Updated Dynamic Lighting - Feedback Thread

Yes, this is a known problem with the new Dynamic Lighting, and was the first problem I noticed, which made me revert to the Legacy mode. soc123 said: Ok, here is the problem I'm having. When I put player A (without nightvision) in a room without a light source he can't see (as it should be). But when I put a player B in there with nightvision, they become a source of light and the player A (without nightvision) can now see. Is this a glitch or a settings issue? I am using the new lighting, player A has can see light source selected, player B has light source and night vision selected but does NOT have either emits light selected. ?

If you are using Ctrl-L to check this, that is a well-documented bug with UDL. GM using Ctrl-L ends up seeing everything that all sighted tokens can see. Try using a dummy player account. Log-in as player may work, too, but I still use LDL (just keeping an eye on UDL progress) so not sure. 

ElKatWilbrooke said: Hey Everybody... - Elizabeth Thanks Elizabeth. The radio silence was getting unnerving, but this sounds like good news.

Thanks for the update, Elizabeth.  I filed the issues I had upthread as a bug (explorer zoom out is broken).  I ran into 2 other issues in working around that one, that I also put in the bug report. First is that there appears to be a limit on the number of objects that have Vision before Vision breaks.  I tried working around the lack of Explorer by placing little dots with light + vision around the map.  That worked for 30 or 40 objects, but at some point I hit a limit, and nearly all objects on the map with Vision lost it.  Removing the last token with Vision and reloading the page fixes the issue.  I can avoid this, but it means I don't have a workaround for showing explored parts of the map short of the Explorer mode fixes mentioned. Second is that I have some ghost geometry in the map that isn't clickable or visible in the lighting layer.  I don't know if it's module specific, but room 8a of Dungeon of the Mad Mage has a slash of blocker geo across the center.  There are other examples elsewhere around the map I can't fix in the same way.  Images attached have a light on either side of the mystery geo.  It has some thickness that makes it look like it's an unclickable line.

Ryan C. said: I like the use of a distinctive monospace font (looks to be Courier Sans) for Roll20 Team updates; it stands out visually when scrolling through the forum posts, and would be a nice convention if used often. Until lots of people start quoting it in their replies!

Found the issue on that mystery light blocker.  There were brush drawings in my map on the Lighting layer.  I swear they weren't there last time I tried to debug it, so either they were hidden somehow by a bug that resolved, or I missed them when poking at trying to fix it.  I admit nothing. The known issue with zoom out and the vision object limit are still there, but the response on the ticket said they're being worked on.

Hi, Please can anyone let me know if the equivalent to Advanced Fog of War should work with the new lighting set up? So does it still show things as revealed (but greyed out) if player tokens have previously revealed it? I'm using ctrl-l and it doesn't seem to, but I gather that whole side of things is knackered, so shouldn't expect it to work? Cheers, Simon  

Simon S said: Hi, Please can anyone let me know if the equivalent to Advanced Fog of War should work with the new lighting set up? So does it still show things as revealed (but greyed out) if player tokens have previously revealed it? I'm using ctrl-l and it doesn't seem to, but I gather that whole side of things is knackered, so shouldn't expect it to work? Cheers, Simon   In my experience, Control+L is only line of sight (current vision) in UDL.  You actually need to use a dummy account, give yourself control of a token and rejoin as player, or have a player join in to test things with you to see how explorer mode is doing.  Explorer mode works when I try it, but I have only tested it with a couple tokens at a time in test games.  Some people have issues running maps with very many tokens with sight with that enabled.  One of those "your mileage may vary" type of things.  Give it a shot in a test game, or copy your active game to give it a try.  That leaves your active game alone to go back to if you have issues.

I recently (this past Sunday) tried to run a map with the updated dynamic lighting and as a result Roll20 crashed. It crashed so extensively that I had to utilize a different computer with much better specs in order to get into the game long enough to turn the feature off. This has been a consistent issue, in that the performance demands of updated lighting seem about as grueling on computers as early builds of Minecraft. In order for me to consider the feature it needs performance parity with the legacy system, including in reliability and usability for all players. As it stands now the feature crashes my or my players' computers while legacy lighting functions normally. If support for legacy lighting ends without performance improvements for users not running high end builds, then its a choice that effectively ends the feature. IMHO it's not ready until even tablets are fine with it, but at the least it should function on basic laptops and while other programs (like Zoom) are also engaged.

