Roll20 on IPhone Question

So I was in a situation last Friday where I didn’t have my tablet and my scheduled game was about to start. I just had my iPhone 8 Plus and I go, ‘I wonder..’. I pulled up safari>roll20>launch game and a few seconds later, bam! There’s my DMs game, map and all. I could move my token, read chat, edit my character sheet, pretty much everything was working no problem. So I’m like, “Alright! Sweet!”. This was a home brew map my DM had cooked up as kind of a prelude to the main event. We were to do Lost Mines of Phandelver afterwards. So about 30 minutes in, that first encounter is over, and he loads the official Phandelver content: Stuck on black loading screen where the map is supposed to be, indefinitely. I trudged on, letting my DM move for me, albeit grudgingly. I could still roll and chat, just couldn’t see or interact with the map anymore. So, my question: Why did mobile safari on iPhone allow me to play a home brew map, dynamic lighting and all, without issue.. while crapping out when it came to the official content? I KNOW iPhone is not officially supported, so please don’t tell me that. I’m honestly looking for a ‘technical’ explanation as to why the first map would work just fine, while the official content wouldn’t work at all. Furthermore, if anyone knows a potential work around or possible way to fix this, please let me know. I’d really love to play on my Iphone and I feel like I’m SO close to pulling it off. (I tried to search this up but I didn’t find the answer to my question. Info about the companion app overshadowed any useful technical info that might have been lurking about) thank you :) edit: I tried mobile chrome and Firefox, same deal 😒

Henrah said: So I was in a situation last Friday where I didn’t have my tablet and my scheduled game was about to start. I just had my iPhone 8 Plus and I go, ‘I wonder..’. I pulled up safari&gt;roll20&gt;launch game and a few seconds later, bam! There’s my DMs game, map and all. I could move my token, read chat, edit my character sheet, pretty much everything was working no problem. So I’m like, “Alright! Sweet!”. This was a home brew map my DM had cooked up as kind of a prelude to the main event. We were to do Lost Mines of Phandelver afterwards. So about 30 minutes in, that first encounter is over, and he loads the official Phandelver content: Stuck on black loading screen where the map is supposed to be, indefinitely. I trudged on, letting my DM move for me, albeit grudgingly. I could still roll and chat, just couldn’t see or interact with the map anymore. So, my question: Why did mobile safari on iPhone allow me to play a home brew map, dynamic lighting and all, without issue.. while crapping out when it came to the official content? I KNOW iPhone is not officially supported, so please don’t tell me that. I’m honestly looking for a ‘technical’ explanation as to why the first map would work just fine, while the official content wouldn’t work at all. Furthermore, if anyone knows a potential work around or possible way to fix this, please let me know. I’d really love to play on my Iphone and I feel like I’m SO close to pulling it off. (I tried to search this up but I didn’t find the answer to my question. Info about the companion app overshadowed any useful technical info that might have been lurking about) thank you :) edit: I tried mobile chrome and Firefox, same deal  Iphone 8 is pretty old, Your hardware probably couldn't handle the newest version of webgl.&nbsp;&nbsp; Does your phone see a rotating cube in the following link? <a href="https://get.webgl.org/" rel="nofollow">https://get.webgl.org/</a>

iPhone8 supports webgl. A critical test to ensure the iPhone is the issue would be to load the exact same game on the exact same account at the same time on a desktop web browser.

I’ve loaded the official game maps on my tablet without issue before. I just don’t have access to it sometimes. It’s a cheap android tablet. Yes I see the rotating square. The official game maps just straight won’t load (stuck on black loading screen) and I’m curious as to why, when imported maps work just fine. I wonder if there’s anything I can do to fix it. edit: fyi I bought an iPhone 8 Plus on purpose. It’s the last model that has a button at the bottom. Later models don’t have home buttons. I like the button.

