developed with million users and subscribers" roll20. They were so lazy for so many years and now they are run over by a bus.
It honestly doesn't seem real. I'm having trouble articulating just how good of an idea it was to let users make modules to make up for the fact that he's flying solo. Roll20 just seems absolutely archaic after using this for a single week.
agreed its great!
calling it single developer is taking away from all the talented people who make all thosecool modules for this great open system though
@@diamend85 Fact is vanilla foundry is still better in so many parts as roll20, to create it as an open system is another win for the developer. This doesnt in no way harm or ignore all the talented and motivated module makers nor all the talented and motivated gm's building worlds and adventures and leading games for their players. in this case i just didnt compared achievements of the communities (there are API developers in Roll20 too) but from the professional developers
@@diamend85 the og developer deserves the utmost credit for making his API as accessible as it is. It’s like praising valve for the wonder that is their source engine games, because it allowed a thriving community of modders to exist. The fact that this dev was self aware and humble enough to know his limitations and allow the community to fill in the blanks is amazing.
Unfortunately this only works for V10 and below. Is there a chance this will updated for a V11-release?
I can see doors on the map despite the fog, which unfortunately makes the module a no-go. Is there a way to fix this? I'd love to use it if that one issue can be corrected. Thanks!
I can only imagine the fade cut on home boy's facecam at 5:19 was because he was having too big of a giggle at his Skyrim meme.
I would love a video of a MUST have modules and how they work by you, your vids are amazing.
I'm happy to say more module videos are coming and I'm starting with a bunch of my favorites :D.
Guessing the module's not supported anymore because you can now see token names & health bars, doors, loot piles, etc, through the Simple Fog.
Which makes its functionality heavily limited. :(
SUPERB!
Fan fucking tastic! Thank you for showing this
I'm going to be getting this purely for the grid-based reveal. I've got a hex-crawl game coming up and that'll make things super, SUPER easy to reveal where the party has been.
I'm not a huge fan of roll20s fog of war system - but I'm considering getting this module so I can use it specifically for spells that hinder the PCs vision (Darkness, Cloud of Fog, etc etc)
It's a great option for that! It's much more flexible than using a negative radius light since you can provide a *little* bit of visibility if you want to as well.
Lister That’s an amazing suggestion! You can also give lights in FVTT a negative number value and they turn into darkness.
Just what I needed to run Abomination Vaults via the table top tv!!!!!
Thanks for the vid! How does the new Overlay Map work?
This was an amazing module when it worked and was one of the reasons for deciding to go with Foundry as my VTT of choice. Unfortunately, it no longer works. The original developer no longer maintains it and updates to Foundry have broke it. The League of Extraordinary Developers has taken it over, which seemed to have fixed it for a bit, but again, it is no longer working well. This really needs to be part of the core software. Without decent manual fog-of-war capabilities, I'm back to using Map Tool for on-the-fly situations. Foundry is so amazing in many ways that it is frustrating that such a basic feature is not supported.
What issue are you having with the League version of the module? I just installed it and used some of the features as a test and it's all working for me. You may have a module conflict or something may be out of date. I would check in the League discord or the Foundry Discord to see if anyone else is having issues as well.
Unfortunately Simple Fog of War like this has come up in Patreon polls for Atropos to focus on but it hasn't come out on top yet though I think it is a good feature for making life simpler for Roll20 and MapTool converts. I think it will be within the purview of the core software eventually but I don't have any idea when that may be.
I've encountered similar frustration with Astral. Both Foundry and Astral aim to displace Roll20, but neither of them will implement such a simple core feature that even a hobby-level VTT like Tableplop can manage. It's baffling and maddening. :P
Nice tool, but the overlay map isn't showing up for me. The one that is to replace the fog layer.
Thanks for this! Can you specify the default settings we should have, as far as the specific Scene Vision & Lighting and also any Token-specific Vision settings?
I'd love to know where you've got this map from! I definitely need this kind of map for an upcoming session
I completely forgot to add a note about it in the video, that's my bad! It's the map 'The Lake Castle' by Caeora on Patreon :D. He's an excellent battle map, world map, and token artist :).
Thanks, dude!
Does this module still exist? It's exactly what I'm looking for, but I can't find it in the Foundry module search
A few years late but thank you for this video, trying to figure out how to use foundry makes me feel dumber than a calc class.
Is it possible to put tokens on top of the fog layer? I use this for exploration in a hex crawl, and I reveal the hacks after the players have explored it. This means, however, that they’re to can sometimes be hidden underneath the fog.
I got a question: In standard foundry, I can have different characters have different fog of war states. Is this still somehow possible with Simple Fog of War or am I being stuck with one fog of war state for all players? How would I create different fog of war states for different characters?
Have you checked out Fantasy Grounds Unity to compare this feature?
I have done so with FGU, but this combination is considerably more robust than what I have in FGU. I ended up buying everything from DndBeyond so I could use it in foundry... It's all around that much better.
I've never actually had an opportunity to try Fantasy Grounds but it might be worth picking it up if only to understand the general VTT space better. I'd appreciate any thoughts you have on it if its worth checking out :).
@@EncounterLibrary Though it somewhat pains me to say it, wouldn't spend time investigating FGU. Not after you've used Foundry.
I have been a very vocal supporter of Fantasy Grounds. I've spent close to $2k in materials I can only use there. That money that is very much just wasted as of right now. To see my review that compares FG with other VTTs, you can check out the steam review I wrote a while back and then edited after I found Foundry VTT.:
steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970434765/recommended/252690?snr=1_5_9__402
However, I saw Foundry a few months ago, watched your videos on how it works, bought it immediately and then worked to see if I could make it work well for my two groups. One of my games has 9 people, it has about 2 years of a huge campaign with hundreds of hours of custom stuff. Foundry was SO much better than FGU (once you install a bunch of critical mods), it was worth investing roughly 200 hours to learn Foundry and build my player's histories and all the hundreds of custom items along the way just so we can switch.
