Patreon Prioritization Poll - Version 10 Feature Vote!

Hello Patreon supporter community. Thank you all so much for your continued support of Foundry Virtual Tabletop during 2021, it was an amazing year where we accomplished a lot as a team. Early next week, we will be posting a “State of Foundry Virtual Tabletop” article which is a companion to this poll and celebrates some of those achievements.

Our team is excited to begin planning and prioritization for Foundry Virtual Tabletop V10 which we will begin work on towards the end of January. A key part of every major Foundry Virtual Tabletop release version is for us to prioritize a major feature that is chosen by you, our Patreon community. Previous Patreon feature votes resulted in the addition of Active Effects (v7), Overhead Tiles (v8), and Card Support (v9).

The most-voted feature in this poll will be prioritized as one of our major features included in version 10. In addition to the choice of the Patreon community, version 10 will also incorporate a number of key features and enhancements which our team feels are most important for the growth of the software.

Many of the exciting choices that were present in the V9 poll, but did not win that vote, remain available as options to vote on. In addition, we have added several new choices in the poll that were not options last time: a Standalone Player Client, Advanced Vision Modes, and an Adventure Importer. A few options which were offered on the V9 poll have been removed from this iteration: Advanced Wall Types, Event Triggers, and Advanced Weather Effects. While we are enthusiastic about the possibility for each of these features, our team agreed that the timing is not right for us to focus on those options during the V10 development cycle given their relationship to other ongoing work.

Feature Choices and Descriptions

The choices are listed alphabetically below with some details about each option. Please pick the one feature that you would be most excited to see added to Foundry Virtual Tabletop in Version 10. The poll will remain open until Monday, January 31. Please voice any comments or questions you have in the comment section below.

Thank you again for your generous support of Foundry Virtual Tabletop!

Adventure Builder and Importer

The Adventure Builder and Importer feature will provide new tools for content creators to assist with packaging complete adventures consisting of many individual documents and data structures. This feature will also benefit Gamemasters with a brand new UI/UX for importing adventures into Foundry VTT.

• Content creators will be able to package collections of content together (Scenes, Actors, Items, Journal Entries, etc…) to define an “Adventure”.
• Adventures can be packaged and distributed via modules.
• Gamemasters can import adventures into their existing world which would load the complete set of content for that adventure.
• Adventures that are imported would maintain all of their pre-configuration and relative references between individual documents.

Advanced Measured Templates

Advanced Measured Templates will improve upon the existing Measured Template system, adding several new features including:

• Linking Templates to a Token so the template moves when the Token does (for things like auras of effect).
• Template placement that integrates with the targeting system to auto-target creatures inside the placed template area.
• Templates with areas of effect that are limited by Walls.
• A core framework for rendering spell animations inside template shapes with built-in support for common effects like fireballs, ice blasts, lighting bolts, and more.

Advanced Vision Modes

Advanced Vision Modes is a system that builds on top of our new Adaptive Lighting added in V9 to introduce advanced rendering for Token vision, including:

• Token configuration options to choose the “Vision Mode” for each token.
• A set of vision configuration parameters and pre-configured vision modes to choose from that support basic rule options like darkvision, infravision, nightvision, full greyscale, or others.
• Improvements to overhead and roof tiles allowing for tiles to be revealed by the vision polygons of controlled tokens.
• An extensible framework in our API for defining custom vision modes and shaders.

Improved Canvas Interaction Tools

Improved Canvas Interaction Tools is a system for more advanced canvas interaction tooling which provides GMs and players with more tools to use to draw attention to the scene, including:

• Pings which provide a visual alert to other players that a specific area of the game canvas is of interest, including the ability to pan the canvas to the ping location.
• Pointers which temporarily emphasize the location of a player’s cursor, to help others follow along with what that user is doing.
• Scene Transitions which allow for switches between scenes to be animated using a customizable animation transition function.
• Token Pan Lock that would automatically pan the canvas to keep it centered upon a controlled Token location.

Journal System V2

Journal System V2 represents an overhaul of the Journal system to significantly improve the functionality and user experience of working with text documents inside Foundry Virtual Tabletop. Improvements envisioned as part of Journal V2 include:

• Markdown editor support
• Custom font support
• A new Journal overview UI which provides a multi-panel view for viewing, editing, cross-linking documents, and search.
• New custom HTML blocks for collapsible sections and secrets which can be revealed to specific users
• Improvements to Map Notes to take advantage of new Journal functions.

Placeable Items

Placeable Items would introduce a new canvas layer and object type, allowing for:

• Item documents to be placed into a Scene and visually depicted on the canvas.
• Each placed Item can have its own visual artwork similar to Tokens.
• Players can interact with placed items to collect those Items and add them to their Actor inventory.
• This work would also include some infrastructure improvements to canvas layers to allow for custom layers to be more easily defined.

Player Client

The addition of a player client would create a new installable version of the software which is useful for players or game-masters connecting to a remotely hosted instance.

• This software can be installed specifically to help players use Foundry Virtual Tabletop. It would be an Electron application like the self-hosted full software and would provide players with a standardized Chromium environment.
• The player client would be free for anyone to download and entirely optional, connecting via a web browser will still be supported.
• The player client would allow you to save bookmarks to frequently connected game servers.

Simple Fog of War

Simple Fog of War would add a scene-level configuration for how the GM wishes to manage fog of war exploration in the Scene. Using the “Simple” mode would:

• Obscure the Scene by default
• Provide the GM with drawing tools (rectangle, circle, polygon) to manually reveal or hide certain areas of the fog.
• Present the same fog of war exploration to all players, instead of player-specific dynamic exploration (which is the current behavior).
• This work would also expose some additional fog of war customization options to the user, like fog color or texture.