Digital TableTops VTT news & patch notes

After some discussions in the forums, I decided to finally add the ability to hide NPC tokens and lights behind walls. Prior to this, you needed to have both line of sight and "opaque line of sight" toggled on. With this new setting, you can hide NPC/lights regardless of the main line of sight settings. Where this will come in handy is if you are exploring a dungeon with persistent fog of war and you explore a room to reveal it, find an NPC, then the players leave the room. If you didn't have opaque line of sight enabled (because you wanted players to be able to see where they have been, even if they are not currently there) this would cause a problem because players would still be able to see NPC's light sources in the room they explored but are no longer in. This fixes that. Really, you can probably just use this (it's on by default) INSTEAD of line of sight entirely. It uses much less resources. But I kept all the options because I know there are some specific scenarios where they will come in handy. With this new update, I really do think the lighting system is about as complete as it will ever be. Maybe some dark vision stuff instead of just torches, but that is a maybe. I feel like it will add quit a bit to the UI for not a lot of benefit (just monochrome after all). Anyhow, as usual please leave a review if you haven't already. Thanks!

Fixed a bug introduced a while back where the light from tokens close to walls would seep through the wall. I increased the collision radius to stop that from happening. While I was in there, decided to go ahead and make the player tokens not collide with eachother at all. Can't think of a useful reason to have it other than when using a touchscreen. So they still do collide when using a touchscreen. That's it for now. Hope you all are having a good summer!

Earlier today someone requested a new option for exploring with fog of war. It ended up being very easy to pull off, so I have it done already! You can find details in the lighting system tutorial in the community forums: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3073720/discussions/0/756178376553825310/ Basically, there is a now a toggle (in the gear icon settings, not main setting on left) to adjust how areas outside the line of sight behave. Before they would just always be completely black. But now you can have them at half brightness if they've been explored. The idea being players are moving around the map revealing areas but those areas aren't always in direct line of sight. Now you can tell which is which. Features like these are perfect because they do not clutter the main UI and didn't take a whole lot of thought. As usual, please leave a review if you haven't already. PS: a user is having trouble launching after the switch to the C# version of the engine. Please report any problems in the bug report thread so I can see how pervasive they are.

Apparently when I switched to the C# version of the game engine (Godot) it wasn't bundling the .NET runtimes correctly. It should be fixed now, but in case you comes across this problem simply manually install the .NET runtimes on your computer. Here is a direct link: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download Also, one of my touchscreen users is reporting issues with the Mac build. If anyone happens to be using the Mac build WITH a touchscreen, please chime in if yours is working okay or not.

Frist off, MapleMapsDnD has been kind enough to provide a few dozen more free maps. So make sure to check those out and subscribe if you like them. This is also a good reminder that they offer Foundry VTT ready maps (which include the walls/lights) and my VTT is compatible with Foundry modules! This means for their maps, you can have versions with the walls already setup with very little effort. You simply need to be a subscriber on their appropriate tier. Which is related to another part of this update: I have managed to replace 2 extensions for the game engine I use (Godot) with native C# code. What this means is that I no longer have to bundle those libraries separately. What this means for users is not much. You won't notice a difference at all. but longer term this ensure I am in complete control of the code and do not have to rely on third parties for certain features. They did a great job and I am very thankful for them as we got years of use from them. But now is a good time to make that switch behind the scenes. I still use GoZen for video playback and WebRTC for the remote play stuff. Doubt those will be getting replaced any time soon. I also fixed a minor bug that was breaking certain models of touchscreens. Oops. I think it may have ruined a few game nights last weekend. I try to push updates earlier in the week to give DM's time to test. Or better yet, not to ship game breaking code in the first place. But stuff happens. Might be a good idea to disable auto-updates to prevent it from ruining your game night and manually update when you have time. That's it for now. Pretty busy summer and working on a lot of projects (including a PCAP version of my cool touchscreen hardware that works with terrain and doesn't misdetect minis in close proximity). As usual, please leave a review if you haven't already. Thanks!

This update mostly deals with the touch aspect of the program. My hardware sales have really been taking off lately and I wanted to make sure I staying on top of that aspect of the software.