I had thought Dynamic was working solid by now and have decided to test it on a blank non game with 1 player added.  Made teh game, converted to Dynamic Lighting. Setup Dynamic in settings incl Explorer Mode and put one token for a charcter with Vision enabled and Light Emit of 10 feet onto the Object Layer. Dropped a random map on the Map layer, I can see it, i press CTRL+L to test and it shows how i would expect with an aura of light showing up the map around the players token. Assigned the token to the players control. Player logs in. Black screen. Nothing. Both on Macs and both using Chrome (latest) Is it really still this broken or have i missed something incredibly obvious. ??

Hard to tell without screen shots of settings. There are a lot of things that could go wrong. In general, a check list is: Are both player and GM on the map that has the player flag? If using regular Fog of War, has the GM cleared any areas for the players (the default when activated is for the entire map to be obscured). If using Dynamic Lighting: is the token correctly assigned, does it have sight turned on, and is there a light source? Be sure not to mix Legacy and Updated Dynamic Lighting. Use one or the other, and for a less pretty, but more stable experience, continue with Legacy for the time being. Be sure to verify each step at the time of the issue. Saving a token can be tricky if you don't have the hang of the order of steps.

Messing with a pickup game I'm setting up for Saturday, full Dynamic Lighting from scratch explicitly for testing. On my end seems great, will report any weirdness and failures this weekend. I didn't know there was an interface update but I'm very optimistic if this is how things are going...

keithcurtis said: Hard to tell without screen shots of settings. There are a lot of things that could go wrong. In general, a check list is: Are both player and GM on the map that has the player flag? If using regular Fog of War, has the GM cleared any areas for the players (the default when activated is for the entire map to be obscured). If using Dynamic Lighting: is the token correctly assigned, does it have sight turned on, and is there a light source? Be sure not to mix Legacy and Updated Dynamic Lighting. Use one or the other, and for a less pretty, but more stable experience, continue with Legacy for the time being. Be sure to verify each step at the time of the issue. Saving a token can be tricky if you don't have the hang of the order of steps. Thanks, i made a brand new game, activated Dynamic from the convert to Dynamic Lighting on the game settings page. Ive gone in and removed other packs from the Add-Ons and will test from scratch and report back. I did follow all teh above settings. Im hoping that this will solve it and then i cna slowly add stuff back in and see the issue with the add-on. Thanks for replying

Kraynic said: In my experience, Control+L is only line of sight (current vision) in UDL.  You actually need to use a dummy account, give yourself control of a token and rejoin as player, or have a player join in to test things with you to see how explorer mode is doing.  Explorer mode works when I try it, but I have only tested it with a couple tokens at a time in test games.  Some people have issues running maps with very many tokens with sight with that enabled.  One of those "your mileage may vary" type of things.  Give it a shot in a test game, or copy your active game to give it a try.  That leaves your active game alone to go back to if you have issues. Cheers for the reply - that's a big shame that the DM can't now easily see what the players have revealed since I used the old version on hex maps to see where the characters had explored. Anyway, I'm off to play with Foundry some more.

Katie Mae said: Hey everyone! Today, we have brought an optimization overhaul to Explorer mode on the Dev Server. This has been a sizable change that alters how Explorer mode utilizes system resources. We have a forum thread in the Pro forum for feedback, we would love to see you join us and test out the Dev update. For those of you who do not have Dev server access, this overhaul should address some of the common issues such as: Explorer mode rendering and data storage Explorer mode responsiveness Reports of memory spikes and/or high memory usage GM View of a token’s revealed area not updating until token is dropped Performance on specific hardware configurations (i.e. integrated graphics cards) Visual artifacts such as: Distorted duplicates appearing Pixel dust Corner revealing/black diagonal on maps Thank you all for your continued feedback and patience, we look forward to seeing folks in the Pro thread! Looking forward to the responsiveness updates being more widely released as I find almost any map with explorer mode turned on unplayable at the moment due to the lag/problems loading for players.

