Hi,
From the first day I noticed the token blurriness in Roll20, but only yesterday I came to gather the required data to finally post my thoughts about it.
Short version:
1) Roll20 crops down and blurs tokens, resulting in a lack of image quality. Is there a way of avoiding this?
If not, I'd suggest making some changes in the Roll20 render engine.
2) Roll20 places the grid lines over tokens, resulting in image overlap. Is there a way of placing grid lines under them?
If not, I'd suggest to implement it as well.
Both of these things can be seen by contrast in the screenshot below, which is the reason for placing two suggestions in a single thread.
Extended clarification:
I created a character token yesterday, and I noticed something while testing it in conjunction with some tokens by Devinnight inside the Roll20 app.
After spending effort in making a detailed piece, I saw that Roll20 displayed it a bit too blurred, diminishing the contrast, sharpness and quality of the overall picture.
Intrigued by this, I tested the same token in another VTT —iTabletop— for seeing if there were noticeable differences in their respective rendering of tokens: the first one displayed a very sharp, pixel-to-pixel faithful image, while the Roll20 screen had it more or less blurred (see the above screenshot: the left sample is iTabletop and the right one is Roll20).
I wonder if there is a way of bringing that image sharpness to Roll20 as well. After all, If I want to blur images or to have gaussian effects on them, I can use a filter before uploading my game assets to Roll20.
What I suspect is that this is related with the fact that Roll20 makes us to define the grid by means of "units", and each unit is 70 pixels. Now, here I'm using hexes of 2 "units" each —for trying to keep token image quality—, because seemingly, in some way —even resizing while pushing the ALT key— Roll20 "auto-fits" tokens inside the allowed pixels per "unit"; but for instance, the upcoming Devinnight's tokens are going to be 200x200 pixels (low-res) and 400x400 (hi-res) (<a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1009057201/monster-tokens-by-devin-night" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1009057201/monster-tokens-by-devin-night</a>); but if you put them inside these Roll20 "units", they are going to be cropped down regardless even if they are low-res . . . Now, I find this as a drawback regarding image quality & sharpness.
For getting a result more or less close to the image sharpness of iTabletop, I had to define my hexagons as having 4 "units", allowing higher-resolution tokens inside them, but on the other hand, I find Roll20 maps extremely cumbersome and impractical to handle under such grid setup.
If you make your own hand-drawn artwork and tokens for your Roll20 games, likely you understand what I mean.
— Thus, my suggestion is bringing higher resolution tokens to Roll20.
Also, I'd like to find a way of placing the Roll20 map grid under the tokens, and not automatically above them. Besides the lower image quality, this additional aspect is also noticeable, by contrast, in the above screenshot.
— So, my second suggestion is to be able to place the Roll20 grid under our tokens for avoiding image overlap.