Non-touch notes:

- Fixed minor bug where maps with the grid size in pixel units within the filename would sometimes scale improperly during initial import - Fixed rendering order. It now goes: drawn shapes, tiles, light/door icons, tiles, tokens. I do not want to make the layers customizable as it would clutter the UI too much - Snap2Grid now uses half grid units instead of a full grid (this actually improves correlating touches to tokens more than you might think)

Touch notes:

- Added a 9-point calibration screen (VERY useful) - New collision logic to prevent overlapping - Improved the logic for assigning tokens to touch points Speaking of touch, I also released a new piece of software. It basically brings the awesome touch support of my own VTT to Arkenforge and Foundry! You can find it on GitHub under "DigitalTableTops". I would link directly but Steam gets weird about direct links for me sometimes. I think they are worried about losing revenue to offsite marketplaces or something. This doesn't mean I am pausing development of the main program on Steam or anything like that. I am 100% convinced the Digital TableTops VTT is the easiest to use and all-around best free option for in-person sessions and I aim to keep it that way. Other VTTs like Foundry and Arkenforge will never be this easy to use. It literally cannot be done unless they start stripping away features. Which I cannot imagine they will ever do. This is why I always am thoughtful about adding new features to this one. I don't want it to slowly turn into those other VTTs. They already exist for people who want to use them, there isn't a need for another. But I sell touchscreens for a living and I know this VTT isn't powerful enough for tech-heavy users. Touch support in Arkenforge is okay, but the helper app on GitHub makes it better. Touch support in Foundry is pretty terrible and my helper app is the only decent option out there if you want to use an IR frame to move minis in Foundry (IMO). As always, let me know if you encounter any issues in the dedicated bug report post in the forums. And please leave a review if you haven't already. Thanks!

We welcome Cropox Battlemaps, who has generously included a new set of 25 maps. This brings the total bundled free maps to 554! Lots of cool caves and town scenes with this one. So check it out. Just click the "Free Maps" button on the main menu. As always, let me know if you have any questions and please leave a review if you haven't already.

Tiles/assets can now be less than one grid unit in one direction only. Minor fix to touchscreen auto detection. I am pretty busy with the hardware side of things right now, but let me know if anything pops up. And please leave a review if you haven't already.

When the OS window manager is set to "landscape" mode, touch points were not getting flipped. They are now. Won't affect most people as most people are not using IR touch frames and those that are, most are not using landscape mode for the player view. But I want the touch support to be top-notch on this thing, so I give fixing touch related problems priority. Let me know if any other issues have been popping up and I will gladly take a look at them. But please check the bug report/feature requests threads first.

Turns out the last update broke things if snap to grid was enabled and a touchscreen is used. I reverted the change so it should be working as before now.

Added a toggle for the movement rings that show up when a token is selected in the initiative tracker. You can show it on DM view only, both views, or neither. Extended the rings in yellow from 30'-60' to cover dashing. Minor adjustment to touch sensitivity for IR touch frames (like the ones I sell on my website). Next up is probably rotating tiles and minor UI improvements. The web/mobile version is starting to lag behind, so getting those back in sync will come soon too.

This update adds a new feature which has a very niche use-case: you can now lock movement for all tokens that aren't the active token during combat. "During combat" in this sense just means the initiative tracker is active. "Active token" is the one with a yellow border around it on the initiative tracker. Click the gear ion in the top-right to open the settings menu to enable this feature (it is disabled by default) Simply left-click any tile along the top initiative tracker to select the active token. If a token is not selected, it cannot be moved by the players. All tokens can always be moved by the DM at all times. It (along with a few other minor features) haven't been ported over the web/mobile client yet but it definitely will be. So what this is mainly for is infrared touch screens have a physical hardware limitation that when too many objects are close together, it loses track of which touch corresponds to which object. Most of the time this is fine, but you might find that tokens keep swapping positions and other weird stuff when bunched together. It isn't perfect and literally cannot be on that type of hardware - it is a matter of physics really. But this does help a little. I have a few more minor tricks in mind to improve things a tiny bit more even. This VTT already is the best of the best when it comes to infrared touch support. There's very little competition and what competition there is, they're pretty far behind IMO. I'm dedicated to continuing to improve this particular aspect as that is what I actually make money on - selling infrared touch screens (and non-touch displays aw well) on my website. Thanks to user "toothymcshark" for the suggestion on the community discussion forums for the token movement lock feature.