Foundry is faster.
Prettier.
More compatible with people's existing computer systems - even mobile, with the right mods.
Easier for my players to use.
Has much better visual options for how map walls and lightings work.
Did I mention it is faster?
I can't overemphasize the speed thing. FGU is a freaking bear to load and everyone needs a copy of the software and usage wildly varies. I've had people unable to play because they can't run it.
Only thing FGU has on Foundry right now are the sheer number of beautiful extras people wrote for FG. Custom weapons and spells (I've got thousands of them, hundreds of purchased modules). This is, in fact, why i spent so much time migrating. I had to create those things myself in Foundry so they can pick up where they left off.
Full disclosure - I think I use some 20 mods in Foundry, but it works amazingly well together, and I've never seen another system even come close. Without the mods, some things in foundry are not intelligently sorted, imo. Compendiums frankly suck OOB. Poor method for organizing, lots of weird criss-crossing where your stuff is likely to be held. But with the right mods and some time sorting, you can make it work well.
Oh, and encounters are better in FGU. But it's a minor thing, and I bet Forien will write a mod to make it great soon enough. That guy's brilliant.
@@JL_Batman I'd love to hear your list of right mods
@@olivierdulac Hello Olivier, I hope this isn't too much I'm putting in here, but there are closer to 60 mods I actually run now a days. I was probably closer to 40 back when I wrote this, I just hadn't gone and counted.
But to be clear, MANY of what I do is just for some extra little "nice to have". I found myself reading modules like they were a software gift shop, and have downloaded way more than I needed. that being said, I've had zero conflicts, which is pretty impressive for 60 concurrent mods.
Ones that I think are required, though are as follows:
Autocomplete Whisper
5e Sheet Resources Plus (if you have custom character stuff, otherwise, not required)
Chat Images (if you have players that love posting goofy gifs or whatever else to illustrate something one of you described)
Combat Enhancements
Combat Template Cleanup
Compendium Browser And/Or search Anywhere.
Data Toolbox for FoundryVTT
Deselection (simple, but should have been core system, honestly. )
East Target
Forien's Unidentified Items, but ANY of his stuff is great. i have it all.
Lazy Money
Magic Items
Midi QOL (one of THE most important ones)
Pings
Polyglot
Show Drag Distance
The Furnace (mostly cause you can drop whole groups of players onto the map very easily, great if you have split groups and stuff).
The whole sweet of Virtual Tabletop Assets.
Tidy UI
Beyond that, I have a bunch of others that are even less "critical", but my groups are large. One game reliably has 8+ people, and it means everything I can do to make the experience better for them, I try. Things like Scenery, for example.. Might not be critical to running a game, but it's VERY helpful and I'm all about that!
hope that helps you in some way.
It's not really mentioned in the video (which kind of hints at the answer), but just to confirm - does this work in conjunction with the current FoW system or as a replacement? Specifically, is it possible to have player movement auto-reveal the Simple FoW?
Sorry for not stating that explicitly because I could definitely see that being a desired use case. Unfortunately in the current version it doesn't work to have player movement reveal the simple fog of war. If you mention it to Vance in the Discord he may be open to it as a future feature though. I know he has a few other features he's looking to get integrated already!
@@EncounterLibrary Yeah, while there are times that I'd definitely love to be able to reveal the fog at my own pace and re-hide areas as needed, for the most part I prefer not to have to worry about it. Having both abilities would be ideal, but for now the latter trumps the former.
Thanks for the helpful video! I was wondering if anyone knows if this actually helps with client performance? Some of my players have older laptops that are struggling with foundry even after disabling all the available options in the settings. I was thinking that a simple FoW might be lighter than the dynamic lightning without animations and soft shadows?
I spoke with Vance who makes the module and if you don't use Foundry's line of sight system on top of Simple Fog you can definitely see a performance improvement because it removes a lot of vision calculations. That in combination with reducing the framerate as low as it goes should get you a significant performance increase if that was what was bottle necking your user's system. Installing the 'Haste' module might also net you some performance as it makes some additional tweaks that could be helpful. Best of luck with getting everything working well for them!
@@EncounterLibrary thank you very much for the reply. I'll check that haste module!
Question, does this module (or anything similar) have a feature where you can toggle FoW room visibility with just a click either on the map or on a side bar? While the grid and shape tools here look convenient, a tiny thing I do miss about playing through a Photoshop screencast was simply clicking layers to show on the screen.
the layer is over the whole map. It doesn't know what is or isn't a room.
@@chronicfireworks That's what I assumed. I'm hoping for something to be released where you yourself can set up sections like that then
You can *kind of* achieve that by uploading just a black image (or using the drawing tools with a fill color applied) and placing it as a tile over each room. Then you could click and delete them or toggle their visibility to make the room visible. It wouldn't handle token visibility or some of the other neat features but it might get you something similar to what you want :).
Is that a custom world map?
It's a map from Caeora! I just added their RUclips channel and Patreon in the description :).
@@EncounterLibrary amazing thank you for replying!
All of these videos are super helpful and awesome! Keep it up, they've helped my big time learning FVTT!
I'm having trouble with the Simple Fog however. After I switch to another function (say the select tool) then Simple Fog simply won't open up anymore unless I reload the application. Does anyone else have this problem? Any workaround or am I doing something stupid?
Is this still relevant in 2022?