Feature request: text boxes

I just started using shmeppy and I love it. However, I’d like to be able to label rooms for myself, like a one page dungeon type of thing. So gm-facing would be ideal, but text that isn’t attached to tokens visible to everyone would still be useful.

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Agreed. I create tokens with labels to share some of this information with players. The way the text moves as other tokens move (which is a great feature for tokens-as-creatures) is not ideal for the labels.

Not a perfect solution, but you could use a token and put it under a single square of fog of war. That way, you can read the labels but players can’t.

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Tokens in the fog o’war is exactly what I do.

Tokens with labels in Fog of War is about as good of a solution to this as Shmeppy will ever offer I think.

I’m planning to do some work around “labeled regions” eventually that may solve this a little better, maybe. But the labels will be very similar to token labels. The difference will be that instead of being attached to a token that can only be a circle/ellipse the label will be attached to a “region” that can be any shape. It’s intended to make tracking AoE and other environmental effects easier.

I’m also planning to do some more work around label collisions, so they do a better job getting out of eachother’s way. But I’m not quite sure what that’ll look like yet since I’m flirting with proven-“impossible” problems for Shmeppy to solve (there’s a very-related NP-hard problem nearby).

But I don’t really see an advantage to just letting text boxes float around Shmeppy without being attached to a token. I could imagine it being slightly more aesthetically pleasing, but I don’t think it would actually be an improvement. Though do any of ya’ll have a sense of what problems a free-floating text box would be solving over a text box attached to a token?

Beyond the aesthetics of not having to look at the token circle next to whatever it is the user wants to label, I don’t see any other advantage.

Maybe in some corner cases, whenever areas you’re trying to label are very small, you might want to be able to use a label but not have a token taking up space. But then again if said hypothetical area really is that tight, a floating text box is still going to be very crowded.