Extremely blurry background images

I have some battle-maps that I'm trying to upload into my roll20 game, but they look extremely blurry no matter what I do.

Anyone know why this is happening or what I can do to fix it?

What file format are you using? And what are the true dimensions of the image vs what you are trying to fit it into on roll20?

Also if the image is near the 10mb limit, i've found it can take longer for the page to fully load the image. I have made several large maps, that have multiple 10mb+ images for the map layer. It takes around 5 minutes for the images to be fully loaded and crisp for all the players. While they are loading they look blurry.

The image is a jpg, 850 KB, 2240 x 1540. (The original is a much larger PNG but I wanted to save space) I'm trying to have it fill in an area that's 16 x 11 grid spaces.

EDIT: I've also left the scene open for a while to see if it will load in, but it hasn't worked, and considering the size of the file I wouldn't expect it to take very long.

I've been having this problem, and sometimes have to leave the page open for 5-10 minutes for it to load

EDIT: I have just discovered that JPEGs get converted to PNGs once they are uploaded.  E.g. a 220kb jpeg background I uploaded has now been bloated to a 3Mb PNG.  You can check this in Firefox by selecting the background from the map layer, pressing Z, then right clicking on the image that pops up and selecting "View Image Info".  This seems a bit silly to me.  I reduced the file sizes I was uploading, only for Roll20 to bloat them back up again.

Alan said:

EDIT: I have just discovered that JPEGs get converted to PNGs once they are uploaded.  E.g. a 220kb jpeg background I uploaded has now been bloated to a 3Mb PNG.  You can check this in Firefox by selecting the background from the map layer, pressing Z, then right clicking on the image that pops up and selecting "View Image Info".  This seems a bit silly to me.  I reduced the file sizes I was uploading, only for Roll20 to bloat them back up again.

I am not seeing this behavior with JPG files I have uploaded into my Map Layer. Can you check and be sure you did not upload a PNG by accident?

I thought you might have been on to something, Kraynic. I renamed a map image from JPG to JPEG and uploaded it and it was upscaled to a PNG just as Alan describes. But then I uploaded a JPG as JPG and it was also upscaled to a PNG. I went back to the map I had looked at when I made my earlier post and it was still a JPG in Roll20.

So it looks like this is new behavior by Roll20 to convert JPGs and JPEGs to PNGs when uploaded.

To truly test I uploaded the same map JPG with a different name, and looked at it and the one I already had in my Art Library. On my PC, the filesize is 6,745,250 bytes.

Old JPG (shows as 7,119,230 byte JPG on Roll20, so some file inflation was going on before this):

New JPG (shows as 37,527,146 byte PNG on Roll20):

Thankfully, it seems to be counting the original, smaller filesize against my Storage Quota, but still. Anyone from Roll20 want to weigh in on what is happening here? Now is not a good time to be inflating filesizes and eating bandwidth...

Rabulias said:

Alan said:

EDIT: I have just discovered that JPEGs get converted to PNGs once they are uploaded.  E.g. a 220kb jpeg background I uploaded has now been bloated to a 3Mb PNG.  You can check this in Firefox by selecting the background from the map layer, pressing Z, then right clicking on the image that pops up and selecting "View Image Info".  This seems a bit silly to me.  I reduced the file sizes I was uploading, only for Roll20 to bloat them back up again.

I am not seeing this behavior with JPG files I have uploaded into my Map Layer. Can you check and be sure you did not upload a PNG by accident?

I just tried uploading some more jpegs and they are indeed getting inflated to PNGs.  Were the ones you checked uploaded some time ago, or did you try a new upload?

This really needs to be sorted, because the extra bandwidth is not going to be helping when the site is so busy.

Alan said:

Rabulias said:

I am not seeing this behavior with JPG files I have uploaded into my Map Layer. Can you check and be sure you did not upload a PNG by accident?

I just tried uploading some more jpegs and they are indeed getting inflated to PNGs.  Were the ones you checked uploaded some time ago, or did you try a new upload?

I am guessing you have now read my latest post, but just to be clear yes, JPGs I uploaded last year (I'm still trying to narrow down the point where this changed see edit below) still show in Roll20 as JPGs close to their original size.

Edit: Going back through my uploaded images, I have a JPG I uploaded on Nov 2 2019 that still shows as a JPG. The next JPG I uploaded was on Feb 1 2020, and that one is upscaled to a PNG, so sometime between February and November is when this started happening. The Zoom tool update at the end of January, maybe? Someone else will need to go through their library and check images and upload dates to narrow it down further.

Just had to abandon a game due to the incredibly slow loading speeds tonight (Saturday 2nd May, 9pm UK time).  Waited about 30 minutes in the end, but was still stuck on a blurry page for most of us, and a just white page for one of our players.  I dragged some tokens onto the page, but they weren't appearing either.

I'm having this issue too in a game at the moment - UK player here, playing with US players.  I remember a point a few years ago where the connection between the image hosting and the European servers was disrupted that might be causing an issue?

UPDATE: Around 10:40 UK time, it seems to have been fixed?  Images are loading correctly now

I too am having this issue, as is many of my friend/players using and tested on several different browsers. This has been happening and getting worse over the last 2 months or so.

Hi spec machine, fast connections.. almost abandoned tonight, took 15 mins for background to appear, weirdly one player it appeared almost instantly.

All UK players.

Me too. 

Wife and I are on ethernet on a 200mbit line. Gaming spec PC for me and a Microsoft surface for her. Blurry background image for 45 sodding minutes. 

Friend on a shitty ADSL using a potato laptop from literally 2008 had no issues at all. 

