Virtual tabletop that handles height well

[Spiritchaser]

So... I decided I wasn’t going to do another flight heavy campaign until I could find a virtual tabletop program that could handle movement in the vertical axis.

However:

My kids are trying to talk me into it.

In the interest of protecting my sanity, does anyone have a program they’d recommend? It’s ok if there’s a one time cost for it. Money well spent... but I’d prefer to avoid subscription based software because... yuck.

If not, how do you keep track of 3D movement and positioning?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

[Tosamu]

It's not great, but since Roll20 lets you have multiple "health" bars, I have been using one of them to represent altitude. For example, setting the blue healthbar as 10/20 means I'm flying at 10 feet and there's a 20 foot ceiling.

[Lunali]

Lately I've been leaning more towards not accurately tracking position. Give the players a map of the environment and have characters/creatures in rough areas rather than specific positions. When in doubt about whether something is in range or not, tend to favor the players.

[Grod_The_Giant]

It's not great, but since Roll20 lets you have multiple "health" bars, I have been using one of them to represent altitude. For example, setting the blue healthbar as 10/20 means I'm flying at 10 feet and there's a 20 foot ceiling.
I've done the same thing from time to time; it works well enough.

You might also consider going with a pure theater-of-the-mind approach. Aerial combat tends to care a lot less about exact positioning. Hell, Warbirds (the best dogfighting system I know) abstracts it down to a single number representing altitude and how in control of the battle you are.

[samuraijaques]

Foundry VTT is great at this and generally just better than roll20 in every possible aspect. There are even a couple cool addons that help with flight, one that gives flying characters a shadow and a minor animation to demonstrate height and another that allows you to set the height for walls and terrain that allows your players to fly up over it to see whats on the other side.

[Spiritchaser]

Foundry VTT is great at this and generally just better than roll20 in every possible aspect. There are even a couple cool addons that help with flight, one that gives flying characters a shadow and a minor animation to demonstrate height and another that allows you to set the height for walls and terrain that allows your players to fly up over it to see whats on the other side.

Thanks all, this last In particular sounds well worth looking into. My son actually claims to like combat in 3D labyrinths, or in 1800 ft tall trees with branches in (what I think might be) tactically interesting locations. I Just hate trying to run them.