Question About Map Size

How well. or poorly, do 100x100 maps perform? I've set 100x100 as my absolute limit and never make anything larger than that. For instance I have a 100x100 city map with tons of buildings and the players can walk around the city, shop at the market square in the center of the city, and enter the 7 largest buildings. I'm currently working on a dungeon using the Instant Dungeon Creator pack from the Marketplace and I want it to be 3 floors deep each floor being 100x100. I wanted a fairly large dungeon. How well.. or poorly.. will this perform for the players? I'm running a high-end gaming laptop so I have no issue with it. It loads up fine and there is no lag or issues when walking around with a token. Will players with average rigs run into any issues with maps this size?

The lowest performing computer/internet connection in your group is the bottom line. If you go big, you need to keep light sources, D.L. walls to a minimum. Unless you really need line of sight, don't give your monsters vision. Roll 20 only loads the minimum needed for the players, if you keep it sparse and localized they will get through it. Don't make the mistake of dropping vision/light tokens where they have been, this is just for video gamers who need the way mapped. If they get lost one time, they will start keeping rudders or marking the map. I encourage players to take white and make discreet chalk marks to map their way out. If they do too much drawing on the map, have intelligent monsters change their marks.

Thanks for the information. When I first got into Dynamic Lighting, I thought that light sources had to have "Has Sight" checked to give off their light. I also thought I needed "Has Sight" on all NPCs for some reason don't remember why I thought that. Anyways ended up with 113 light sources and 44 NPCs with "Has Sight" so it was recalculating line of sight and lighting 160+ times every time a PC moved. This was on a 100 x 100 map. Oddly enough I had no slow down issues with this map when I had those settings. Now, however, I NEVER give an NPC "Has Sight" - Line of Sight for NPCs is easy to calculate by using the measuring tool or even just eyeballing it. One of my only concerns is I use "PageFX" liberally. On the 100 x 100 first floor of a 3 floor dungeon I'm working on I already have 7 light sources with a "campfire" sparks FX on them and 6 vents on the map floor with smoke FX coming out of them. I stagger the animation cycle from all the others so no two FX run at the same time. This tends to speed things up and I don't get lag for a few seconds then all at once a dozen FX fire. Anyone have any other input they can add about optimizing 100 x 100 maps?

I run pages, sometimes larger than 100x100. All of the usual lag/weight/processing/bandwidth factors apply. All of the factors mentioned above apply (number of light sources, complexity of DL walls, number of tokens, number of PageFX particle effects; etc) and probably others (such as number of Character Sheets x number of Attributes). The more that's added, the heavier the weight becomes, affecting lower-end computers first. Optimized? The most-optimized 100x100 would not use DL or AFoW, and would not use Character Sheets, no 3D dice, or background map tiles (just a nice plain solid background color), and little pixel-sprites for tokens. :) Are you using Advanced Fog? Using AFoW on top of DL, on top of large page size, (can work but) can be a lot to load and track. So as a practical matter, any-all of the ways to optimize that you can. Fewer light sources, straighter DL walls, less FX (if necessary, I understand you want to use a lot which looks really cool) stay on square grid don't change to Hexes especially not Numbered hexes. If you run into a problem (Player complaints of lag), troubleshoot it from there and cut back for the next Page. Go Big. Happy adventuring!

Page FX proved to be a major resource hog for me. I don't use it at all.

keithcurtis said: Page FX proved to be a major resource hog for me. I don't use it at all. I've had issues with it as well. The map will lag for 2 to 5 seconds then all the FX will fire at once, some of them multiple times on top of each other if they are set to run more often than once every 5 seconds. However, I found a way to use two dozen or more FX on a page with no lag or slow down. Just stagger the timers by 500 milliseconds so if I have five PageFX running I run them at: 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 This greatly reduces the work load on the page and allows you to use numerous PageFX objects without any resource issues.

It's been a while since I used it, but for whatever reason, I had issues with even one instance. I've switched browsers since then, though...