Today, we’re excited to announce that the Foreground Layer is officially out of beta and accessible in all Jumpgate games created by Plus and Pro Roll20 subscribers. Originally debuted in early April, the Foreground Layer presents new and exciting ways to beef up your TTRPG campaigns with dynamic graphics and the ability to surprise players with hidden treasure, passages, creatures, and more. 

Alongside this milestone, a new feature called Reactions is extending some of the functionality of the Foreground Layer to other layers of the VTT! Read on to learn more.

Your Voice = Better Products

During the development of the Foreground Layer (which ranked as one of the most-requested features since Roll20’s launch in 2012), our product, design, and development teams conducted extensive research and usability tests to ensure that it not only met the needs of the community, but performed seamlessly in Jumpgate, our new new tabletop engine launched last year. 

Our goal was to build a feature that would open doors to creative possibilities, enabling the imagination of GMs to translate easily onto the pages and scenes of the stories they tell.

The success of our beta is directly related to the participation and feedback of you, our dedicated subscribers. Your use in real in-game scenarios and your commitment to bug reporting and brainstorming helped us release the following updates since launch:

• Doors and windows are now viewable and clickable even when blocked by foreground objects
• The image preview in the page menu now utilizes the map layer, providing a more accurate representation of scenes at a glance 
• You also now have the option whether or not to show grid lines on foreground objects, allowing for greater precision in your designs and control over whether to surprise your players with Foreground elements or let them discover them on their own
• We’ve added a new mode to render Foreground objects “as darkness,” which works very well for things like roofs, where your players can navigate through a building, and the roof covers everything out of line of sight
• We clarified the other related settings, now called “below darkness” or “above darkness.”  All of these modes (“above”, “below”, “as darkness”) can be used with or without Conditional Fade, providing a lot of potential variety in configuring maps.

Finally, we resolved over fifteen bugs reported by the community, which makes for a more reliable experience for everyone.

What’s Next? 

While the Foreground Layer is stable enough to come out of beta, our support of and excitement around it won’t end today. We’ll continue to listen to the feedback of the subscribers using it and keep considering fun new ways to iterate and improve looking ahead. We’re still working on a solution for multi-level play / elevation… if this is something you’d benefit from in your games, don’t forget to upvote it on our Suggestions and Ideas Forum to help us get it prioritized on our roadmap.

Reactions are Here!

We’re really excited to be launching a brand-new feature called Reactions today, as well. Reactions allow GMs to create more opportunities for exploration and interactivity in their scenes, similar to how the Foreground Layer works, except now the functionality has been extended to ALL other VTT Layers. 

The first available Reaction is Conditional Fade. Toggling this on allows you to set an opacity % that will be triggered when the selected token* is overlapped by a player or GM-controlled token. It can be used to make things fade, disappear, or even appear out of thin air (when combined with a token’s Base Opacity settings).

*Reminder: on Roll20, a “token” doesn’t always represent a Character or NPC. They are any static or animated asset placed on the VTT, like maps, decor, furnishings, and even weather. 

The “Foreground Only” Toggle found in Reaction Settings gives you more control over your Conditional Fade options. If, for example, you have Conditional Fade settings on a token but only want them to trigger when that token is on the Foreground Layer (some GMs move things between layers throughout the course of a campaign for various reasons), you would toggle that on.

We’re continuing to brainstorm and test how else Reactions might be fun to use in-game. From triggering Effects to teleporting tokens, switching on a jukebox track, and sending commands to chat, we’ve got tons of ideas, including some that make the function of some Mod Scripts/API more accessible… and would love to know yours! 

Let us know what you’d like to use Reactions for on our Forums, Discord or your social media platform of choice, and keep your eyes peeled for more updates in the coming months!