This has come up enough times, apparently people out there are using 3 displays while DMing. Seems overkill to me, but to each their own. I lacked the hardware necessary to test more than 2 displays on. Didn't occur to me until today that I could just install a virtual display adapter to simulate the extra display. So now on the very first screen that comes up, if you have 3 or more displays plugged in, there will be an option at the bottom to manually set the display you want the DM and player views to appear on. If you have 2 or less displays, nothing should change. I can't promise that it will remember correctly if you go swapping ports or powering off devices in between sessions. So you might have to manually adjust it each time. It also is ONLY present on the first calibration screen and ONLY if you have more than 2 displays plugged in and powered on. I haven't tested it on Mac or Linux either. I probably won't bother as that is a lot more work and I have no idea how many Mac or Linux users there are using this thing with 3 or more monitors. But if it comes up there is a problem, I will look into it. Just let me know. Along those same lines, I got a bad review today. About this very issue, actually. It was in Russian and I assume they did not bother to check the forums to see that this was a known problem and a fix was being worked on. At first I was going to region lock this to North America only. It's free software I spend my own time making and seeing negative reviews for something like that ticks me off. I made this software to sell wooden cases with TVs/touchscreens inside them and I only ship to North America. It doesn't do me any good if people outside North America use this software. But I WANT people to enjoy it anywhere and everywhere. So I decided not to region lock it for now. I noticed half (2/4) of the negative reviews I ever got were in Russian and it seemed like blocking Russia was an easy fix for that. Sorry, just venting. Please go leave a positive review so I can quit complaining and focus on making the software better and keep it widely available. Thanks!

Normally I don't do updates over the weekend as I wouldn't want to break anyone's game. But this one is pretty minor, so we should be okay. I improved how animated tiles are handled by creating better screenshots and adding a pause button. Tiles in general have a better interface. Should be pretty self-explanatory. You can toggle their visibility, delete them, move, and resize them. Same as before, it just works easier I think.

This has been a pretty big requested feature: you can now import animated tiles to the map and use them during your session. Pretty cool! It should accept just about any format, but webm is HIGHLY recommended. It modern, efficient, and allows for transparency. Keep in mind this is going to cause your system to lag on particularly weak hardware. My test rig is an ancient low-end machine and it can handle maybe half a dozen before it starts to chug along too slow. Nothing I can do about that really. The other big news is that we are now "Digital TableTops VTT". I've been wanting to rebrand this way for a while but needed to reach a certain number of reviews before asking Steam nicely to let me change it. Which they agreed promptly so we are all set there. Now when you search for "VTT" we are right there below Fantasy Grounds when sorted by relevance and in the #1 spot when sorted by reviews. Thanks everyone for helping to make that happen! Next up is some relatively minor UI fixes. Mostly related to tiles. Such as: - ability to rotate tiles - change how they are moved and toggled - ability to pause/play animated tiles - make better thumbnails for animated tiles (sometimes they appear blank if the first frame of the video isn't correctly encoded). As usual, let me know if you encounter any problems via the dedicated bug tracking thread, and leave a review if you haven't already. Thanks!

There have been a few reports lately of the app crashing on start up. None of that code has changed recently, but I did manage to hunt down a hard to find bug where it would try to set the player view to a display that doesn't exist under very specific conditions. Hopefully this fixes that. When reporting bugs, at the minimum please let me know your OS and when exactly the bug occurs. And please use the "Bug Reports" thread here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3073720/discussions/0/690871474424383063/ And if you want to be really helpful, notice that the bug report thread says "For each OS, there is a console wrapper in the same folder as the executable for this program. You can use this to automatically open a command line/terminal window when running the app. This will output debug information which you can paste here." Thanks everyone!

We welcome yet another artist, MapleMapsDnD! This brings the total free map count to 529 from 7 different artists! I also fixed some minor bugs and added an often requested feature: when adding a token (right-click anywhere on map and select the add token icon) you can now adjust its properties BEFORE it gets placed onto the map. No more having to right-click after adding it! Best of all, whatever settings you use will persist for the remainder of your session. For example, if you want to add 10 goblins all with 13 health and 9 initiative with a purple border, simply select those options on the menu to the far left before clicking "add to map". That will add 1 goblin. Click a new location on the map and the add token icon again, and everything will be remember (except the token image - haven't decided if I'll pre-select that as well). Hopefully that makes adding lots of tokens easier. It is unlikely that I will facilitate adding tokens en masse further than this. I cannot decide on a decent way to place multiples on the map without cluttering up the UI. "Duplicating" a token essentially only takes 4 clicks now. That will have to be good enough.

The last build introduced a bug where you couldn't add any tokens to the map. Oops! Now you can :) Just right-click where you want to add the token and select the add token icon to pull up the list of all tokens. You can add a keyword to narrow the list and then either double-click or select a token and click "Add to Map". You can also paste from the clipboard, using the "From Clipboard" button or simply press "ctrl+v". That will both permanently add the token to your library, mark it as a favorites, and add it to the map. Pretty cool huh? This same "paste from clipboard" trick can be performed from the token or asset menus during prep from the main menu. There you can also edit keywords by right-clicking, delete tokens, and add tokens from a file. Those functions are restricted during a session for usability reasons.

