Animations still messing up

I've written about this before, but never got a solution. I have animations that I bought on the Roll20 marketplace, and they keep messing up. It doesn't matter which browser, whether I deleted my cache or not, or which device I use. It keeps happening for me and for my players, and I've seen other people here talk about the same problem. So, this is a SERIOUS issue with Roll20 where I basically can't use the animations I bought correctly. I would REALLY appreciate an answer from the Roll20 team that goes beyond "have you tried deleting your cache" or something like that. Yes, I tried ALL that. And no, the WebRTC-Log that I downloaded doesn't show any errors. Tried that several times in different situations, and there never was an error in the log. Here's what happens: Sometimes, animations I have placed simply disappear, or they don't appear at all right after loading. When I reload, they're there again as if nothing ever happened. Not always, but if it doesn't work, I just reload several times. As this happened with my players last session, and the animations I included were ESSENTIAL to solve a riddle, they missed seeing items that were necessary to solve a task. Or in other words: THIS MESSED UP MY GAME. Sometimes, animations get displayed totally wrong. I think it's something about transparency messing up. A floating light turns into a light floating through a coloured rectangle box, stuff like that. See screenshots. Example 1: The left and the right one are the same animation. The left light is moving around correctly, the right one moves, too, but with the orange and black background. Which I really don't want to show my players during game. It's seriously messing up the mood. Same map after logging in again, the animations simply don't show. Reloading, the animations are there again. Example 2: The four lampposts are also animations that I bought. It's all the same file. The two above display correctly, the two below mess up. This seems to be some really bad glitch in how Roll20 handles animations. In my experience, it gets worse with more animations - but this might just be because the probability of something like that happening gets higher with more animations. PLEASE, Roll20 developers, look into this glitch! It's been messing with my games for MONTHS now, and last session it almost ruined my adventure's main puzzle. This is serious!

And it keeps happening. The screen with the portal animation is my GM view (Chrome). Animation is on token layer and shows perfectly for me. Player view (Opera): No portal. Which pretty much sucks, as the very task of the players is to close that portal. Come on, Roll20, this is getting ridiculous. You SELL these animations. They really should show up in the game then!! (Yes, I'm getting seriously annoyed here.)

Opera is not a supported browser for Roll20. Have your player try Firefox or Chrome.

If you're using UDL, overlapping nightvision is currently also breaking animations along with making the grid disappear and whatever else.  So that could potentially account for some of what you're seeing.

Rabulias said: Opera is not a supported browser for Roll20. Have your player try Firefox or Chrome. As written in the original post, I tried this with a variety of browsers. Chrome, Firefox... keeps happening.

Sean G. said: If you're using UDL, overlapping nightvision is currently also breaking animations along with making the grid disappear and whatever else.  So that could potentially account for some of what you're seeing. OK, this is helpful, thanks! Yes, I noticed this in particular with night vision. But also in daylight mode without night vision active for the player tokens.

Okay, I tried to really minimize all possible sources of problems here and see what it needed to mess up animations. First attempt, and (sadly) succeeded in recreating it. I made an empty map, Grid and Fog of War turned off, Dynamic Lighting and Daylight mode turned on. Then I placed a player token on the map, and logged in with this player in Chrome Incognito mode. After that, I placed a single animation of circling lights on the map. This happened on the player map: GM view was pretty much the same. Instead of circling lights, I see the black box wth the grey area inside moving, and in there are the spots that are supposed to be the lights. There is no unsupported browser involved, no night vision, no extensions, even in Chrome Incognito made it happens. Did I mention that I am VERY unhappy about this and it keeps wrecking my games?!

As it just happened again, and animations that I added simply disappear randomly, sometimes appear again when I reload, sometimes not... I was wondering if ANYONE at the Roll20 team even READS these posts? Or do you totally ignore your paying customers who are UNABLE to use their purchases due to serious programming bugs?! I get it, the (serious) Dynamic Lighting problems probably take up a lot of your time. But that doesn't mean you can just ignore any other topic coming up! I am VERY VERY VERY FRUSTRATED HERE!!!!