Any ideas?

Edit: tried crtl-f5, f5, restarting browser, no dice. Weirdly it cleared up for both of us at the same point. 

Moustache Prime said:

I'm having this issue too in a game at the moment - UK player here, playing with US players.  I remember a point a few years ago where the connection between the image hosting and the European servers was disrupted that might be causing an issue?

UPDATE: Around 10:40 UK time, it seems to have been fixed?  Images are loading correctly now

Ours affixed at around 10.40 too

Drespar said:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are currently investigating causes for extension changes/file up-scaling.

Feel free to continue to provide reports of this behavior as it helps us in narrowing down any potential causes.

How do I get a refund please? IT's been unusable for 3 weekends in a row now, time to try another service I think. 

Wasn't aware of this thread. But simliar issue here

https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/8638625/blurry-background-maps-since-a-few-weeks

However it claims that the connection to Amazon S3 was denied

Tom D. said:

Drespar said:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are currently investigating causes for extension changes/file up-scaling.

Feel free to continue to provide reports of this behavior as it helps us in narrowing down any potential causes.

How do I get a refund please? IT's been unusable for 3 weekends in a row now, time to try another service I think. 

Write to team@roll20.net and explain the situation. It might help to provide a link to this thread.

Yep, UK user here too.  I'm not playing this weekend but trying to set stuff up for a game next week, and it's impossible to get anything done.  Every Saturday evening for the last month Roll20 has been unusable.

Using wget to download one of the backgrounds shows it downloading at 2 KB/s.  It's estimating 42 minutes to download a 2.4 MB file....

Since taking that screenshot, the download has hung and its now reporting 10 hours.  Utterly ridiculous.

If it helps. I am based in Germany. But the DM that runs the game is UK based aswell

I've just emailed team@roll20.net.  Pasting here for transparency...

For the past month, Roll20 has been pretty much unusable in the UK on Saturday evening.  Images are downloading at an incredibly slow rate, resulting in background images appearing very blurry, or not appearing at all.  It got so bad last week I had to abandon a game after waiting 20 minutes for a background to load.  I am now (9pm BST 9th May) trying to set up another game for later in the week and it's unusable again.

I just tried using the wget command line utility to download one of my background images, and is started out with a speed of 2KB/s, which would take 42 minutes to download a 2.4 MB file.  The download eventually hung after only 33KB of the file had downloaded.  I cancelled the download when the estimated time raised to 16 hours.

There is a forum post about this here...

https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/8549246/extremely-blurry-background-images

I appreciate you guys are under a lot of strain right now, but something is up with your image hosting.  If the service is unusable then this needs to be sorted out ASAP.

Also, as I mentioned in the forum link above, any uploaded JPEGs are getting converted to PNGs which are roughly 10 times the size of the the original uploaded file.  This cannot be helping matters.

Thanks

Alan

Alan said:

I've just emailed team@roll20.net.  Pasting here for transparency...

For the past month, Roll20 has been pretty much unusable in the UK on Saturday evening.  Images are downloading at an incredibly slow rate, resulting in background images appearing very blurry, or not appearing at all.  It got so bad last week I had to abandon a game after waiting 20 minutes for a background to load.  I am now (9pm BST 9th May) trying to set up another game for later in the week and it's unusable again.

I just tried using the wget command line utility to download one of my background images, and is started out with a speed of 2KB/s, which would take 42 minutes to download a 2.4 MB file.  The download eventually hung after only 33KB of the file had downloaded.  I cancelled the download when the estimated time raised to 16 hours.

There is a forum post about this here...

https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/8549246/extremely-blurry-background-images

I appreciate you guys are under a lot of strain right now, but something is up with your image hosting.  If the service is unusable then this needs to be sorted out ASAP.

Also, as I mentioned in the forum link above, any uploaded JPEGs are getting converted to PNGs which are roughly 10 times the size of the the original uploaded file.  This cannot be helping matters.

Thanks

Alan

What I'm completely baffled by is the fact this seems localised to the UK. Also, one of my players has absolutely no problems whatsoever on his "Intel Xeon inside" family desktop from the dawn of microprocessors. 

Bizarre. 

Unfortunately I haven't been able to test it tonight.  Can anyone in the UK tell me if the problem has been fixed this week?

Drespar said:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are currently investigating causes for extension changes/file up-scaling.

Feel free to continue to provide reports of this behavior as it helps us in narrowing down any potential causes.

I have tested my full art library. There is a clean cut off between JPGs that are resized to JPGs and JPGs that become PNGs.

Based on the number in the url, the 296 JPGs uploaded between 2017-11-08 21:13:04 and 2019-11-26 18:03:31 all stayed jpeg. 

All 42 JPGs uploaded after 2019-12-03 18:58:17 became PNGs.

This is the same for all size versions of the asset 'thumb', 'mini', 'med', 'max', 'original'.

So i think there has been a code change or a library change/update or a browser update early december 2019.

Thanks for doing analysis of your art uploads, Martijn. That narrows my window down even better, to some time between Nov 26 and Dec 3 2019. Hopefully this will help the devs identify the source of the problem.

Is there any update on this?  I've had to put my Saturday game on hold due to the site being completely unusable in the UK on a Saturday evening.

Hi.

In my case, deleting old maps from a previous game seems to have fixed the issue.
It's an aight workaround, but I'd very much prefer an actual fix. I don't want to be paying for 6000+MB if the system can't even handle holding 300 at a time. I was planning on leaving the old maps and everything in my old game, so that I could whip it out again if I ever found another group to run Icespire Peak for.
But I guess I'll have to upload the maps anew when that time comes.