Very concerned about Jumpgate

Hi, TLDR Please consider not making all new games Jumpgate and leave the option for legacy tables. I will probably say this all wrong and get heat for it, but that's not my intent. I just read that all new games will be Jumpgate only and I am planning to go make 20 new legacy tables just in case. In the experience of me and my small group of maybe ~30ish people who play in games together here, almost universally Jumpgate has been problematic. I have a good computer and connection and still I have issues I did not have before Jumpgate. Those of my friends who have older computers or who are playing from some other device cannot play. There's no other way to say it, the games just won't work for them. We have already lost a half dozen players who have said "not playing on Roll20 anymore due to Jumpgate", and I am afraid we are going to lose more. Is this experience unique to us or are others having it too? Thank you.

I am also concerned for this as Jumpgate consistently has problems for me to the point it even messes with my internet. I also have been unbale to use the discord on roll20 for my games as they refuse to load, all except a Jumpgate one I tested & I think they somehow broke the app for legacy games & instead of fixing are refusing & pushing more for Jumpgate.

Hi Don H., and Ultrathewolf,  Could you elaborate on the issues you are having with Jumpgate?  Have you filed a report via the Help Center ? Don,  Were the issues in the early days of Jumpgate or do they continue?  When did you last try to see if your players still have an issue?  Ultrathewolf,  Could you elaborate on how things were broken for you? Some commentary: My understanding is that the Roll20 Legacy engine is very old. For most intents and purposes it is 13 years old. While it has had some updates over the years it is still basically the same engine as what Roll20 started with.  It cannot continue to be updated, the technology is just too old. I feel Roll20's stance here is probably the best possible solution. Let folks continue to play their Legacy games and then move to Jumpgate as those games conclude.  But, and I cannot stress this enough, if you are not reporting these bugs and helping Roll20 with the data they need to solve the problems then Jumpgate will always have those issues. We must be part of the solution here.  P.S. I know one issue with Jumpgate that was causing people issues is an easily solved one. Change the FPS setting from Unlimited FPS to 30 FPS. That has solved the issue many folks were having with both newer and older machines.  Another issue is to make sure you are using Hardware Acceleration in your browser settings. 

Several of my players have been experiencing performance issues ever since I converted my game to jumpgate. Reducing the frame rate doesn't help, and all have verified that hardware acceleration is enabled. I've sent several help tickets over the last several months regarding the problems we've been having and although communication has been good, and my issues have been noted, the problems still persist. The worst experiences have been with large  maps - those approaching 100 grid squares in any direction - which worked without much trouble under the legacy environment. I've tried to keep my maps smaller, but this really restricts opportunities for players characters and NPCs who have abilities with long ranges and for those that can move quickly or fly; it's become pointless to have characters with such abilities if they don't get the chance to use them. Also, I need to redesign and/or replace several scenarios that I had planned that require more than a dozen or so NPC tokens on the map unless those tokens are not linked to character sheets and I don't use dynamic lighting at all because under Jumpgate these types of scenarios are completely unworkable. My current campaign is coming to a conclusion and I have to discard and completely rethink and re-create the planned endgame encounter into which I had  put many hours of work back before Jumpgate was released.

Jimmy said: Thanks for weighing in, Gauss! Don and Ultrathewolf, as Gauss said above, if you are having issues with the Jumpgate engine, please let us know what they are, specifically, so we can troubleshoot with you. You can post directly here, or let me know any ticket numbers you have submitted.  Hi Jimmy, Gauss and others. I listed the problems I have seen consistently in every game in which I have played that is Jumpgate. I am dubious that R20 is going to shut it down based on my forum post so I probably won't fill out a ticket. I can't believe R20 isn't already aware of the issues. Since legacy mode will still work, regardless of engine age, etc., I did as I said above and made several place holder tables in Legacy mode that should last me until I die, or Legacy mode goes away :) Thanks for the response, sorry I couldn't be more help.

