That Affect GM Preparation

A handful of updates will make the GM’s work to prepare maps and adventures much easier.

• Adventures – This almost made it in the Spotlight for me because I think it’s one of the best and most fleshed-out new features. But I think only GMs will find any excitement in this one, so I left it here. Adventures are a new type of Compendium that let you package up any collection of elements from your game world to export and share with others who can then import all those elements into their own game world. This makes sharing custom-made adventures way easier. Before, the best way to have a carefully selected amount of content packaged together was to export an entire World. However, using a new world doesn’t have the player characters, scenes, music, homebrew, or 75 modules you’ve already installed (everyone has that many right, it’s not just me?). Now you can use these Adventures to add packaged content to your very lived in existing World and smoothly transition your players into new adventures. The packaging even retains things like token and map pin placements (as long as you package the corresponding actors and journals).

• Levels (lite) – I say lite because the dev team has created the framework for the future full implementation of ‘levels’. While the full levels system won’t come around until a future version, the framework itself allows for some really fun interactions. Essentially, the framework creates synthetic z-axis on the game canvas allowing token height to have a visual impact. Tokens at 0 or ground level go under tree and roof tiles, but if their ‘height’ is increased above 10ft or so, they will fly over the trees or run along the rooftops. It also has an impressive impact on tokens using Tremorsense, which can’t see tokens that aren’t actually on the ground.
   

• Lighting
  • The “Torch” lighting animation has been improved and overhauled to provide a more realistic appearance of the exposed flame. The previous animation has been renamed to “Flicker”, and uses an improved noise generation algorithm, and its approach to coloration should result in a less “washed out” appearance.
  • The “Gradual Illumination” checkbox for Ambient Light and Token light source objects has been replaced with an “Attenuation” slider which allows for fine-grained control over the smoothness of transition between bright/dim/dark lighting regions. An Attenuation value of one produces the most dramatic and most gradual easing, while an Attenuation value of zero produces the most sharply differentiated appearance between lighting levels.
  • Other new lighting animation options include Force Grid, Vortex, Smoke Patch, and Starlight.

• Audio/Video – The Audio-Video user interface has been redesigned to be a full-height sidebar panel on the left side of the interface which can be resized. Camera views of connected players are displayed in a grid layout and can be popped out to separate frames, giving a more aesthetically pleasing UI. There’s also nameplates that rotate between player name and character name, border frames colored based on player color, and even more.

Affecting Community Developers

There are so many Major changes, and a lot of the are Breaking Changes so for any developer I highly recommend checking out the Release Notes. However here are the big ones to keep in mind:

• You can create custom Tours for your modules to guide people on how to implement and use your module
• The Canvas changes for levels are something you can access on the back end to create new ways to interact with object height
• Check out the v10 Migration Guide

Affecting those Learning the Program

These features are for any user (player or GM) that is trying to learn Foundry VTT or modules (for the module creators that leverage these features).

• Tours – The Foundry VTT team has created a way for ‘Tours’ to be created that walk a user step-by-step through any aspect of the program to teach them how to use it. The settings now have a ‘Tour Management’ button where you can view and reset any tours you’ve already taken.

• Tooltips – Tooltips have been improved to create a more cohesive experience that supports localization and also allows community developers to help their modules have unified tooltips with the Game System.