Since an update is in testing on Dev, it seems like a good time to revisit some bugs with the conversion tool that were first raised when it was launched. The following video contains spoilers for ZEITGEIST. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbcc0jR-w3o&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbcc0jR-w3o&amp;feature=youtu.be</a> Using a new game with the following addons: <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/gameaddon/8537/z01-island-at-the-axis-of-the-world" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/gameaddon/8537/z01-island-at-the-axis-of-the-world</a> <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/gameaddon/8557/z-campaign-and-players-guides" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/gameaddon/8557/z-campaign-and-players-guides</a> The Firefox window on the left contains Legacy Dynamic Lighting on the production server, and the Chrome window on the right is after the game has been converted to Updated Dynamic Lighting after it was copied to the Dev server. *Problems with conversion* 0:00:04 &nbsp;Page that does not have LDL is converted When a page does not have LDL and is converted to UDL, the page has Dynamic Lighting added. This is a problem because customers do not know which pages should be converted and which should not. They should be able to push a button and run their game. Now they have multiple pages where Dynamic Lighting was not activated because it did not make sense (such as location maps), and they need to figure out why their players cannot see the map. 0:01:00 &nbsp;Token with vision that does not emit light When a token that Has Vision but does not Emit Light (such as one representing a D&amp;D 5e human) is converted, the token has a Night Vision of 0 feet added. The Night Vision should stay off.

I would love if dev accounts would just post "Seen" when they check this thread so we have some sense that we're not shouting into the void

Although I agree that it would be nice, I can attest to the fact that if a dev posts a thread and asks for feedback, that thread is checked regularly and closely.

getting a weird bug in my current game where the dynamic lighting is using the wrong scaling for the darkness but only while a token is dragged and in motion. You can see my dragged token in the top right while the anchor is near that wall breach. While the anchor is not in motion the shadows calculate correctly. If I move my mount and my kobold to another square, the scale issue will exist, then shadows will be at the correct scaling when the token is dropped. During drag: After drop to another square If I pick up the token then abort the drop by leaving it in the same square, the screen will stick in its badly scaled state. This is until I minimize the window or go to another tab, whereupon it will return to the correct shadows.

I tried creating tokens (torches) without vision but with light emitting from them. Unfortunately, players can see the token and all of the light, even if they don't have line of sight to the token at all. Interestingly, when I CTRL-L on the player token, it shows correctly! (i.e. they can see the light where it spills around a corner into their field of vision, but not the source).

Hey! I noticed something using the Dynamic lightning, that sometimes when I sit and edit, like add things to the map- Suddenly chrome blinks black for a second or two, then returns to normal. But roll20 won't work until I restart the page. Is this because of the dynamic lightning or something else?

Hi everyone, I hope you'll understand that I don't have time to sift through 14 pages of comments and will forgive me if I'm asking an obvious question that's been answered. I've perused this thread a bit but have not found my answer. I'm preparing for my campaign that starts tomorrow. We have been delayed by approx. a month. A month ago, I acquired and played with Dynamic Lightning and found it relatively easy to use. Now (a month after), I'm dusting off my ability to use it, thinking it'll take me a min to re-figure it out so I can continue preparing only to find out that I can't get it to work. TLDR: My issue is that when I give Night Vision to a token, all other characters that have Regular Vision can now the same thing. FYI, The page has Dynamic Lightning turned on, every token has Vision enabled, and only one token with Night Vision has it. I've also given it a Tint Color (Green) to ensure I can tell the difference. Now, when I click on a token without night vision and CTRL+L, I see that it can see the Night Vision. What is the issue? If you have thoughts, I'd appreciate your feedbacks. Thank you ahead of time as I prepare for a game that starts tomorrow :(