I can ask them. Most of them are just trying to play a game and frustrated by Roll20 no longer working like it has for many years. A few have left, sadly. Will put it out there to them, but I am dubious anyone will bite. Apologies in advance. :)

Hi Katie Mae! Our group won't be playing in my campaign until  OCt 12th because I alternate campaigns with another DM, but  I'll certainly give this a try! Is this a "per game" or a "per user" setting? IOW, do each of my players need to chose this option? Katie Mae🔮 said: Howdy! The team is still working on resolving performance issues for a certain subset of Jumpgate users, it's one of their biggest focuses right now! They've actually just released this toggle in settings called Enable Experimental Performance Enhancements this week, and your players sound like the perfect candidates for it! We'd love nothing more than to have your table try it out and let us know how it goes <3 

Jumpgate has been very laggy for all 8 of my players.  I'd be very concerned if I was forced into it. A simple work around in the meantime is to copy an older game so you don't have to default into it. It usually gives you an option to use the old roll20.  I'm hopeful as it's worked on further. But in the meantime people should be allowed to use the older version if it works for them till they have it actually working proper. 

Hi Mr. NumNums,  Have you or your players filed a Help Center report? What troubleshooting steps have you performed to try to resolve the lag? 

Hi When Jumpgate was released a few years back, I probably copied a game, saw a few problems, watched the bug reports threads here getting pages after pages of issues, so I stopped looking at it and kept my games on legacy, telling to myself "I'll switch to JG when there is no other choice" And then this announcement a few days ago. I had a conversation with a french fellow MOD developer and Roll20 user, who told me that some of his players had issues connecting to JG games, even not being able to connect. Don't know the specifics. So I did a copy of my current game to JG, and asked my players to try it before the jump (pun intended). So far, they have connected, checked the new toolbars, the new right-click menu and rotation grip and yellow bubble on tokens, etc.  But I had to correct something first so that they would find their character sheets in the journal where they ought to be. Copy a legacy game to JG where sheets are in folders in the journal, and in the JG copied game, your sheets are removed from their folders and put down at the very bottom of the journal. Did it a few times, always occured. Opened a support ticket, the Roll20 folks responded that they could reproduce it and it has been sent to the dev team for a fix. So... How much trust should I place in Jumpgate if a simple operation such as copying a game still has an annoying issue ?  I can't imagine it has never been noticed and reported. Either those who noticed it did not bother reporting it, or it's not something the dev team wants to fix. Or their bug tickets backlog is so huge they still haven't got to this annoyance. Which kind of more severe bug will I see when playing a session ?  And if that happens, I am supposed to do Roll20 QA, and keep smiling while my 10 bucks subscription is paid each month.  My 0.02 € 

Hi StephaneD,  I cannot speak to whether that bug has been reported or not, but I can say that I am not surprised it hasn't been caught. As your own post indicates, folks are reluctant, for whatever reason, to file bug reports. I suspect folks notice it, get annoyed, and don't report.  It is a real problem for any kind of platform, not just Roll20. 

Howdy! The team is still working on resolving performance issues for a certain subset of Jumpgate users, it's one of their biggest focuses right now! They've actually just released this toggle in settings called Enable Experimental Performance Enhancements this week, and your players sound like the perfect candidates for it! We'd love nothing more than to have your table try it out and let us know how it goes <3  I can tell you that when I tried this setting in my Jumpgate game, I could no longer see status markers on tokens.  I would have to toggle them on/off or add a 2nd one to make them show up.    At first I had no clue what was causing the issue, but once I turned off that setting it all went back to normal.

Windows 10, Firefox, Jumpgate, 2014 character sheet, Dungeon of the Mad Mage / Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, running 52 API Scripts. I am experiencing lag especially during a game while other players are logged on. I am hosting up to 4 players but when there is even one player logged on the lag sometimes makes it unplayable. It used to work fine.

Where do I find the Experimental Performance toggle? I've looked in Campaign Settings and can't seem to locate it. Howdy! The team is still working on resolving performance issues for a certain subset of Jumpgate users, it's one of their biggest focuses right now! They've actually just released this toggle in settings called Enable Experimental Performance Enhancements this week, and your players sound like the perfect candidates for it! We'd love nothing more than to have your table try it out and let us know how it goes <3 

Hultz (Keeper of Secrets) said: Where do I find the Experimental Performance toggle? I've looked in Campaign Settings and can't seem to locate it. In your game > My Settings > Graphics > it's a checkmark here called Enable Experimental Performance Enhancements 

