Experience with HUGE maps?

Hey there. I've played through enough of Roll20 (10k hours on combined accounts) to be very familiar with the website and the campaign tools. I also know the pain of having more than 50 maps for your game and how difficult it is to work with the Maps tab once it gets so cluttered up - so I was wondering, during my next campaign, if I could just quite simply build a huge map about 500+ squares width and length from several of Gabriel Pickard's map collections, like in an open-world videogame, and have it run just fine. Does anyone have any experience with running an immense battlemap/ a mishmash of several dozen battlemaps on Roll20 or has anyone else tried this before? My laptop destroys itself when I turn on Dynamic Lightning so my main concern is low performance. Do you think it would run fine if I was to try this? It is important for my players as well - some of Gabriel Pickard's maps, for example, are so high-quality so as to take two-dozen seconds for some of my players to load sometimes - so imagine if I merged about 50 of them! Thanks!

A map as large as 500 x 500 most likely won't work at all I'm afraid. About a year or two ago I tried running the Doomvault map; without dynamic lighting the entire map was unbearably slow, with it some of my players suffered crashes and was overall unplayable. I had to split the map in 4 pieces (about 180 x 250 each) and we somehow managed to play, but it was a tad on the slow side at the time. If performance has improved with the new dynamic lighting update (I haven't been able to test it), it's likely you could run a map of maybe 200 x 200 with a very good computer, but since you mentioned you're struggling with dynamic lighting on a single map that's probably not much over 25 x 25, I'd suggest staying away from such large maps. You can always give it a go, of course. Just open photoshop/gimp and create a solid color image large enough to fill 500 x 500 and see how it works on its own, but I'm positive you'll have trouble with it. My suggestion would be to keep it at an intermediate level, and lower until you find your balance of quality/performance and the amount of pages. Try with 75 x 75 or 100 x 100 maps at most and go down until you find that sweet spot, that way you'll have to split the map in 10 or so pages instead of 50. Cheers!

Nick is right, that will not be playable. The approach I would take is to use a Library System of campaigns, if you will need so many map pages. In the Master campaign where you play the actual game, I'd keep (say) 10 map pages at any given time. I'd have several other "Sandbox" campaigns where to build the map pages and kit them out as you like, keeping a manageable number in each one. Use a naming system for these Sanbox Campaigns to keep them organized (say one sandbox campaign is named The East, another is The North). Then I'd use the Transmogrifier to pull maps in/out of those sandbox campaigns whenever they're on the docket for game nights. You'll need a Pro account for this approach. But if you intend to build a huge adventure, you'll save yourself a shocking amount of time by upgrading to Pro. The Transmogrifier and certain API tools are worth it.

Hey, thanks for your input. I assumed it so but was hoping to be proven otherwise. What Chris suggested sounds a bit too complicated but probably the way I would go on about it myself.

With Fog Of War (not dynamic lighting), in my experience you could go 160 x 180 page size, or so, and have it working. This fits several (lot of) Gabriel 16x16 to 30x30 to 35x35 maps used as tiles.