Updated Dynamic Lighting - Feedback Thread

Roll20 is usually really solid.  This feature was a case of them miscalculating and putting a feature that should be in Beta - probably early Beta - and trying to get everyone to replace their completely working system with it.

To be honest Beta might even be too strong.  With the number of issues and missing features, it's probably Alpha at best.

Maybe they should release a reverse-tool to undo the conversion until it's fixed.

Brian said:

Just one more person sounding in on the night vision UDL issue; I'm having the FoV issue even though I've hand-drawn in the DL lines on new maps. The only workaround so far, is to turn off night vision, set the character to emit 'dim light', and just ask the players to RP when their character shouldn't be able to see. That said, I am a new subscriber, so when I tried out the much-touted new DL feature, I sort of thought it would be a bit more... implemented, if they're saying it's hit 'feature parity' with the old system? That aside, I think roll20 is great and once they've hammered these issues out, it'll be that much more awesome. It will be great to hear about a fix, because I think this feature would be really cool once it's working right!

Master S. said:

This feature was a case of them miscalculating and putting a feature that should be in Beta - probably early Beta - and trying to get everyone to replace their completely working system with it.

Agreed, most annoying part is that some customers, myself included, were very clear with that it wasn't ready for release in the current state. Sometimes I wonder why we even have a Developer Server?

Game tonight was riddled with problems. From my perspective as GM, everything was looking good, but then players were reporting they could see the entire map. I'd delete their token, re-add it, re-do all the lighting, they'd refresh, and it would work for about 10 minutes....and then it would just flip back to they can see everything. So, secret doors, etc. become a wash. It's incredibly frustrating and I'm not even sure if I'm using UDL, there are like 3 different sets of options, it's just silly at this point. Consolidate into something that WORKS, please! Or put out an instruction guide for those of us who don't want to waste a ton of time. I did a lot of prep for my session today to make it right and we spent at least an hour troubleshooting again.

UDL worked great for me up to last night... now randomly getting the darkvision cone of shame (not all tokens, not all maps); similarly can't get LDL to work in a reasonable fashion.  Deeply annoyed at the hours I've wasted trying to fix this.  We are not alpha testers!

DreadBeard said:

Game tonight was riddled with problems. From my perspective as GM, everything was looking good, but then players were reporting they could see the entire map. I'd delete their token, re-add it, re-do all the lighting, they'd refresh, and it would work for about 10 minutes....and then it would just flip back to they can see everything. So, secret doors, etc. become a wash. It's incredibly frustrating and I'm not even sure if I'm using UDL, there are like 3 different sets of options, it's just silly at this point. Consolidate into something that WORKS, please! Or put out an instruction guide for those of us who don't want to waste a ton of time. I did a lot of prep for my session today to make it right and we spent at least an hour troubleshooting again.

This was me two weeks ago. We had a 2 and a half hour session and spent about 45 minutes actually playing because we were trying to deal with bugs all night.

It's kind of amazing that we pay for this service.

I think the most disappointing thing is the whole time we've heard that parity between LDL and UDL had been achieved, then a couple days ago Cassie posts that parity has not been achieved yet the convert tool is still up and public for anyone to click on and ruin their game. I spent a couple hours a night for the last 2 weeks transferring all my information from my game to a newly created game just so we could have session last night.

Noticing that if you change your zoom level to ANYTHING other than 100%, the quality goes way down.

Just throwing my hat in with the cone darkvision people. I had this issue the day they announced parity with LDL. Had to turn off all DL. Tried it once since then and it was the same shit. Turned it off and haven't touched lighting since. Disappointing to say they least.

Its fine here,how are you?

https://youtu.be/8s8lpFkLFZk

Paul N. said:

I think the most disappointing thing is the whole time we've heard that parity between LDL and UDL had been achieved, then a couple days ago Cassie posts that parity has not been achieved yet the convert tool is still up and public for anyone to click on and ruin their game. I spent a couple hours a night for the last 2 weeks transferring all my information from my game to a newly created game just so we could have session last night.

Exactly. The fact that the conversion tool and message to convert are still up is just mind-boggling. And ... no apology from Roll20 to all users, and specifically to users who had their data corrupted by a product the company foisted on them before it was remotely ready. Apart from Cassie's thoughtful response, the only thing I see from Roll20 support are content-free platitudes, gaslighting, and requests for game links.

