I played a session last night with my group, and used dynamic lighting with them for the first time. It will also be the last time, at least for now. I know older computers have issues with rendering, but three of the PCs are i7, 8GB RAM, 2GB dedicated Nvidia video. The slowest Internet connection is 30MB down /2MB up. The issue is, and will be unless something gets changed, that dynamic lighting isn't working great, for my scenario. Now, I'm not suggesting it can't be used at all, but here's the issue (This needs to be amended a bit by saying that when I was testing alone, it worked great with 2 small (25 feet) light sources on 2 tokens, on a small map.) The group (dnd next) consists of a dwarf, 2x elf, a halfling, a human. This means that at night, we have a lot of low light vision, which is not limited to the 25 feet (used above), and a torch, which is 20 feet of bright light, and another 20 feet of dim light, or 40 feet. the map is 25x27 squares, and has 1 image for the map base and two images for boulders, and one light emitting camp fire, which I deemed to be 35 feet of light . Pretty light-weight, I think (in terms of images). Now, add to that 6 Bugbears and a quasit (which all have 60' darkvision). This really adds to the problem. Even on the best computers we have, there is quite a bit of render lag and was not smooth at all. We tried update on drop and that seemed to help slightly. The real issue is when someone pans around. On the best computers, it takes a 1/2 a second or so to render when you move (with update on drop), and tolerable. On anything else it was worse. Imagine using a three year old integrated video card? Imagine using a tablet? The computer was rendered useless. We had to remove all lighting and play without it, as two computers were in that three year mark. For a bit of the battle stuff: while invisible, the quasit doused the campfire with water, causing everything to go black. This meant that darkvision and lowlight vision came into play, and was very important. I like the dynamic lighting concept because it means I don't have to constantly remove fog of war. It's automatic. Maps with a night theme or a dungeon are perfect examples of where to use this. I guess I see this as a huge setback because if a pretty powerful computer can't perform well enough, what does that say for mobile? The last thing I will say is that all of the people I play with, whether I know them, or play online, or whatever, use these types of scenes, and it is important that the experience is a good one. Yes, there are limits to how older hardware can be used, but when a tablet bought 4 months ago can't perform, and that's a huge selling point of a subscription, I'm not sure what'll happen. This is mainly informational, and hopefully shows what some people need, in terms of lighting. What plans can you share with us about where dynamic lighting is going? Where is mobile support heading?
