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Enable FoW on Server Start
From discussion with Dorpond's observations of a new MapTool GM. "He didn't know his maps were player visible and didn't even have FOW turned on. He was a bit bummed that we suddenly saw his stuff. Again, this might just be learning curve stuff, but I can't help but try thinking of how we can make it better."
Possible solution Place option on Start Server dialog to enable FoW on all Maps.
There are questions as to whether it should be turned off again when in non-server mode.
This is user training, IMO. Maybe this GM didn't realize that he could fire up another instance of MT and login to his own server as a player? That's a pretty easy way to see what the players will see, and seems kinda obvious to me.
Az, we suffer from power user syndrome. A lot of things seem easy but trust me, hand the reigns over to a new gm, even one that's been a player for a few years in MT, and you see them struggle with some of the seemingly simple things.
I proposed on slack, activating the mini panel view as a player view and make it more obvious how to test/track PC player views. I think a FoW toggle button may be nice to as a visual reminder if it's on, as a menu option does not provide this.
This is true.
Have you ever used one of those apps that notices when you select a menu only to not choose an option, then gives you some popup help regarding that menu? Or it notices that you've toggled a checkbox or two on and back off and not made any other changes inbetween,, so it gives you some help on topics related to those checkboxes?
I don't know how we'd implement something like that, to be honest. But it might be a way to help aspiring GMs figure out the next step...
For this particular issue, the first time the GM starts a server we can offer some ideas, such as "start another client and connect to see what the players see", "make sure maps you don't want players to see are not-visible-to-players", and so on.
I started coding a start a server wizard using JFX. There are likely a lot of places where wizards could be used, and my goal was to come up with a common framework to make writing future wizards easier. Unfortunately, the Wizard classes in the ControlsFX package -- which is part of the official JFX now, I believe -- is cumbersome to use. I need to streamline my code and rewrite it before using it as a base for other wizards.
Wizards would be awesome I think. I kind of envision the Landing Page in MT part wizard part welcome screen (sort of like eclipse). I say FX is on the table to. Server wizard is probably the #1 best case for a wizard. Maybe CV creating and test FoW is #2 but can't envision how you would wizard that. More tutorial.
Perhaps the Start Server dialog could prompt the user when they click the Okay button and tell them if there is more than 1 map Visible to Players and that n maps don't have FoW enabled. If we wanted to get fancy, could present a list of Visible Maps perhaps with check boxes to toggle visible state. Would have to keep in mind that some people have 100 maps in their campaign.
Similarly the GM could also be prompted if no maps are visible to players.
I don't know if this was "pre" onCampaignLoad but I'm not clear how this is a feature request.
Is this to imply a desire to have 'viewports' of the players so the GM can see what they see? I don't see how that is a reasonable request.
Nothing to do with viewports or player view for the GM. This is about GMs, especially ones new to MapTool, not realizing that their maps aren't visible to players (because they are all hidden) or that too many of their maps are visible to players either because they didn't enable FoW on the map or because they forgot to set some maps as not visible to players. Some of this is because there is no control over which map the players will end up on that doesn't involve setting up macros to do so.