Roll20 ... this is a huge issue that is costing you users, and will continue to cost you users until and unless you make a serious commitment to changing your development and release-to-market process. Something is seriously wrong with how you do things. The volume and frequency of customer complaints should be sounding off warning bells.

Yesterday, the team released a fix to the night vision cone issue, and we're feeling confident that this has resolved that issue.

This was an exceptionally challenging bug for a few reasons. First, the fact that it existed at all was hidden by another bug that was resolved in mid August. Once that field-of-vision problem was resolved, this issue became apparent, however it was not clear cut.

The cone was only visible on tokens added to a Page after a certain number, and that number was dependent on the computer hardware you were using. Some graphics cards (more specifically some GPU drivers) would render the cone after the 16th token, others would not be until more than 30 tokens were placed.

The actual code change that needed to happen was not a simple diagnosis, either. The math and logic responsible for calculating the various components and restrictions that go into revealing the mask are complex, but the team was able to find a consistent method and make some minor performance gains along the way.

Please let us know your experience with the cone issue.

The team is digging back into two issues:

1. Screen tearing on Mac (triangles revealed while zooming)
2. Optimization of Explorer Mode

We'll be back with updates. 

Good jod !!! Cant Wait to play with new light system.

Duncan H. said:

Noticing that if you change your zoom level to ANYTHING other than 100%, the quality goes way down.

I also noticed this - add it to the pile.

The overlapping of Nightvision Tints is very annoying form my Players and me especially as DM, 4-5 People most chars have Nightvision. It’s a Mess of overlapping Tints.

Also, Dim light is way too bright, everything in Dim light should be grayed out or have a way harder fall of into the tinting since dnd vision rules specifically say, you can’t discern color in low lights. The same goes for Nighvision, (which is dnd Darkvision from Chars) they should only be able to see everything in grey (black and white) not full color. If that would be fixed there wouldn’t even be a need for the buggy tinting to indicate it.

Error message when attempting to convert a game to Updated Dynamic Lighting.

We had a weird issue last night. Suddenly one of our tokens lost vision...I think it had to do with multiple people have access to move the token? Not sure, I tried turning the token's vision off and back on, I tried disabling Dynamic Lighting of and back on but nothing work. Finally I turned Dynamic lighting off  all together...in my flurry to keep the game moving, we were a pivotal fight and it was not going well for the group I did not think to get a screen shot.

Any suggestions in the future

Craig Steinhoff said:

We had a weird issue last night. Suddenly one of our tokens lost vision...I think it had to do with multiple people have access to move the token? Not sure, I tried turning the token's vision off and back on, I tried disabling Dynamic Lighting of and back on but nothing work. Finally I turned Dynamic lighting off  all together...in my flurry to keep the game moving, we were a pivotal fight and it was not going well for the group I did not think to get a screen shot.

Any suggestions in the future

I had one player then a second player lose vision last night about 830PM CT.   The only solution we found was to switch the page to LDL 

with UDL, as soon as one player night vision intersect with another player or token with night vision, everything in that 'intersecting' overlap on the gm overlay disappears,  it is there,  but you cannot see it even with maximum gm overlay opacity... it becomes 'invisible'  !  help,  gm layer is no longer usable.

Kilrathisly said:

with UDL, as soon as one player night vision intersect with another player or token with night vision, everything in that 'intersecting' overlap on the gm overlay disappears,  it is there,  but you cannot see it even with maximum gm overlay opacity... it becomes 'invisible'  !  help,  gm layer is no longer usable.

One trick you can do is set each token to emit 20' bright light... that allows the GM layer to be visible 

Hi and to whom it may concern.

Not sure if this is something that's been reported before, but if not, here goes.

I've noticed in the UDL that tokens residing on the GM Layer, which are typically faded but visible, tend to disappear when two or more tokens with the UDL setting on come into viewing range of where those hidden tokens are located.  I'm going to try to include two pictures, one where you can see the hidden token because there's only one Player Level token in the area, then I took another screen cap after moving a second player level token into the same area.

