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Video, Map Centering & Zooming issues

Hi, My group's been paying to use Roll20 regularly for a number of months and enjoying it, but there are some bugs/issues which annoy the cr@p out of us. 1. Video. We use this extensively for "dicecam". Sometimes the Roll20/Tok servers have gone down completely for hours at a time, which is frustrating when we're paying a subscription. The most common problem is that we'll "lose video" at one end or both for a particular player. This is frustrating because we regularly have to refresh Roll20 (we use windows 7 systems with chrome as the browser) to bring back the video feed. We end up being forced to use google hangouts externally to Roll20 in addition to the inbuilt VTC, because of better stability and audio quality. It seems that it doesn't matter which end of the link does the refresh either. Why can't the 3rd party VTC app reestablish the connection without us having to do a manual browser refresh? Which brings me to the next problem. 2. Map Centering. When we refresh, Roll20 doesn't save the map centre point (and zoom scale) information, so I (as DM) have to find the section of the map we're in again and do a shift click hold to send the centre to everyone else's maps. It would be so much better if Roll20 could keep track of the coordinates and scale for each Roll20 player so that when doing a refresh (or coming back between sessions) the map stays in the same place. Also: 3. Zooming works poorly. What we all want to do is be able to zoom out, look at the whole map say, and then zoom back in to exactly where we were before. This doesn't happen. Please fix it. I'd like to keep using Roll20, but these recurring issues will likely prove a dealbreaker for us if they're not addressed soon. Thanks, Michael.
1399718468

Edited 1494106446
NA
Roll20 is a very limited operation. Basically it's a few friends that had an idea and wanted to see if other people would like it too. There aren't building full of developers and a dedicated team of bug squashers. There's Riley and..... I think there's just Riley. Things like the zoom tool and map re-centering are pretty minor and I'm sure there are bigger/better/more important things for them to work on. Also, this is the first I've personally seen of someone talking about not liking the zoom tool (I don't like it either, but it's not something that people complain about much, if at all) which might explain why there hasn't been any time devoted to changing it. The problem with the video isn't on Roll20's end (if I understand the situation correctly). It is definitely a problem though which is why so many people use hangouts or Skype or something else. There aren't a lot of options for them, they can create their own video/audio chat program from scratch, but that's WAY too time consuming, expensive and labor intensive or they can use an existing service. I'm sure they could pay Skype a whole bunch of money to integrate their stuff, but who's going to pay for that? They have the option to use Hangouts (free) and they have the option to use Flash or Web/RTC (both free). Wait, what's that? Why are there two options? That's because the Flash system wasn't awesome so the devs responded by giving us more options - how archaic of them. The Roll20 dev 'team' has been more responsive to it's customers than any other project I've seen.
1399771522

Edited 1399771529
Gauss
Forum Champion
Regarding the scrolling issue, Cody , what browser issue are you using? In Chrome I can use shift+mousewheel for side scroll. Additionally you can use the right click button for "grab and move" style panning or press and hold the mousewheel button (if you have one) for the 4-way panning function.
There is some new code in Data Delve (going live May 28th) that should help further improve the video/voice stuff. We're constantly working to improve that, but keep in mind you can use Google+ Hangouts, Skype, or even Mumble/Vent as well. Our goal here isn't to have the "end all be all" video/voice, it's to offer one option integrated that hopefully covers most people, but then work well with alternatives as well. You only need one to work well for your group, after all. The zooming stuff is definitely on our to-do list...as Khrain said it's just me slinging code here so our resources are limited, but that one has been an issue for long enough, I think -- time to get it fixed. Hopefully in the next update after Data Delve we can make that happen.