We’ve been going a mile a minute over here at Roll20, so you might have missed some of the biggest updates we’ve made to the site and virtual tabletop to enhance your roleplaying game experience.
Roll20 has completed five of the top ten requests from our Suggestions & Ideas forum. Our team is proud of these releases for character sheets, dynamic lighting, dark mode, and the VTT.
Improved Performance
We made a huge commitment to improve the performance of the virtual tabletop with Operation Fire Bolt. As a result, the majority of games load in under 4 seconds and non-3D dice rolls appear in chat about 20% faster. Our revamped voice and video is in beta and is showing over 99% of minutes connected.
Dynamic Lighting
The highest ranked post for dynamic lighting in the Suggestions & Ideas forum was One-Way Barriers, where light and vision can pass through in one direction only. We took that a step further and added Transparent Barriers for uses like force fields.
Following up on the simplicity of the Place Light Tool that we launched last year, we took that a step further and created Place Window and Place Door. You can use the Place Tool to add a door or window to your Dynamic Lighting in just one step, and these are the first objects that we’ve released where your players can interact directly on the VTT – if they successfully unlock them, of course.
VTT Updates
Placing maps and tokens is even easier with image placement logic, which detects the size of your image when you drag it to the Virtual Tabletop and choose to adjust either the page size or the image size to fit.
Roll20 also added functionality for PDFs in the VTT, where you can upload documents as a searchable handout. You can upload the PDFs you purchase at DriveThru RPG for additional character options, adventures, or rules to use in your Roll20 games.
Character Sheets
We released jQuery for character sheets for our sheet creators to add even more functionality to their work. And another top ten suggestion, printable character sheets, just came to its first Roll20 sheet. You can use this functionality to save or print a PDF version of your character to take with you or squirrel away. Plus, we put together documentation for sheet creators to add the print button to their own projects.
Site Changes
The biggest change that came to the Roll20 site was dark mode, which rolled out over several months into the VTT as well. Not only was it the #1 top ten request from our users, it was a top request from our team, too. You can change the site to dark mode under your account, and the VTT will auto-detect dark mode based on your settings.
Compendium sharing is expanded – if you have a compendium shared with you in a game, you can access that compendium on the site outside the Virtual Tabletop.
Mobile App
Roll20 made the Companion App more robust by adding compendiums and a dice roller. You can access your D&D 5E compendiums while you’re on the go, and if you forgot your dice, we have you covered. We’ll even send the results to the VTT.
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