Option to loop animated graphics only when a PC can see them (when a vision-limiting feature is turned on)

I love the new animated tokens / graphics, but they take up a lot of resources to have running, especially if you have a lot of them going at once.

It would be helpful if each token had another option besides "play", "stop", and "loop" called "when visible" that would automatically turn animation looping on or off based on whether they are visible to one or more tokens that have sight and are controlled by a player.  This would only really be useful if dynamic lighting and/or AFoW was in use, or anything that prevents the players from seeing the whole map at any given time.

For example, right now my players are on a swamp battle map at night with multiple roiling spheres of cursed fog around them.  The animated fog patches are really cool looking (search for animated weather on the Roll20 marketplace), but having 15 of them going at once grinds my system to a halt, much less the less-powerful laptops of some of my players.  More specifically, it ends up with each fog bank animating for a couple seconds then stopping, then another one runs for a couple seconds, etc.  I could have less fog banks, but I don't want the PCs to be able to just duck away from the first couple and be in the clear.  For now, I have only set the closest couple to looping and stopped the rest, but that's a lot of micro-managing when the PCs move around.

A similar situation would be a dungeon with one of those awesome-looking animated fountains; until the players get there, there's no need for it to be running.  But as soon as they step around the corner it should be animated.

It's possible that this suggestion could be implemented via an API script once animation controls are made available to the API; I don't know.

Thanks for your time!

I'm an animator and want to use a lot of tokens with animated effects, but optimization is one of the key reasons why I'm hesitant to do so. I feel like this should be an option by default that animations only play when they're visible to players. I love the idea of littering my maps with animated torches, but the resource drain has always been a primary concern of mine.

Animations are already finicky to work with due to Jukebox issues and a lack of proper API support, but this should go on the list as one of many improvements to be made, at least until WebGL is supported.

Thanks for the suggestion!

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