Aloha, i've just bought 6 animations pack before finding out this subject and i have the same issues than you are confronting. Why are these packs on the market ? It seems that this trouble is on for years !  

TACKIAN N. said: Aloha, i've just bought 6 animations pack before finding out this subject and i have the same issues than you are confronting. Why are these packs on the market ? It seems that this trouble is on for years !   I don't understand it, either! The artwork that the animation artists sell here are amazing, I love using them in my games. But the technical bugs ruin them almost entirely, even wrecking my games sometimes. And the Roll20 team doesn't seem to care AT ALL. Worst support ever :-(

Aaaaand I just encountered a new way of animations messing up. They do appear - but just as a static image. The animation isn't on pause or anything, it just doesn't start. No night vision active, tested on different browsers with no add ons, cleared cache, everything. I put the animation on the screen, and both player and GM only see a still image. Sometimes I wonder if Roll20 has any kind of serious testing processes, or if the paying customers are just alpha testers. I've been working in IT projects for many years, and all I can say is, something is SERIOUSLY wrong here.

Heiner said: Aaaaand I just encountered a new way of animations messing up. They do appear - but just as a static image. The animation isn't on pause or anything, it just doesn't start. No night vision active, tested on different browsers with no add ons, cleared cache, everything. I put the animation on the screen, and both player and GM only see a still image. This is actually worse than I though. It's not just the the animation visually doesn't start - the token doesn't have the animation features. So this animation is ACTUALLY put on the map as a still image. WHAT THE HELL is going on here?? Did I mention I would REALLY like to hear something about this from the Roll20 team? ANYONE out there?

I feel your pain, though from a slightly different angle. I believe it has a lot to do with the lighting debacle currently plaguing everyone with an account. As a marketplace creator, working very specifically to create animated tokens, my sales are being severely hammered because users don't want to fork up their $$ for something that straight up doesn't work. Thankfully, I don't rely on income from Roll20, but I fail to see any reason to keep putting forth effort to produce new packs when people aren't buying anything because the system is borked. Revenue has steadily decreased since the first "sunsetting" announcement of LDL, either because animated assets just wouldn't work properly in UDL or because people were leaving the system for alternative VTTs.

Christopher K said: I feel your pain, though from a slightly different angle. I believe it has a lot to do with the lighting debacle currently plaguing everyone with an account. As a marketplace creator, working very specifically to create animated tokens, my sales are being severely hammered because users don't want to fork up their $$ for something that straight up doesn't work. Thankfully, I don't rely on income from Roll20, but I fail to see any reason to keep putting forth effort to produce new packs when people aren't buying anything because the system is borked. Revenue has steadily decreased since the first "sunsetting" announcement of LDL, either because animated assets just wouldn't work properly in UDL or because people were leaving the system for alternative VTTs. Oh wow, so this shows it's really a massive problem for a lot of people. And the Roll20 team keeps ignoring it since months. This is horrible :-( Glad you don't rely on the income, but still really, really bad. Both for you and for people like me who love using these animations and are totally willing to pay for it (I bought LOTS of packs!). I used to really love Roll20, but honestly, if this doesn't get fixed soon, I'm seriously considering changing the platform as well. I mean, they don't even care enough to react to it :-/

Did I mention I would REALLY like to hear something about this from the Roll20 team? ANYONE out there? So, another week gone, more people complaining about animations in the forums, and still no reactions from the Roll20 team . Week after week entirely ignoring that your PAID products that you KEEP SELLING are so bugged that it CRASHES people's games . Yeah, sure, no reaction needed from you here. I mean, what do I as a paying customer expect from you? That you care if what you sell actually works? That you take the time to at the VERY LEAST acknowledge that you REALIZE there's a problem? Guess I'm expecting too much here. Yeah, I'm seriously getting cynical here. Thanks, Roll20 team. I was a real fan once, but what you're doing (or rather, not doing) here just totally sucks.