Hultz (Keeper of Secrets) said: Where do I find the Experimental Performance toggle? I've looked in Campaign Settings and can't seem to locate it. Howdy! The team is still working on resolving performance issues for a certain subset of Jumpgate users, it's one of their biggest focuses right now! They've actually just released this toggle in settings called Enable Experimental Performance Enhancements this week, and your players sound like the perfect candidates for it! We'd love nothing more than to have your table try it out and let us know how it goes <3 

Hello You should have read further down my post. I explained that when the November strategy change was announced, I gave JG another try and found this annoyance with the character sheets being moved out of their folders each and every time I copy a legacy game to JG I just did it once again just now and the issue is still there. Here are the folders where the char sheets are originally located Only the companions NPC sheets are still where they should be. Please note that I created these sheets as GM of the game The PC sheets that the players created themselves are moved down at the end of the journal. Maybe that’s the cause of the issue ? Since the sheets can be then moved back to their places, it’s not critical.  Just annoying and not making me too confident with the new engine if a simple game copy has glitches like this….

That's interesting.  When I read this item (around an hour ago) I tested it with a really old legacy game I had lying around, and it didn't move the PCs to the bottom, but left them in their folder (it was a subfolder under a parent folder, if that helps). But I have noticed that Roll20 tends to put player-created sheets at the bottom of the Journal on creation, while DM created ones go to the top, so it could depend on how the sheet was originally created (all of my player sheets in that game were created by the DM, me)

Thanks for the feedback Ken Well sounds like on oversight from the devs when they wrote the copy Legacy > JG function In any case, I'm simply copying a game, I am not supposed to re-organize and fix it afterwards

Hi StephaneD,  Are the PCs connected to Roll20 Characters? You can check by opening the character, clicking Edit, and if it has "remove from game" instead of "delete" then it is a Roll20 Characters Character.  If so I think that might provide an explanation of the issue. 

Hi Gauss The button is Delete.  The sheet is developed by me for a French RPG system with the agreement of the publisher but not much more support. It is therefore not available on the Roll20 Characters tool. In the original game I am copying from, the options to allow players to create and import characters are enabled. The sheets that are moved down the journal after the copy to JG were created by the players in the game (not outside the VTT). Those which stay at their place in the folders were created by me as the GM.

StéphaneD said: Hi Gauss The button is Delete.  The sheet is developed by me for a French RPG system with the agreement of the publisher but not much more support. It is therefore not available on the Roll20 Characters tool. In the original game I am copying from, the options to allow players to create and import characters are enabled. The sheets that are moved down the journal after the copy to JG were created by the players in the game (not outside the VTT). Those which stay at their place in the folders were created by me as the GM. Ok, thanks for the extra information. :)

Gauss said: Hi Mr. NumNums,  Have you or your players filed a Help Center report? What troubleshooting steps have you performed to try to resolve the lag?  Been here before.  Lit 2 of my players are computer tech lol.  You guys just haven't worked out all the bugs. I get you're all trying to implement alot of moving parts. So it'll take time. I look forward to seeing what it looks like once it's polished and finished. 

As the OC said, please don't force new games to be Jumpgate. There's actually a decent number — based on our tables' players — of people playing on a VTT that aren't  video gamers and thus, don't have a gaming rig with a discrete gpu. I actually run sessions on a SFF Dell with integrated graphics, and the old Roll20 interface is enough of a challenge. This is acually one of the least demanding VTTs, graphics-wise, which is why we use it, even though your PF1e sheet and support is inferior to other VTTs. I can't afford a gaming PC to VTT, and neither can a lot of our other players. We may end up having to just ditch Roll20 and figuring out how to cobble with a dice roller on Discord and screenshots.

Tonja T. said: As the OC said, please don't force new games to be Jumpgate. There's actually a decent number — based on our tables' players — of people playing on a VTT that aren't  video gamers and thus, don't have a gaming rig with a discrete gpu. I actually run sessions on a SFF Dell with integrated graphics, and the old Roll20 interface is enough of a challenge. This is acually one of the least demanding VTTs, graphics-wise, which is why we use it, even though your PF1e sheet and support is inferior to other VTTs. I can't afford a gaming PC to VTT, and neither can a lot of our other players. We may end up having to just ditch Roll20 and figuring out how to cobble with a dice roller on Discord and screenshots. One of the goals of Jumpgate is to be easier on people's machines, not require a gaming machine. It is why Roll20 needs reports from folks that are having difficulty with Jumpgate, so they can find the issues that are specific to those folks' machines and remedy them. 

