Maps, thumbnails and voice problems

So far, so good with my first campaign on Roll20. Got my tile sets purchased, built several maps and generally got a good feel for the simpler stuff (no scripts or macros yet) However I have had a couple of complaints from my players. Fortunately, not about the running of the game. It seems the maps (the homemade ones) take forever to load. I did some research and it seems the solution to this is to take screenshots port it all out to a separate graphics program and stitch them together and import them back. That seems inconvenient and violates the for use with Roll20 only type statements? Most of the threads on this topic were 3 to 5 years old though so I thought I would ask if this is still the only way to "flatten" a map thereby updating the thumbnail and loading it as a single image rather than hundreds of pieces. The other issue is voice. We have tried the web client and discord. Both seem to cut out on us. Any helpful suggestions would be welcome. I have boosted my wifi to eliminate spikes in the ping, changed discord servers to a more local one and disabled the web client voice/video altogether. Thanks for the help in advance!

If your marketplace purchase allows a download, your are completely within your rights to download, assemble a map in a graphics program and re-upload. This page has lots of good advice on file types and sizes, but a rule of thumb is jpegs for maps, with the compression up as high as you feel still looks good, and the resolution as low as you think looks good. A slight loss in quality can mean a significant increase in performance. For voice, despite improvements, I still find built-in video chat to be problematical as the number of players increases. Our group varies between Roll20, Discord and Skype. Which works best can change from week to week.

As Keith mentioned if the art packs if you have purchased and allow a download you can use them in editing programs such as gimp (free open source) and make the maps you want. There are plenty of tutorials on the net on  how to use such programs. Depending on how many player are in the game.  Maps over 100 x 100 squares may load more slowly depending how big the file size of the image displayed on it and so forth. I have purchased such art packs from Roll20 and made maps this way. I often break up big maps as not everyone may have a rig like mine and its hard to know if your players will have better or worse bandwidth than yourself. I try to keep file size of images under 2mb and no higher than 5 if its really big or detailed. Larger than that may see performance issue. Maps between 600k and 1.5 meg work really really well. As far as audio I do not use Roll20's as it mileage may vary in performance. I use discord the most and while its by no means better or perfect, it has features that can help improve performance such as which regional server your voice server connects to etc. Skype is also good but do not use it much and if memory serves not as robust as other options. Keep in mind that mic quality and bandwidth also play a role in how well that will perform.  Rasfrasen said: So far, so good with my first campaign on Roll20. Got my tile sets purchased, built several maps and generally got a good feel for the simpler stuff (no scripts or macros yet) However I have had a couple of complaints from my players. Fortunately, not about the running of the game. It seems the maps (the homemade ones) take forever to load. I did some research and it seems the solution to this is to take screenshots port it all out to a separate graphics program and stitch them together and import them back. That seems inconvenient and violates the for use with Roll20 only type statements? Most of the threads on this topic were 3 to 5 years old though so I thought I would ask if this is still the only way to "flatten" a map thereby updating the thumbnail and loading it as a single image rather than hundreds of pieces. The other issue is voice. We have tried the web client and discord. Both seem to cut out on us. Any helpful suggestions would be welcome. I have boosted my wifi to eliminate spikes in the ping, changed discord servers to a more local one and disabled the web client voice/video altogether. Thanks for the help in advance!

Awesome, thank you! Is there a reason that map conversion isn't built in? I can see where it would benefit map makers, but I am unsure of the technical hurdles that it presents. I know most of the threads were old, but I don't recall ever seeing any cause it hasn't been implemented. I look forward to the next game session to see how it improves!

Map conversion would be nice, but it's not really the core focus of Roll20. My guess is since it is fairly easy to get that kind of function or better with an external image editor, development has been aimed toward things you can't do elsewhere.