DM said: Hi everyone, I hope you'll understand that I don't have time to sift through 14 pages of comments and will forgive me if I'm asking an obvious question that's been answered. I've perused this thread a bit but have not found my answer. I'm preparing for my campaign that starts tomorrow. We have been delayed by approx. a month. A month ago, I acquired and played with Dynamic Lightning and found it relatively easy to use. Now (a month after), I'm dusting off my ability to use it, thinking it'll take me a min to re-figure it out so I can continue preparing only to find out that I can't get it to work. TLDR: My issue is that when I give Night Vision to a token, all other characters that have Regular Vision can now the same thing. FYI, The page has Dynamic Lightning turned on, every token has Vision enabled, and only one token with Night Vision has it. I've also given it a Tint Color (Green) to ensure I can tell the difference. Now, when I click on a token without night vision and CTRL+L, I see that it can see the Night Vision. What is the issue? If you have thoughts, I'd appreciate your feedbacks. Thank you ahead of time as I prepare for a game that starts tomorrow :( Your quickest and easiest fix is to swap over to the Legacy Dynamic Lighting&nbsp;(LDL)&nbsp;as that functions mostly without issue. It's simple enough to do, just disable any Updated Dynamic Lighting settings on the page(s)/tokens then enable LDL on the page(s) and set up sight via the LDL tab on the tokens. For darkvision it's recommended you set the radius to 60 and the start of dim light to 0 (unless they're in daylight in which case make that 60 too); for regular sight in darkness I make it 10 and 5 so they have some idea of their surroundings and for daylight I make it around 60/60 too. While there may be fixes and workarounds for Updated Dynamic Lighting you'll have more consistent success just using Legacy Dynamic Lighting.

Thanks Michael. That's what I had resorted to doing until I got an answer. I'd rather work with legacy that I'm used to. Having recently acquired a PRO subscription, I was hoping to get it to work but oh well.

DM said: Thanks Michael. That's what I had resorted to doing until I got an answer. I'd rather work with legacy that I'm used to. Having recently acquired a PRO subscription, I was hoping to get it to work but oh well. Might be waiting a long while before UDL is working properly, just look at the state of Advanced Fog of War... Well don't actually, it'll probably crash your browser if you turn it on xD Glad I could help though!

SO I'm using Dynamic Lighting on my map and after a little bit, my map refreshes and the dynamic lighting is turned off. I'm using chrome and clearing my browsing data and re entering the gae resets it but only for a little

DM said: TLDR: My issue is that when I give Night Vision to a token, all other characters that have Regular Vision can now the same thing. One of the "Known Issues" on the very first post of this thread is that Control + L shows the GM the sight of all tokens at once in UDL. This doesn't mean that is what the players see.&nbsp; To truly test, you need to assign yourself control of a token and rejoin as player, use a dummy account to see what a player sees, or test things with one of your players.

I had the Updated Dynamic Lightning set up on various pages in my game. It was working fine a couple of days ago. Now it is basically completely stuck and doesn't work at all. Players are not seeing anything but their characters in complete darkness. The tokens have night vision on, and the map also has many lightsources in map layer. The lightsources has no affect on what the characters see, as nothing is updating. I, as a GM, also see only the character tokens but the visuals are not updating at all. The lightning seem to work normally only on small pages. We tested on Chrome and on Firefox - same problems occur on both browsers.

We have the same issues, black boxes and only the own token is visible. Cache refreshes and restarts didnt help, when the dynamic lightning is turned of, the page loads, but and reactivation the page stops working completely and everything is stuck.

Anyone able to tell me why I'm having a big square of unresponsive area. That had been working perfecrlty fine previously? All tokes have the exact same dark vision settings as seen in the pink tint. But the entire square area in the NW side is unresponsive to their vison or even if I drop in light sources. Just stays dark.

Look slike everymap has the same area balcked out. its about 14.75x14.75 in the top left corner of any map I have.

Yeah, I'm also having the black square issue. Top lefthand corner of all my UDL maps. Turning UDL off and reverting to Legacy Lighting fixes the issue. I also made a new map and it didn't have the issue, so it seems only older maps were affected by the update.

Guess I'm fixing Maps :/

I am seeing extreme performance loss when the new Dynamic Lighting is enabled. I first noticed it sometime in the last week. I had been using it successfully since my current campaign began in early Nov. Last week I started seeing noticeable lag while scrolling the map and dragging/dropping tokens. Setting "update on drop" didn't change anything, so I disabled it for this weekend's session.&nbsp; Today I was playing around with it, trying to figure out what's wrong. I've loaded a mostly empty map and tested it. I removed all lines from the dynamic lighting&nbsp;layer. The page scrolls smoothly with no dynamic lighting or the legacy dynamic lighting enabled. If I enable the updated dynamic lighting, the page stalls and won't scroll at all.&nbsp;

1st time dm and was using updated dynamic lighting with fog of war. Works fantastic in gm mode but when i invited a player the map will not load for them. I take dynamic lighting off and it loads fine.&nbsp;

I'm having the same dark box issues, as well as one of the maps having a random light source and light sources from tokens hiding things on the GM info layer.

