Animated Weather Overlays

Weather Overlays in the Marketplace Spice up your wilderness encounters with weather animations! Check out  this high quality video  for a good look at all the effects included. What you can find in the pack: Fog Fog (thick) Rain Rain (top down) Rain Storm Snow Snow (top down) Dust Motes / Bokeh I hope you like it!

Take Took my money.  Sweet work.  Thank you.

Thank you Vince, I'm glad you like them!

The animations themselves are really well done, but unfortunately the effects almost unusable for large maps. Having more than two of the 25x25 or 30x30 animations active at the same time takes almost all of my CPU and GPU processing power (Firefox, 95-100%), freezing all animations and causing intense lag. Probably has to do with the way Roll20 uses animations, but unfortunately trying to cover larger map with these animations is not currently possible... The map I tried these on was 70x40 squares with dynamic lighting.

Hi Memm, thank you for the kind words! I'm sorry you're experiencing lag with them; I've asked to see if there are any news regarding animation lag and if there's anything users can do to improve the situation while Roll20 works on a fix. While not everyone seems to have the problems, it's widespread enough that it should be handled quickly by Roll20 (one could hope). There's also a known bug with audio + animations that drastically worsens the experience. After Roll20 re-encodes the animations they tend to be around 1mb each (and were ~10mb max before that), so in theory they shouldn't be causing such cpu spike; I'm hoping they can fix the platform soon so we can enjoy them properly. I'll let you know if they mention any fixes. In the meantime the only thing that comes to mind that might help (besides no audio, if you're being hit by that bug) is hardware acceleration, but that's usually enabled by default on most browsers. Worst case scenario, the Layer Up update will be ready for testing in around a month if they keep to their schedule. It will be a new layer that supports animations with areas of effect and hidden parts made specifically for weather, so hopefully they'll have the solution by then. I'm sorry I don't have better news yet, but there's not much more I can do but wait for Roll20 at this point :/

Nick S. said: Hi Memm, thank you for the kind words! I'm sorry you're experiencing lag with them; I've asked to see if there are any news regarding animation lag and if there's anything users can do to improve the situation while Roll20 works on a fix. While not everyone seems to have the problems, it's widespread enough that it should be handled quickly by Roll20 (one could hope). There's also a known bug with audio + animations that drastically worsens the experience. After Roll20 re-encodes the animations they tend to be around 1mb each (and were ~10mb max before that), so in theory they shouldn't be causing such cpu spike; I'm hoping they can fix the platform soon so we can enjoy them properly. I'll let you know if they mention any fixes. In the meantime the only thing that comes to mind that might help (besides no audio, if you're being hit by that bug) is hardware acceleration, but that's usually enabled by default on most browsers. Worst case scenario, the Layer Up update will be ready for testing in around a month if they keep to their schedule. It will be a new layer that supports animations with areas of effect and hidden parts made specifically for weather, so hopefully they'll have the solution by then. I'm sorry I don't have better news yet, but there's not much more I can do but wait for Roll20 at this point :/ Yeah, unfortunately the problem is with the way Roll20 handles animations. Normally my CPU usage is -- even in a campaign with 5 years worth of stuff and large maps filled with assets -- around 5-10%. However, as soon as I add one 25x25 weather animation the CPU usage goes all the way up to 45%. Add in another and the CPU usage is ~80%. Third one clogs the computer. That's just bonkers. That said, these weather animations are superb. Shame that Roll20 doesn't work well with animations :/

I just purchased this set and am trying them out. Pretty disappointed. Reading your comments above, it seems you are well aware of the problems with this set and I suggest you remove them from the market place until the problems are resolved. I gather Roll20 need to make some changes before these animations will be usable. Otherwise you may find a lot of ill-will created as other buyers come back here to bitch. I have been testing these now: 1. They only work in Chrome, not Firefox. I can't prescribe what browser my players must use. (In Firefox I get a black animated place holder to show where the animation would go, which covers up my map. Screenshot below shows 1 rain and 1 fog animation.). 2. They push CPU usage up high. Some of my players have crummy computers and will struggle.

Hi Andrew, I'm sorry to hear you're disappointed with the set, though I fully understand the sentiment with the way Roll20 performs with all animations at the moment. They've already implemented some patches to fix a few of the issues, but there's still a way to go until they're performing well for everyone.  I have asked our marketplace liaison to see if we can have a proper conversation with the devs working on animations, hopefully that'll shed some light on the timeline for future fixes and what's being done now to solve these problems; we're pushing for better quality and performance. The high cpu is an undeniable problem, however Firefox should work well with animations (I am testing right now with Chrome, Opera and Firefox). Perhaps updating the browser instead of changing it might also help in this case, since that one thing is probably Firefox's ability to render translucent .webm files and not a Roll20 issue (my version of Firefox is: Firefox Quantum 64.0.2 (64-bit), not the last one, but should be close). I'll bring it up to the devs too just in case.

Hi Nick Thanks for your prompt reply. I am using Firefox 66.0.0, but will dig around in the Options and see if there is something that can be done. I appreciate your openness about the problem. I know browser compatibility can be an endless headache for developers! :)  If your testing reveals any clues for what users can do to to self-help, please keep us updated. Good luck!

As I assume the weather effect files are vp8 webm: From the animation file-types supported by roll20 only webm allows the use of real transparency. GIFs in example create a pixelated mess in terms of transparency.  In addition to that it also matters if it is vp8 or vp9 webm, as the marketplace itself only supports vp8 (older version), although roll20 itself supports both (which I learned the hard way, as my newest sets were not compatible with the marketplace).  Chrome supports both vp8 and vp9 webm for sure. With Firefox the issue might be vp8 based or webm based. Also it might be possible that Firefox can not handle the alpha channel data (it defines the transparency). I would try using a firefox plugin (google: vp8 webm firefox plugin), maybe that fixes the issue on the users end. Would be interesting, if it works in IE or Opera.  

Thank you for your suggestion @Stefan. I tried to search for some Firefox addons and do a Google search but couldn't find anything right now. I'll hang on and see if roll20 or Firefox updates change the situation for me.

UPDATE: I have found that if I disable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox, the animation works great! (but has a higher CPU usage). So I think the fault was not with the animation file, and not with roll20, and not with Firefox ... but with drivers or something related to my own PC's hardware. Big thanks to @Nick and @Stefan R for helping me figure this out.

Oh, that is interesting to know.