I've often wondered if the problems that many people are having with Jumpgate has not so much to do with the capabilities of their personal devices but with the browsers being used. Chrome and now even Firefox are pretty bloated and both suffer from memory leaks. I also wonder about the efficiency of information transmittal between the servers that Roll20 uses and the player's devices (some days the VTT is quite responsive while on others it's downright boggy). I know that there's a lot of "conversation" between the VTT and all the players that are logged in. Some of my players' complain that they have to disable or nerf their VPN in order to play, and that's got to be because the VPN restricts traffic. If that's the case  I don't know how to get around that unless it's to use a dedicated browser specifically designed for Roll20's VTT. Gauss said: One of the goals of Jumpgate is to be easier on people's machines, not require a gaming machine. It is why Roll20 needs reports from folks that are having difficulty with Jumpgate, so they can find the issues that are specific to those folks' machines and remedy them. 

Rick, I definitely agree that Roll20 needs to broaden it's official list of browsers. There are definitely other options out there that might be better than Chrome or Firefox. 

Interesting thought Rick. In my experience I use Chrome and go back and forth between Legacy and Jumpgate tables. I have no problems on the Legacy table and have maybe 1 in 10 players who do, usually trackable to their computer system being a bit out of date. The Jumpgate tables are as I said at the top...problematic for one and almost all in those games. I am curious what others have seen. Gauss, as a thought, what if Roll20 put together a few teams of players whose main mission was to play games and stress test the system during intensive use times (Fridays, Saturdays). Get some software/hardware professionals in these sessions and perhaps they could give more useful feedback than a layperson like myself who is just likely to say 'it's bad' without giving useful feedback for the Roll20 team. Rick A. said: I've often wondered if the problems that many people are having with Jumpgate has not so much to do with the capabilities of their personal devices but with the browsers being used...

Don H. said: Gauss, as a thought, what if Roll20 put together a few teams of players whose main mission was to play games and stress test the system during intensive use times (Fridays, Saturdays). Get some software/hardware professionals in these sessions and perhaps they could give more useful feedback than a layperson like myself who is just likely to say 'it's bad' without giving useful feedback for the Roll20 team. Unfortunately that wouldn't be enough. The majority of people seem to not have much problem with Jumpgate (not going to say no problem, perhaps they aren't reporting the issue(s)). BUT, a segment of the population is always going to find things that the QA testers and the majority of population does not find/experience.  It could be a hardware issue, software, or just some rarely used combination of things that causes a weird behavior.  With that said, I DM games during intensive use times and I do report the issues to Roll20. 

I lean toward the thought that many people have had issue and just don't report it. We can get into the ethics of that some other time if you like. I think the reality is they aren't Pro members, let alone Elite members, and it's easier to quit playing here and go play elsewhere - that might mean video games or something else besides a roleplaying table. Were you around for the Tabula Rasa beta/soft open? It was a video game made years ago that had tremendous opportunity, but it was also one of the first games to let people in before the finished product was done. In one week the game went from the hottest new product on the market to total devastation as most people, instead of reporting problems, bugs, etc. to the developers like they promised they would in the beta "contract", just quit and went out to the internet to tell their friends how bad the experience was. They SHOULD have talked it out and been part of the process, but instead, they generated the most negative marketing campaign online that a company had experienced to that point. Very soon, the game was dead. All that to say my feeling is most players don't feel an obligation or social contract to report problems - imagine you can't get a website to open correctly but somehow you are expected to report this to the devs on the same website that won't open correctly for you. They just say, "this sucks", and go do something else. Gauss said: Don H. said: Gauss, as a thought, what if Roll20 put together a few teams of players whose main mission was to play games and stress test the system during intensive use times (Fridays, Saturdays). Get some software/hardware professionals in these sessions and perhaps they could give more useful feedback than a layperson like myself who is just likely to say 'it's bad' without giving useful feedback for the Roll20 team. Unfortunately that wouldn't be enough. The majority of people seem to not have much problem with Jumpgate (not going to say no problem, perhaps they aren't reporting the issue(s)). BUT, a segment of the population is always going to find things that the QA testers and the majority of population does not find/experience.  It could be a hardware issue, software, or just some rarely used combination of things that causes a weird behavior.  With that said, I DM games during intensive use times and I do report the issues to Roll20. 

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