I think my problem is also a non-responsive box of darkness, but it covers everything except one grid-line in the bottom of the page and one grid-column in the right side of the page. So almost the entire page is dark and non-responsive.

I found another solution to the box of darkness in the upper left was to duplicate my page.&nbsp; That fixed both the original and newly created page.&nbsp; All the dynamic lighting issues instantly resolved that way, and remained resolved after deleting the duplicate (copy) page.

Hello All. I have been having an issue just recently (as in now, as I was setting up some items on the map for the next game) with UDL, where as the GM, I move one of the player tokens and suddenly ALL player tokens seem to lose vision (all tokens and environment dim for GM view and Ctrl-L shows no vision on any of the player tokens). Additionally I notice that portions of the grid in certain areas (overlapped night vision?) are also no longer displayed to me as GM, though I can see it in player's view.&nbsp; I can reload the page and I can then see revealed areas/light again as GM and see the players have vision as well, though the grid issue persists.&nbsp; If I move the player token again, the cycle repeats.&nbsp; Any information or advice would be appreciated.

Hello! So when I have two tokens with NIght vision in the same area it prevents me from seeing anything on the GM layer. Our game did not start our like this. I've also noticed that players are now able to see through the dynamic lighting barriers, I have their tokens set to have 60 feet of Nightvision per their characters, and the past few sessions they have been able to find secret passages (because they can see the tunnel) and find things i've written in blocked off areas. Is there any way to fix this? playing on Dungeon of the Mad Mage.&nbsp;

Kristen P. said: Hello! So when I have two tokens with NIght vision in the same area it prevents me from seeing anything on the GM layer. Our game did not start our like this. I've also noticed that players are now able to see through the dynamic lighting barriers, I have their tokens set to have 60 feet of Nightvision per their characters, and the past few sessions they have been able to find secret passages (because they can see the tunnel) and find things i've written in blocked off areas. Is there any way to fix this? playing on Dungeon of the Mad Mage.&nbsp; I've also had this problem. It seems that night vision causes a transparency effect on my GM layer, and additional overlapping night visions causes objects on the GM layer to become totally invisible to me.

I created a new map, turned on Dynamic Lighting and have lag problems just panning. Throwing players on the map with Vision has like a 1-3 second delay on just selecting them. Moving a single token (without Vision/Emit Light enabled) is sluggish at best. I checked out the 'how to optimize my systems' stuff. Nothing is getting rid of this lag.

I don't know if it's a known bug but it should be quite recent since it wasn't happening when I made this map. The problem is that night vision effect covers tokens in dm layer.&nbsp; Steps to reproduce 1) add tokens on dm layer 2) add the first token with night vision on object layer 3) adding the second token with night vision on object layer, the tokens on dm layer disappear

I was able to replicate this in game. Definitely a bug and you should report it (<a href="https://roll20.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new" rel="nofollow">https://roll20.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new</a>).

Tried using it; flicked every setting on and off, always black screen when I click on a token and try CTRL+L. I'm going back to Legacy for good; if Legacy gets removed, I'll cancel my R20 sub and move to another site.

Running into a weird issue that another player told me is a bug. When playing with Explorer mode it seems all players have a shared greyscale area on the map. My understanding is that this is not the intended functionality, but since I just started used UDL I don't really have context.&nbsp; I have attached a screenshot of what I am seeing to this ticket. In this case the token I have control of is the duck, another player has control of the token that is the man. I do not have any control over the man token. The duck has never been in a position that would allow it to see the chair that is behind the DL wall, but can see it in greyscale because the other token has had it in its line of sight.&nbsp; I am not able to find any documentation on how this particular part of the system is explicitly supposed to behave, but from reading the forum and talking to other players it sounds like this is a bug. For things like dungeons where the players are separated this is pretty detrimental to the puzzle aspect of the game.&nbsp;