Tiles should now be working on the web/mobile build. It may take a day or 2 for Google to approve the new build in the Play Store. Also made some performance enhancements while I was in there. I plan on making some GUI changes next for the Steam build. You can now paste from clipboard while adding a token/tile to the map. Just ctrl+v as usual and there is also a button for it. The idea is to have everything prepped ahead of time, but if you just have to add something mid-session, this should do the trick.

Lot's to go over here. Reminder: everything should be pretty intuitive but you can always click the "?" at any time using the program for a quick run-down of what's important for that screen.

New feature: Assets

An asset is basically an image you can add to a map. Similar to a token, but it does not have a border and cannot give off light. It has no features at all really other than size/position. With this you can add traps, spell effects, roofs to buildings, etc. There is a "layer" property that is not implement quite yet. That will be whether it is drawn above or below player tokens and fog, for example. And with that you'll be able to toggle it's visibility to players. Assets have not been implemented in the web/mobile build yet. So they won't show up there.

Performance improvements for lighting

With the addition of "line of sight" a few releases ago, performance really took a hit. Due to all the new calculations being performed for each token. It should be a bit better now, with the downside of hard light textures being a bit blurry. If this ends up being something that bothers people, I will add a toggle for "high quality light textures" or similar. With soft light it looks great still.

Changes to how tokens/maps are loaded

Now ALL maps and tokens are available at any time during a session. Not just the favorited ones. This has been an often requested feature. Favorites are shown at the top of the list, but all tokens and maps are ready to load at any time.

In-play menu completely reworked

The "main" menu during a session is now totally different. Instead of different sub-menus for lighting and such, it's all a single menu. Clicking the Digital TableTops logo in the top-left will still hide the menu. And there are more, less frequently used options hidden in the settings menu (gear icon in top-right).

New right-click menu

You'll notice you no longer add tokens by dragging them onto the map from a dedicated menu. So where did they go? Well now there is a much improved right-click menu. The icons in the menu should be pretty self-explanatory. You can - Measure distance - Ping the location to players - Add tokens - Add assets - Add notes - Add lights I think that just about covers everything. There are still some rough edges and minor features I want to add. And the web/mobile version is now lagging behind pretty bad. But all-in-all lots of really good progress lately! If you haven't already, please take the time to leave a quick review. I am only 5 away from being considered "very positive" :)

We welcome Snowysmaps to the Featured Artists section. There are quite a few caves, castles, and forest with even a few sci-fi maps in there. Steam is weird about posting URLS in here but Snowysmaps can be found on Patreon or their website. A direct link is included in the VTT. I have decided to make some pretty major changes to the UI that are going to take a lot of code. So there probably won't be any updates for a few weeks.

Minor fixes, mostly for the browser/Android version. For performance reasons, line of sight on browser/Android is now limited to 120 feet. This doesn't affect the player view shown on a secondary display even if the browser/Android is controlling the token. No one should ever really notice this unless you have a huge map, your token is in one of the corners, and you are using browser/Android. Which shouldn't come up very much.

Pretty minor update. You can now add what I call "static lights" when importing a map. They are already getting imported if stored in the file. Such as uvtt files from Dungeon Alchemist, dd2vtt files from DungeonDraft, or Foundry modules. And you could already add them during a session. But now you can also add them while in the editor during import. For a description of how static lights work, see this tutorial from the forums: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3073720/discussions/0/756178376553825310/ Basically, just right-click to add a light. During import there is no actual lighting being rendered, so you will just see the light's radius when it is selected. But rest assured, they will be blocked by walls/doors properly during a session. There have also been a great many fixes to the web/mobile version. I think the next big project will be adding "tile" support. Basically images that aren't tokens but behave somewhat similar. For traps, spell effects, roofs, etc. As usual, if you haven't already left a review, please do so. I am only a few away from the magic threshold of 50 to be considered "very positive" overall :)

This one has been requested for a while and it went easier than expected. The way maps and tokens are handled in the main menu is completely revamped.

Keywords

For starters, you can now search for maps and tokens using keywords. Simply start typing in the search box at the top of any of the main menu screens. The file name is automatically included in the search, so simply naming things correctly will make searching quite easy. You can also right click on any token/map to edit its keywords.

