There’s nothing like changing up your style to make the new year feel really new – and today’s the day for Roll20 to Get a New Look! We’re adding real live animations to the tabletop and giving a much-needed jolt of performance improvements to Advanced Fog of War. Let’s take a look at the New Look, shall we?
First up: animations! You may have seen animations in your chat before, but now you can put them on your tabletop for some hack n’ slash, swoop n’ sway action. Character tokens that swing their swords? You got it. Magic portals that swirl with unknown possibilities? Easy-done. All animations can be played on loop or paused at any time simply by clicking them on the tabletop, and every person at the table will see the same thing – unless they have animations disabled in their user settings! Yes, you can disable animations if you don’t want them. We got you, users. 😊
Traps and levers from “Animation Sensations Vol. 1” by Meditating Munky! Available now on the Roll20 Marketplace.
As with all images, you can drag and drop your favorites onto the tabletop: gif, webm, m4v, and mp4 file formats are all accepted. Still searching for that perfect animation? Keep an eye on the Roll20 Marketplace: our creators have already started to release animated tiles, tokens, and more!
We’re excited to have animations, which lays the groundwork for even more exciting updates, but our New Look also brings some updates to make Roll20 run smoother on your browser. Over the last few months, we’ve been working behind the scenes to overhaul Advanced Fog of War. Users with slow internet connections or low-spec computers reported that their virtual tabletop slowed down when this feature was turned on, so we completely reworked the code to make it run more efficiently.
Based on data gathered during the beta test, users who previously experienced slowdown with Advanced Fog of War should now receive a crisp 60 frames per second. Turn it on in your games (you’ll need a Plus or Pro account to enable this feature) and watch the shadows roll in.
Those are the two main features of Get a New Look, and you can read about them in more (technical) detail here! Together, these LAYER the foundation for MORE graphic updates in the future. We’ve also got one more update coming for Roll20 Resolutions: Bring Your Own Beat will beef up the Jukebox and let you upload your own audio files, so stay tuned! Get it? “Stay tuned” like a music tune? ...You get it.