It makes it very hard for me to find the hidden tokens without sweeping the entire area up into a selection, and then it's hard to move one or two of the GM level icons forward to the player token level because when I select one, the other "outlines" vanish again.



I appreciate the work that's gone into updates and things seem to be working better than just a few weeks ago, so thanks for that.  But if this issue can be addressed with apparent layering of lighting effects, including the color tints seemingly getting thicker as more are applied to an area it would be much appreciated all the more.

Thanks and more thanks.

Still getting this issue, with no lighting setup on the page.

Lag build-up with keyboard movement (Especially for multiple token movement and large maps) [1, 2]

Last night during our game Dynamic Lighting just stopped work for me the GM and one of out players, everyone else was fine. No matter what I did, reloading the page, opening up a new tab it would not work. This extremely annoying and really starting to get on my nerves..this a feature I pay for but it does not work. 

Here is another page where dymanic light is sort of working? I am the GM the entire page is black, I can see 4 out of the 5 tokens. Not sure why? if I Cntr -L on the player the light looks right...
Base page show to the GM

Page settings

With Cntr-l

light settings on the fire

Vision settings on the token

Not sure what to do?

Thank you Roll20 team for continuing to push through all of the issues. As a software developer, I get it. Hopefully it's just a few root causes.

I'm currently blocked completely by the ghosting issue reported somewhere in the thread above.

On my account, I have a page called "UDL Fail". It demonstrates the problem.

My page settings: Restrict Movement, Dynamic Lighting, Explorer Mode, Update when Token Drop

My token settings: Vision, Night Vision(60')

Interesting info:

• Turning off Token Vision fixes the problem
• Turning off Night Vision fixes the problem
• Turning off UDL fixes the problem

Hopefully it helps,

Ed

Night Vision is unusable with more than one token. Where their night vision overlaps, it goes very dark.

This suggests to me that the tinting is subtractive or divisive in its calculations, when it should be monotonic -- always increasing, never decreasing.

This means the new system does not have feature parity regarding the old "All players see light" option. Luckily not an issue for us, because we play with all players having shared vision anyway and can just set them to emit dim light instead, but I was really looking forward to having the tints.

Well, I can't dismiss the UDL message and when I try it it doesn't even work...

Hey Guys

There's a lot here so I figured I'd just post and if it's been said, apologies. 

Started working with the new dynamic lighting system and had a major issue which I've sorted now. I'm running dungeon of the mad mage ATM so lots of assets on screen for the maps. Marked the walls and doors with character settings too. 

When I went to load another map to do the same on L3 the whole thing crashed and wouldn't load. I cleared my cash, made a new campaign (its a fix) and managed to load it up again phew. But every time I go onto that page it crashes the whole thing and the lighting doesn't work anymore. I'm going back to fog of war and manually revealing it. Hope this works better in the future cause its a really cool idea. 

Running on Chrome. 

Apparent Memory Spike Crashes

Issue: After extended sessions of playing the Sunless Citadel, GM VTT would appear to have a VRAM spike that caused the screen to black out. Screen would return with UDL/FOW glitched and revealing everything on the GM VTT without UDL/FOW shading. Also, GM would then lose functionality of the VTT, as it would appear the mouse was clicking 3 or 4 inches away from the indicated cursor. GM had to close Chrome and reload/relaunch the game. 

The first occurance was after 3 or 4 hours of play on the Citadel Map. Second occurance was after a similar amount of time, 3 or 4 hours, this time 1 hour on Citadel Map, 3 hours on Grove Map. 

Both times, after resetting Chrome, the GM VTT would only be stable for 5 or 10 minutes before crashing after the initial crashes.

I am new to Roll20, and have only been using UDL/FOW. It has been fine functionally, working as expected except for this bug, which in my experiences appears to be a VRAM spike causing crashes.

Bug Report Template

Browser & OS info:

Is WebGL supported by your browser?

Yes

Game Link: (The URL when you're looking at your Game Details page)

https://app.roll20.net/campaigns/details/8420855/dungeons-and-dragons

Game Settings
No page settings were modified except turning on UDL/FOW.

Have Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, Waterdeep Dragon Heist Winter loaded.

Map Settings
Are you using Legacy or Updated? Updated.
Were you using Explorer Mode or not? Explorer.
Were you using Daylight Mode or not? Not.

