Keeping track of where you’re going (and where you’ve been) is a very important part of many tabletop games. It’s not only vital to know that you’ve walked 15ft, it’s just as important to know that your character stepped on THAT tile, NOT the one just to the left with the nasty trap door underneath.
Today we’re very pleased to unveil a new feature (that’s been requested for quite some time) to help: the Waypoints System. Instead of more writing from me, I recommend jumping straight into our trailer showing off what it can do:
(On a side note, making those trailers is almost more fun than coding the features. Almost.)
As you can see in the video, the Waypoints System has important pieces both for when you are actively moving a piece, and for when someone else has moved a piece on the table.
While you’re planning a move, you can now activate a handy ruler that will show you exactly how far you have moved. There’s also a “shadow” of your original position on the table, making it easy to tell where you were in case you change your mind. As you move the piece, just press the Spacebar to lay down a waypoint – especially handy for navigating around corners or avoiding nasty GM trickery. When you’re happy with your move, release the piece like normal and it will save the new position, as well as the move itself for later review.
On the other hand, when you’re observing a piece that’s being moved, you’ll now see the piece glide smoothly from its starting position to the final destination – no more “jumping” across the screen. If waypoints were used during the movement of the token, you’ll see the path the token is taking on the board, and the piece will actually follow that path as it moves to its new spot. The path will fade, but you can always select any token on the board and press the Spacebar key to view the last move that the piece made. And that information is persisted between play sessions, perfect for coming back to a game after a long hiatus or for play-by-post games, so you can see exactly what just happened after the fact.
Finally, as a side benefit of this new feature we’ve improved our support for measurement on Hex Grids, so battle gamers rejoice! You can make full use of the waypoints system and the ruler works properly now as well.
We think that the Waypoints System is an exciting new improvement that will really aid your play in Roll20. Since it’s a part of Rugged Reroll, you can expect to see this feature go live in December when we launch that update. If you’re a Mentor subscriber (and today’s a great day to become one if you aren’t!) you can start helping us test this new feature today on the Dev Server.
Happy gaming!