I think that having a way to add an overlay to a tile (perhaps implemented as diagonal lines overlaid on the tile) would be useful. I have had many times where I need to show dim light in 5e, or areas that are hard to see in, which requires me to add art skills to a tool meant for speed. Another example is a guard holding a torch. If the guard moves, I have to redraw the colors I used to show the area that was bright. Being able to clear a tile effect instead of changing colors would be much more efficient. Other creative uses could be representing hazardous terrain (like the area lit on fire by a dragon’s breath) or representing fog-of-war without removing player visibility.
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Layers would be really useful… I still worry that juggling layers will be a pain though. Drawing on the wrong layer is such a common problem with every drawing application that has them.
I’m going to be experimenting with a shapes/polygon tool soon to track AOE affects. If that goes well hopefully it’ll help with some of this, especially something like a guard’s torch.
I could see this functioning like the Fog of War tool. A single effect (adds diagonal lines that are X% darker than the tile color, or X% lighter if it’s below a certain threshold), much like the Fog of War when viewed from the GM side. This would reduce its “layer” similarities and increase its “mask” similarities, since you’d have to switch to the tool to use it, and it doesn’t interact with the Fill tool.
That makes sense. A single layer wouldn’t cause the same usability issues a tool like GIMP has. And there is a ton of reasons to want to overlay stuff like this. It’d be pretty versatile. It’s easy to imagine how the Select tool would interact with it too. Seems worth trying out, thanks for the idea!