Token Settings
What kinds of light and vision were utilized on tokens?
(bright light, low light, night vision, regular vision)

Human Tokens using Bright Light 20 ft, Dim Light 40ft to simulate torches, Shared Light.

Night Vision Tokens use only Night Vision 60ft tinted whatever that vibrant royal blue color is.

Do you have Hardware Acceleration turned On or Off in your browser or system:

I can confirm that Updated Dynamic Lighting doesn't work.  I'm not using any wrong combinations (no "Fog of War" on top of Dynamic Lighting, for instance).  But what I find is completely inconsistent.

Here are some scenarios I've tried (all of these scenarios take place in the Cragmaw Hideout map of LMOP pre-purchased Roll20 content):

NOTE: The Players ribbon is set correctly so I am going to the correct page when shifting to Player mode

====================================

Scenario 1

====================================

PC: Updated Human Fighter (Noble)

-----------------------

Map Settings:

-----------------------

- Dynamic Lighting: Enabled

- Explorer Mode: Disabled

- Daylight Mode: Disabled

- Legacy Dynamic Lighting (All Settings): Disabled

-----------------------

Player Token Settings:

-----------------------

- Vision: Enabled

- Night Vision: Disabled

- Limited Field of Vision: Disabled

- Bright Light: Enabled (60 ft.)

-----------------------

Result: FAIL

-----------------------

- DM View: PC can move around and dynamic lighting works as expected

- Player View (Rejoin as Player): Screen completely black (no light)

====================================

Scenario 2

====================================

PC: Updated Human Fighter (Noble)

-----------------------

Map Settings:

-----------------------

- Dynamic Lighting: Enabled

- Explorer Mode: Enabled

- Daylight Mode: Enabled

- Legacy Dynamic Lighting (All Settings): Disabled

-----------------------

Player Token Settings:

-----------------------

- Vision: Enabled

- Night Vision: Disabled

- Limited Field of Vision: Disabled

- Bright Light: Enabled (60 ft.)

-----------------------

Result: FAIL

-----------------------

- DM View: PC can move around and dynamic lighting works as expected

- Player View (Rejoin as Player): Screen completely black (no light)

====================================

Scenario 3

====================================

PC: Updated Dwarf Cleric

-----------------------

Map Settings:

-----------------------

- Dynamic Lighting: Enabled

- Explorer Mode: Disabled

- Daylight Mode: Disabled

- Legacy Dynamic Lighting (All Settings): Disabled

-----------------------

Player Token Settings:

-----------------------

- Vision: Enabled

- Night Vision: Enabled (60 ft.)

- Limited Field of Vision: Disabled

- Bright Light: Disabled

-----------------------

Result: FAIL

-----------------------

- DM View: PC can move around and dynamic lighting works as expected

- Player View (Rejoin as Player): Screen completely black (no light)

====================================

Scenario 4

====================================

PC: Updated Dwarf Cleric

-----------------------

Map Settings:

-----------------------

- Dynamic Lighting: Disabled

- Explorer Mode: Disabled

- Daylight Mode: Disabled

- Legacy Dynamic Lighting (w/o any sub-settings): Enabled

-----------------------

Player Token Settings:

-----------------------

- Vision: Enabled

- Night Vision: Disabled

- Limited Field of Vision: Disabled

- Bright Light: Enabled (60 ft.)

-----------------------

Result: FAIL

-----------------------

- DM View: PC can move around and dynamic lighting works as expected

- Player View (Rejoin as Player): I can see Klarg's den and a portion of the room with the pools of water (Rooms 7 & 8).  The area around the PC is black

NOTE: This is the same experience regardless of which PC I've tried.  The results are all the same.

ALSO OF NOTE: When I use CTRL+L with Updated Dynamic Lighting enabled, it seems to work from the perspective of the PC.  But even then, when I switch to Player Mode, the screen is completely black.

Clearly this needs much more work to be usable.

UPDATE

Interestingly, I have a game with my own home-grown content and dynamic lighting seems to work there.  I also checked another instance of LMOP where I inserted a new page and the pre-created content pages in that game seem to work.  I have no idea why inserting a new page into a pre-created game might correct dynamic lighting issues, but at least as of this moment, it appears playable now that I've taken this step.

