Flaky dynamic lighting

Hi all, I'm new to this Mentor scene, and I'm messing around a bit with dynamic lighting. What I'm seeing is that sometimes it seems as though the lighting goes flaky. I have a token on a page with dynamic lighting enabled, I enable the settings which cause the token to show light, and everything seems fine. Then I come in and the lighting looks...well, weird. Instead of a 30 foot circle of dim light, and a 10 foot circle of "normal" light (for example), I get a 30 foot circle of really bright light with no dimming, and sometimes with little dark specks in it. I refresh the page (i.e. exit the game), and come back, and it's normal. I can't figure what's causing it, so I can't get it to repeat, but if it happens again, I'll post a screen capture. Just wondering if anyone has experienced something like this, and if I'm doing something wrong.

Here's an example of what I mean: Maybe a bit hard to see, but that light is supposed to be softer, and then get dimmer right around where the 2nd tunnel starts. Plus, there are these little dark specks. Any suggestions? EDIT: I just exited the game and came back in and this is what it looks like now... Much better! But I don't want to have to exit the game in the middle of action when the lighting goes flaky.

Hi Gozer and welcome to the mentor scene! I've seen this before when setting things up, it is often caused by a poor or busy network connection causing the dynamic lighting layer to load slowly or incorrectly (assumption based on my experience). Refreshing allows your cache to kick in and take the brunt of the loading so that DL can load correctly. I don't really worry about it since, unless you are making maps during a session, it shouldn't really cause you a problem. It is worth noting that the players will have significantly less data to process than you as the GM so they are likely only going to see the lovely crisp image as per your second image. (again, not sure on this but playing with the GM opacity in the page settings might reduce the effect to begin with also...?) You can also click a token and use ctrl(cmd on mac)+L to see what it sees which should give you the clean image even when the flakiness is happening...

DL is more a client side issue, it's more your browser hiccuping up.

I'll throw some more speculation into the ring... Try it in a different browser and see if you get the same results. Try turning off /on hardware acceleration for the canvas: <a href="http://www.solveyourtech.com/turn-hardware-acceler" rel="nofollow">http://www.solveyourtech.com/turn-hardware-acceler</a>... It might actually be a problem with your video card.

Yeah, I'll try that. I've been running Chrome, but I can use Firefox as well. I'm on a Mac, and so I don't know how to turn on or off hardware acceleration...what's a video card? :)

Ha! I'm on a Mac too. That link should take you through the steps in chrome to get to the setting. It's the same regardless of where you're running chrome, I believe.

Ok so I did that, but that does slow down the redrawing of lighting...I'll have to experiment with it and see what I like best.

Does it fix the issue? Was curious if it might be an issue with your video card.

Well, it did seem to fix the issue, but so does exiting the game and coming back in. The question is will it pop up again with the hardware acceleration turned off? This remains to be seen.

Yeah, and knowing the answer might not really provide any options for a solution. Run your updates I guess? Take it to the apple store and convince them to replace the video card? =D