FWIW, I see the same behavior on my iPhone 8. It will load a custom map just fine, but chokes on official maps. I didn't do a deep dive test, because using Roll20 on a screen that small is frankly a miserable experience. On my iPad, things behave more normally.Since as you have noted, the phone is not supported, I doubt appealing to a&nbsp; Help Center Request &nbsp;will do much good. But for the technical reasons, I could only make uneducated guesses.

FWIW, I was surprised by how well the site worked on the iPad. Again, not a deep dive, but responsiveness was great.

keithcurtis said: FWIW, I see the same behavior on my iPhone 8. It will load a custom map just fine, but chokes on official maps. I didn't do a deep dive test, because using Roll20 on a screen that small is frankly a miserable experience. On my iPad, things behave more normally.Since as you have noted, the phone is not supported, I doubt appealing to a&nbsp; Help Center Request &nbsp;will do much good. But for the technical reasons, I could only make uneducated guesses. I didn’t personally find roll20 on mobile phone to be a miserable experience. I have a plus model, so it’s a bit bigger than a standard iPhone. Then by zooming out the page to 75%, I found that I could easily access every aspect needed to play on the VTT. FWIW, I wish they would support iPhones and the like. It doesn’t seem like it would be much of a stretch to fix this single issue of ‘choking’ on official maps. I’d greatly appreciate that.

If anyone else is interested in playing on their iPhone in safari, either in a pinch or otherwise, I’ve found the solution.&nbsp; It seems mobile safari comes preloaded with a few of its experimental features turned on (settings&gt;safari&gt;advanced&gt;experimental features). I simply went into those settings and disabled them all, reloaded roll20, and the official content loaded quickly and easy. Im unsure precisely which feature was interfering with roll20. I may do some testing there if it becomes an issue having all experimental features disabled, but I can’t see why it would. I’d be interested if anyone else who has experienced this issue, such as the gentleman above me, would be able to duplicate these results following my suggestion. Please let me know!

Henrah said: If anyone else is interested in playing on their iPhone in safari, either in a pinch or otherwise, I’ve found the solution.&nbsp; It seems mobile safari comes preloaded with a few of its experimental features turned on (settings&gt;safari&gt;advanced&gt;experimental features). I simply went into those settings and disabled them all, reloaded roll20, and the official content loaded quickly and easy. Im unsure precisely which feature was interfering with roll20. I may do some testing there if it becomes an issue having all experimental features disabled, but I can’t see why it would. I’d be interested if anyone else who has experienced this issue, such as the gentleman above me, would be able to duplicate these results following my suggestion. Please let me know! I'm sure a mac fanatic would be upset to hear you say Metal is experimental hehe.&nbsp; I was going to respond here and suggest you go into the hood and switch off Metal.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Thanks for the tip, Henrah. And yeah, a bit larger screen would have made a big difference.

I don’t recall seeing metal in the experimental features. I’m honestly not sure what most of them did or how a handful of them got turned on in the first place. Hopefully disabling them all doesn’t come back to haunt me later (like being unable to play some other game), but for now I’m happy that I can now use roll20 on my phone without issue. I can always go back in there and start flipping them back on if I find out one is needed for some other application. fyi, turning them ALL on at once (which I tried first) causes safari to sh!t it’s pants and stop working completely- so don’t do that, lol. edit: is the whole host of ‘experimental’ features collectively known as ‘metal’?

Metal is a suite of APIs (in this case, for iOS) used to control some advanced graphic functions, such as ray tracing, and can give the phone the option to transfer them to the GPU or not. One of the options is "WebGL over Metal" which might be the culprit. Hard to tell. There's a lot of options. Apple files them under Experimental on iOS. Basically, tinkering here is the rough equivalent of setting chrome flags.

I noted the webgl on metal as it was one of the few options for which I had an inkling of what it was for. That would seem like the logical culprit, but surprisingly wasn’t one of the ones initially turned on iirc. Anyways, thanks for the info.