Favorites/Quick Access

You should notice a little star icon next to every map and token on the main menu. Click it to toggle the map/token as a favorite. Favorited maps and tokens are available during a session. THERE IS LONGER A 24 TOKEN LIMIT TO FAVORITES I thought 24 unique token types were more than anyone would ever need during a session, but it came up enough I decided to do something about it. There is now no longer a limit. Actually adding them the map when the screen is full of tokens is going to be tricky on a small screen. I will work on the UI for that at some other point. In the meantime the fix would be just... don't have so many tokens in the quick access? I think with these 2 new features the main menu is even easier to navigate than before and makes this truly the easiest to use VTT out there. I try to check them all out and they are way more complicated than this.

For all the details, check out the lighting tutorial here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3073720/discussions/0/756178376553825310/ Short version: lights are imported from uvtt (dd2vtt) files or Foundry modules. You can manually add static lights during a session as well. I've made some good progress on completely re-working how tokens and maps are presented on the main menu and in session. There is a still quite a lot of work left, but pretty soon you will be able to filter maps and tokens by customizable keywords.

Minor updates. Biggest one is probably that the "virtual screen size" in settings now gets taken into account properly when no secondary monitor is detected. It was working before when there was a second screen, which is the intended use-case for this VTT. But if you were, for example, running the DM screen and everyone else was connected via web/mobile then the player screen wasn't right. Anyhow, the next big update is going to include static lighting! Right now you can add player tokens and use those as torches, but there are a few problems with that that this new feature will solve. I figured out a way to do it with very little performance impact.

2 new often requested features are now available: Token Health and Line of Sight! The first one is easy: there is a field on the token menu (right-click on token) to adjust the health of any token (can be player or NPC). It will show up under the panel on the initiative tracker on the DM screen and can be quickly edited there as well. I may want to add AC as well, but for now I think this is an improvement. But the much bigger news is that we now have line of sight! So this is a bit complicated, but when line fo sight is toggled on in the lighting menu, only parts of the map that can be connected in a straight line to a player token without hitting a wall/door will be visible. EVERYTHING ELSE WILL BE HIDDEN. This should clear up the mismatch between some users expectations and how the program works. For example, if an NPC is behind a wall and no players are on the same side of that wall, that NPC will not be visible. It's a bit complicated, so I also wrote a detailed guide on the lighting system in general, which includes the new line of sight stuff. You can find it HERE I was able to accomplish this without any noticeable performance penalty! Quite proud of that. I could have easily brute forced it months ago using the engine's built-in lighting but it would have slowed things to a crawl on low-end hardware. Little touches like this are why I truly believe you will not find a VTT that can do what this thing does so easily and without causing how fans to run at max all the time.

In the setting from the main menu (gear icon in the top right) you can now export/import your maps. This will be useful if you prepare maps on one computer and then transfer them to another to run the session. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT ALL SCREENS ARE CALIBRATED TO 1 GRID = 1 INCH ON STARTUP All caps to stress how important that is. If you don't do that, they won't be scaled properly and you'll need to go in and manually re-scale them by editing them within the VTT. Exports include all tokens that were manually imported (so not the ones it comes with) as well as all your FAVORITE maps. As a reminder, favorite maps are the ones shown when you first start the VTT and are available when running a session. So if you imported a map and later sent it to the "Map Library" (by clicking "Archive") it will not be exported. You'll need to "Restore" it from the library into the favorites first. Good news is any maps that are imported will automatically be favorites, so should be easy to find. After importing, the program will restart automatically. This is so the library can be rescanned with the newly imported maps. Should happen very quickly though. Eventually the way maps and tokens are handled will be completely rewritten to make things even easier. We are a few months away from that probably. Thanks for all the reviews, they've been very nice lately and keep me motivated!

Fixed some minor UI bugs (you can now click "esc" to cancel drawing shapes and some other things) Bigger changes are: There is a setting to toggle token counters on/off. It applies to the the player screen only, as presumably the DM would always want to see this info. This was a frequent complaint that should be resolved. Gear icon in top-right corner during a session. NPC tokens can now have different colored borders, to more easily group them. Players are going stay blue though. I didn't want to increase the size of the right-click menu too much, especially as I have a few more stats I plan on adding. This is not working on the mobile/web version quite yet but should be soon. Next up I'll be adding an export/import feature to more easily move map/token libraries between installations. As always, let me know if you encounter any bugs. Check the dedicated thread first here to make sure it hasn't already been addressed: bug thread And, as usual, if you haven't left a review please do so at your earliest convenience. I am very close to the magical number of 50 where it goes from just "positive" to "very positive" :)