I am continually frustrated where every session, one or more players either see nothing, or else see everything. My campaign is the Curse of Strahd. It's got a lot of maps and they are set up to support dynamic lighting. When I first started the campaign, we did the initial sessions using the manual reveal tool and that was smooth(ish) if slow. We switched to Dynamic Lighting which seemed to work at first but has not done well for months now. This session today was the worst yet, between lighting not working, and half the players being stuck on Loading for 30 minutes or more: It is a common theme that my computer, a midrange office laptop,
will load the maps but 1 or more players' machines will take much longer
to load the maps, and some of them are decent gaming spec PCs. One player only saw the Loading screen for over 30 minutes, reloaded, reloaded, switched from Chrome to Firefox, still saw nothing, reloaded, and then finally saw the map, but then could see everything on the map. Another player saw just black for a long time until restarting Chrome then could see black again then when I re-edited and re-assigned their token to the character sheet again, could then see as "expected". Three other players saw lengthy loading screens then eventually also saw what they needed/ As the DM, my screen loaded ok and I could see the map quickly, but was very laggy in Chrome. I switched to Firefox and it was better but still a bit laggy. It is very disappointing and frustrating when you trust that the game will show only what the players should see but then you hear from 1 or more - "I can see the entire map" and "What's that person over there doing?" etc. So I can't really stop the game in the middle to debug this. It is super disruptive to the gaming session when you spend 1+ hours trying to get your session rolling because half the players get stuck on Loading and the other half can't see the environment. Questions: The dynamic lighting is cool when it works, but it basically sucks as of now, at least for me. Should I go back to hand-drawing a black rectangle over the entire map, and manually revealing areas (reveal polygon etc)? That at least was RELIABLE! Is there a simple, clear, and up to date description of how to re-enable the legacy dynamic lighting and "fix it the right way" for all the users' clients so I know they are all going to work? Also, this is something that is continually annoying, it's not really well documented how to get characters able to see outdoors in daylight (if dynamic lighting is enabled). I set each player to emit light because otherwise normal humans can't even see the map in daylight. And otherwise it seems they can see everything. I guess basically what this means is that I have not yet found a tutorial that says in a simple manner how to properly enable the lighting - aka "do this for legacy lighting", "do this for new lighting", "do this for manual control over the reveals" aka simply " Here are screenshots of the game settings as needed to set up the game to correctly use lighting styles (legacy, new, or none) " and "Here are screenshots of the token settings you will need to use for each of those modes" and so on. Thanks, it's been a struggle learning to use Roll20 effectively. I feel like the intent is there for it to "just work" but so far that's not the case. Every session has had a rocky start and has had lighting problems. None have gone smoothly. EDIT / UPDATE Several hours later I am still reading online helps and trying to debug the problem. I have the browser console up and I am running the exact same player's account and am unable to reproduce this issue. Items that are the same: My setup - same as when having the problem. Same laptop as before, no reboot since playing earlier. Same browser - Chrome (as originally when launched the game) Player's setup - same as when having the problem Same laptop as before, no reboot in between either Same Chrome browser that initially failed to load, now loads maps fine. Same player account, same token as was already on the map from the earlier session Items that are different: Only 2 people logged in - me and the player Player map loaded in less than a minute. Did not get stuck on Loading for 30+ minutes. Switched player party to world map at end of session, then I have just switched back to the area map to test if still failing We both had left the game then come back into the session Start time for this "session" was 5:45PM CST USA. Earlier session that went badly was 11:30AM CST USA. To me the only difference is either Time of Day, or Number of Active Players. Is there a spike on Roll20 server usage on Sunday midday USA time? Experience was very different. Nothing else is different. ??