Have you submitted a Technical Issues Request ?  The forums are generally for users helping each other these days, and if your issue was especially common or something we had any idea how to help you with, you probably would have gotten a few more responses by now. It would be nice if Roll20 would respond.  And I wouldn't be under any illusions that they'll be more helpful there, but that would at least be the proper channel for this.

Sean G. said: Have you submitted a Technical Issues Request ?  The forums are generally for users helping each other these days, and if your issue was especially common or something we had any idea how to help you with, you probably would have gotten a few more responses by now. It would be nice if Roll20 would respond.  And I wouldn't be under any illusions that they'll be more helpful there, but that would at least be the proper channel for this. Yes, I tried, but no response so far. And since this is wrecking my games and rendering purchased packs useless, it's pretty urgent for me. So yeah, I'm trying all channels available - unfortunately, the Roll20 team ignores me on all of them.

As I keep using this as a bug report summary thread, here's another thing I just noticed. I had placed some fairie fire animations on a map. After a couple of times logging in and out, they were suddenly gone - for good, it seems. No amount of reloading helped, switching browsers or whatever else - nothing worked. So far, a behaviour I noticed several times already. (And yeah, it seriously sucks.) But I just added another two fairie fires on that map, meant as a "replacement" of the previous ones. And reloading NOW made them ALL come back. As if placing the new animations somehow "resetted" them other ones. Come on, Roll20 Team, I'm really delivering information here. I don't WANT to switch to a different platform. I used to love Roll20. I've submitted a bug tech assistance request a while ago, and linked it to this thread. This is a CRITICAL bug. PLEASE help me out here. This HAS to be fixed!

Hey there, I feel your pain. I was working on some projects over the summer using my own animations and kept running head first into these kind of problems and have since abandoned them. I've only returned because this place is what some of my current players are use to, but I won't be putting any of the effort into it like I was before. If it helps any, you can find some of mine and other's experimentations with potential fixes here . It has since been locked due to age, but there was even a few responses in that thread from the official team. They seem to boil down to  (and please correct me if I'm wrong here) that the UDL system was their top priority at the time (and that seems to be still the case) and that fixing anything with animations would both 1) take time away from working on the lighting and 2) probably be accidentally undone at some point due to both systems being tied to the same things. I took this to mean that once the lighting system was stable and finished, the could then take another look at animations and have a solid foundation to work from. But it's going on 10 months since I originally left and well... here we are. :-( Edit:  I'll also add that those attempts at navigating the problems were as of 10 months ago. I have no idea what (if anything) has changed for the better or worse since then... and I'm not really interested in going through all that again to find out. :-)

FarricSarhorn said: Hey there, I feel your pain. I was working on some projects over the summer using my own animations and kept running head first into these kind of problems and have since abandoned them. I've only returned because this place is what some of my current players are use to, but I won't be putting any of the effort into it like I was before. If it helps any, you can find some of mine and other's experimentations with potential fixes here . It has since been locked due to age, but there was even a few responses in that thread from the official team. They seem to boil down to  (and please correct me if I'm wrong here) that the UDL system was their top priority at the time (and that seems to be still the case) and that fixing anything with animations would both 1) take time away from working on the lighting and 2) probably be accidentally undone at some point due to both systems being tied to the same things. I took this to mean that once the lighting system was stable and finished, the could then take another look at animations and have a solid foundation to work from. But it's going on 10 months since I originally left and well... here we are. :-( Edit:  I'll also add that those attempts at navigating the problems were as of 10 months ago. I have no idea what (if anything) has changed for the better or worse since then... and I'm not really interested in going through all that again to find out. :-) Thanks for the feedback. I'll go through the potential fixes, though I'm not very hopeful - tried a lot already. You know, I understand the UDL priority. But simply keeping people waiting for such a long time with SO many BIG problems is just... well, in past jobs, I've kicked agencies because of such stuff. It's simply, sorry to say, totally and utterly unprofessional. And the fact they don't even care to REPLY to people really shows the kind of mindset here. The main reason I haven't switched yet is that I'm not super happy with the alternatives. But yes, patience is wearing off. It's really unbelievable what they're doing there.