Using UDL in test game. Created lighting layer with new UDL. Created second map with restrict movement. Created movement restriction and lighting obstruction on Lighting Layer with bordered filled squares. During testing on hex map snap to hex with token, twice encountered the following: 

Settings were as follows: 
\

Following settings on shape tool: 

There are MAJOR bugs still!

I'm trying to reprogram tokens that now have cone vision. I think I've fixed that, but now Night Visions tokens are essentially blind within their night vision range, but have a halo of light around the vision limit?

Then, while panning on my map, the map behaves super strangely. It's like a second copy of the map image is ghosting in and moving around with my camera view?

Then, even more mind-bogglingly, going to an entirely different page with a totally different map, the same map image from the OTHER page is ghosting in behind? How does that even happen?

I haven't been able to use this feature of Roll20 for months because of how broken it is, and it's the main reason I pay for the Pro subscription. Can you PLEASE get this working properly?

Testing with two characters with night vision. Overlapping night-vision segments become opaque to the DM. When two characters are close with same range of darkvision, the overlapping cones away from other light sources become entirely opaque and there is nothing visible in the section. Tried with two characters with 45' night vision near a 20' dim light source. One had orange-tinted, one had green-tinted night vision. Where the dim light stopped and both night visions overlapped (in terrain that had been explored by both characters as well in player mode so no exploration fog remained) it was evident that the overlap resulted in completely opaque tinting that the DM could not see through to terrain or tokens. 

Pat said:

Using UDL in test game

Wait....you mean you actually tested? Hmmmm....at least someone did around here..........

Hi, I have this issue where if I and my players zoom out on my maps it reveals large parts of unexplored and unlit map. Any ideas why?

daviddewitt said:

Hi, I have this issue where if I and my players zoom out on my maps it large parts of unexplored and unlit map is revealed. Any ideas why?

Yes, UDL still has lots of bugs, that's why.

daviddewitt said:

@Farling I gathered as much from the 6 page bugs thread lol. I notice I have the same laptop as another user who reported the same issue (Adam). I wonder if my hardware is just incompatible :( 

The recent dev update seemed to indicate that it could even be down to the version of graphics driver that you are using - rather than incompatible hardware.

Does Explorer Mode in the new DL work for anyone? I have tested it across many games (including a basically brand new one) and it never works. The previous areas are never left revealed.

Just plain Explorer works fine for me. UDL only breaks once I start adding things like tinted lights, etc. Have not yet trusted it for actual play, yet.

wizardmark said:

Does Explorer Mode in the new DL work for anyone? I have tested it across many games (including a basically brand new one) and it never works. The previous areas are never left revealed.

Are you testing with control + L?  If so, that will only show you line of sight.  You need to rejoin the game as player (after making sure you will have control of a character as a player) to see the area revealed by explorer mode.  At least, that is how it has worked for me.

wizardmark said:

Does Explorer Mode in the new DL work for anyone? I have tested it across many games (including a basically brand new one) and it never works. The previous areas are never left revealed.

It's working for me, but the overlapping nightvision blocking the GM layer makes it unplayable for me.

 UDL only breaks once I start adding things like tinted lights, etc.

I don't see an option for tinted lights. Is that on the Dev server? 

Pat said:

 UDL only breaks once I start adding things like tinted lights, etc.

I don't see an option for tinted lights. Is that on the Dev server? 

I believe Keith was referring to tinted Night Vision.

Yes, sorry. I was distracted while posting.

I have an issue with tokens appearing very small when dragged onto the map.
It works when I drag them from the compendium, or when dragging old characters to the map (old = created before I converted the game)

No problem in games that are not converted yet.

Tried it in Chrome, Firefox and Edge on 2 different computers.

Workaround: If I resize the tokens to 2x2 squares, it will take up 1 square when dragged to the map.

MykeMyke said:

I have noticed that when I programatically adjust settings (TokenMod), I need to either make a second edit or edit the token manually (no changes, just open and click save changes) for certain settings to take. This seems particularly prone to happen on the low_light_distance, and the only sure fire way is the manual edit, which is disappointing.

I have the same issue.