The Roll20 Team
Along with our official launch today, we’re pleased to introduce several exciting new features.
Dynamic Lighting Preview
One of our most-requested features is dynamic lighting. This feature allows you to draw “walls” on top of your map in advance, then place objects that emit light into your game ( such as PC tokens or torches on walls). The game will then render lighting and shadows in real-time as your players move their pieces around the map. Today we’re pleased to show off the system as it currently stands (which is alpha!):
Note that if your are a Mentor-level supporter you can start playing around with the Dynamic Lighting right now on the Dev Server.
Localization
Nearly 40% of all Roll20 users are now international. To support this growing trend, we’ve begun the long process of adding localization (also known as “foreign language support”) to Roll20. We’re working with a team of volunteers to translate Roll20 into as many languages as possible.
Starting today, you can choose to change your default language on your Account page. Much of the site still needs to be translated, and where translations aren’t available you’ll simply see English text. But go ahead and change that setting today if you are an international user, and as we translate the site further you’ll start to see more and more strings show up in your chosen language!
Site Status
Now that we’re “live,” we want to be more transparent about our downtime and stability. We also want to open up a better line of communication (besides our Twitter feed) for you to consult when you think that we might be experiencing issues. To that end, today we’re rolling out the Roll20 Status Site, which you can consult at any time to see the status of the Roll20 service, and also view historic information about our stability.
Improved Help Documentation
We’ve completely overhauled our Help and Documentation Site, re-organizing the pages to better fit the needs of most players. We’ve also written thousands of new words across more than 15 new pages of help information. So if you haven’t visited the docs in a while, be sure to check it out so you can read about all the great new features we’ve put in place over the last few months!
More to Come!
Dynamic lighting released on the main site, mobile tablet support, and professional game modules are all on the way! And with your support, we can get there even faster. Thanks for your continued feedback and kind words, and we’re excited to see where the next few months take us!
As always, you can read more about all the changes we made on the forum thread.
