Battlegrounds Games

[heruca]

BRPG v1.0.8 is now available for download. This is a full install, not a patch.

The main features of this update are:
• Added new Fog of War tools for manual reveals and conceals (these replace the prior grid-based tools)
* The GM can now choose to view the Fog of War as the players see it
• Added the ability to select units on the map with a marquee (left-click-and-drag)
• External bundles are now in a more secure format

The format for Encounters has changed since v1.0.7a. Files created in older versions of BRPG will need to be updated before they can be used. Failing to update them will result in errors or failure to load. The format for Deployments has not changed.

As usual, see the included ReadMe file for more details.

Download BRPG v1.0.8 here:
(be sure to get the right one for your platform)
http://www.battlegroundsgames.com/BRPGv108Win.zip
http://www.battlegroundsgames.com/BRPGv108Mac.zip

Installation instructions are included in each zip file.

Edit: Added more instructions below regarding how to switch cursor modes while the FoW panel is closed.


Hotkeys and Cursor Modes:
Control-1 = Select

Control-2 = Rectangle Reveal
Control-3 = Circle Reveal
Control-4 = Polygon Reveal
Control-5 = Freehand Reveal

Control-6 = Rectangle Conceal
Control-7 = Circle Conceal
Control-8 = Polygon Conceal
Control-9 = Freehand Conceal

(Note that Mac users use Command instead of Control)

[mahhand]

got it!!!

[heruca]

[Kepli]

Cool, will get this as soon as I can

[greytale]

Woohoo, I will check it out soon. Thanks Heruca.

[trevor]

Congrats on the upgraded fog exposure!

It looks like you are creating an image the size of the map, and cutting shapes into it, then rendering it over the map ?

Test:
I used the default grass map, added a 10x10 token, added a torch light, turned on fog, exposed a couple freehand shapes and a couple circle shapes. Map panning was choppy, probably 2-3 fps. Moving a token would take upwards of 2-3 seconds for the fog to update. Zooming brought my laptop to its knees. Seemed to take a ton of memory, swapped all my other apps into virtual memory.

WinXP SP2, 1.86Ghz, 512M ram

[heruca]

Yes, that's exactly how I'm handling FoW.

Your test results are slower than even my 500MHz dinosaur of a machine. Are you running in 16-bit color mode, or something? Or running many apps in the background? You'll get better results with smaller maps, btw. 40x40 cells does get a bit sluggish, even on a fast computer.

Yes, it takes a lot of RAM. You may have a 2440x2440 pixel map, a grid of the same size, and two FoW layers of the same size. In the future, I might be able to consolidate the two FoW layers, though. And there are sure to be other speed optimizations, over time. Right now, I'm just happy that it works.

[trevor]

Running in 32bit color mode. I have an email client open (Thunderbird), and browser (Firefox), and iTunes.

I was using the default grass map.

[Farland]

Ouch. I might have to stick with 1.0.7a until you come up with some method of making it less of a resource hog, since it uses enough RAM as is.

[Kepli]

Fog reveal/conceal works like a charm sofar. It does slow down the machine, but not too much.
Love the options for picking a cursor mode

[Klodabien]

Hi Heruca, Dave here from V-FORT. I just downloaded the new 1.0.8 Beta version. Very nice work. I especially like how you expanded on the reveal feature by adding the conceal shapes options. Something I had not not even thought of but now seems so obvious!

I see some of the early reports here about memory usage. Is this something new? I never really did thorough testing with the stuff I wrote, so I am not sure what may be causing this. If I can help let me know.

[heruca]

Welcome to the forums, Klodabien/Dave.

(folks, this is the person we have to thank for the new manual FoW code in v1.0.

The RAM usage is due to the number of very large graphics layers (which I mention one post up). I'm not sure if anything can be done about it, short of a complete rewrite that uses imaging Lingo to render just the viewable area. Right now it's rendering all the offscreen stuff, as well. I'm very close to hitting some limitations of Director. Vector shapes can only be up to 2798 pixels big, and bitmaps max out around 4150 pixels.

[greytale]

Thanks for your efforts Klodabien.

[heruca]

I wanted to make users aware that there is a maximum map dimension of 4000 pixels (height or width). If you go much over that, you'll get error messages and FoW won't render properly. This seems to be a limitation in Director (BRPG's authoring environment). So if your map is bigger than that, you'll need to resize it in a graphics program before importing it into BRPG. This means you may see some slight pixellation at 200% zoom on some large maps.

[Kepli]

Hmm, exporting a DJ map at 122dpi will result in a max of 4880 pixels, so a full map is out of the question for now. That is good to know

[nijineko]

has that very useful information made it into the faq / help / manual / docs yet? ^^

[heruca]

There's a chart near the end of the User Manual that specifies pixels per cell. Unfortunately, that was written back when BRPG's default resolution was 61 pixels per cell. It is now 122 pixels per cell, so you'd need to double all the numbers to get accurate info. I'll be sure to update that info as soon as I update the User Manual to cover all the new features added since v1.0 was released.

I also need to add the info about maximum map sizes, which is pretty important.