Updated Dynamic Lighting - Feedback Thread

Riyz said:

Sargauth Level (lvl 3) in Dungeon of the Mad Mage is basically non-functional with updated dynamic lighting. The map is so big the client keeps throwing warning about big maps not loading at all. When it loads, if it loads, I can't even touch my characters tokens or chrome goes completely black (even the tabs/backbutton/home button, etc) then when it reloads there is no map, no nothing, and I need to close chrome. 

I cannot even express how angry I am that a product ROLL20 made is not supported by ROLL20. This is literally a crime. If you sell a content pack in needs to be runnable. 

Why don't you use the legacy system that works perfectly for the time.

Rnamer . said:

Riyz said:

Sargauth Level (lvl 3) in Dungeon of the Mad Mage is basically non-functional with updated dynamic lighting. The map is so big the client keeps throwing warning about big maps not loading at all. When it loads, if it loads, I can't even touch my characters tokens or chrome goes completely black (even the tabs/backbutton/home button, etc) then when it reloads there is no map, no nothing, and I need to close chrome. 

I cannot even express how angry I am that a product ROLL20 made is not supported by ROLL20. This is literally a crime. If you sell a content pack in needs to be runnable. 

Why don't you use the legacy system that works perfectly for the time.

My guess is that he was tricked into believing that Feature Parity was an reality. Lots of people don't read these forums and just activated UDL when suggested on the game page.

UDL is making one of my games unable to load as a DM. I made a copy of a current game, used the conversion tool, and was able to get a player to load into the map, though they were surrounded by darkness (they could see in the original). I keep getting "unable to display page" errors after a long time loading and my computer working significantly harder than it has to with LDL.

This is the first test of UDL that I've done since April, and only done because I can't turn on AFoW on the map for the next session of the game (wanted to see if explorer mode worked).

I've since kicked all the players from the copy, and I can load into it now. However I'm getting issues with the token being unable to see at all when I'm using ctrl+L and the screen remains black. I've tried turning vision on and off and moving a light source from the map to the token layer, and neither of that seems to work. I also tried setting the token to emitting dim light and turning off night vision, and vice-versa. It's outright not working.

Game: Home Tyranny of Dragons Copy

Map: Well of Dragons

Using Windows 10, Chrome, and VTT Enhancement Suite

I vaguely remember similar issues when I tried this with the Tomb of Diderius map when UDL was new back in April, with similar lack of results.

I was actually able to load the Tomb of Diderius map and move a token around a bit, but with extreme lag (I want to call it over 5 seconds, maybe more than 10). I also saw some visual artifacts when using the ctrl+L function after moving a token, and didn't see any evidence of explorer mode being active even though it was turned on. The token that I moved could also see a random other token on the map around corners. Upon reloading the Well of Dragons map, things that should have been providing light still were not, though light was being cast on the Tomb of Diderius map. I'm guessing the Well of Dragons map will fall under the "issues between UDL and large maps" category.

Hi There,

I'm trying to set up a campaign for my friends to pick up our in person game. I upgraded to have Dynamic Lighting. But When I test it out I can just drag a token through barriers and doors. Is there a way to fix this?

Written Warrior said:

Hi There,

I'm trying to set up a campaign for my friends to pick up our in person game. I upgraded to have Dynamic Lighting. But When I test it out I can just drag a token through barriers and doors. Is there a way to fix this?

You probably do not have Restrict Movement set.

https://roll20.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037258654-Dynamic-Lighting#DynamicLighting-LineofSight

And be sure you're not the GM of the game. The GM can move tokens anywhere on the map, regardless of Restrict Movement. If you are the GM, create a 2nd "dummy" account with a character token for that account. Login to that account to test the movement.

Brian C. said:

Written Warrior said:

Hi There,

I'm trying to set up a campaign for my friends to pick up our in person game. I upgraded to have Dynamic Lighting. But When I test it out I can just drag a token through barriers and doors. Is there a way to fix this?

You probably do not have Restrict Movement set.

https://roll20.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037258654-Dynamic-Lighting#DynamicLighting-LineofSight

Currently listening to the Developer Q&A Stream on Twitch for one of the Competitors.  The actual developer is going ofver the newest Beta Release in the release chain explaining all of the Bug Fixes, Feature Enhancements etc., in the release, all while receiving questions and answering them.  And this happens for each release.  And these releases occur about every 2 weeks....

So, this weekend I tried out the UDL for the first time. Made a new map, in my existing campaign (running LDL), and made tokens to match the UDL. After a few minutes one of my player started asking about "those dim-lit areas further back in the map". Turned out when he zoomed out a bit he could se dim lit patches of the map everywhere I had placed a light source.I quickly moved their PCs to a landing page, called for a 10 minute coffe breake, deleted the page and made a new page with the same map, using LDL.

That made me realize we've had a similar problem since early summer, on LDL. Another one of my players sometimes gets the whole map, including tokens, light sources and all revealed to him. It lasts till he logout, closes the window and log on again. Has happened some 3 or 4 times since (maybe?) June, on different maps but with the same player and PC. My players run Roll20 on quite capable Windows PCs, using Firefox and Chrome (and as far as I can tell, they keep them updated.) I have an older Mac, also using Firefox.

The problems on LDL seems random and we haven't been able to replicate them after the sessions.

I don't know if these problems are connected in some way but I've run this campaign for almost two years and never encountered these kind of problems before this summer.

Wint said:

Roll20 has been tinkering with dynamic lighting for two years now, the current situation is the compromise to the compromise to the compromise, every time they "fix" it they break it further.

I too am unimpressed. What's most striking to me is that Legacy worked and continues to do so. You can call it a "workaround," but it's obviously the way your users are using the platform — something you clearly endorsed since it was listed on the wiki for years as the intended way to reproduce darkvision.

The fact that Roll20 is just now acknowledging that the sole reason many people pay for their platform is to be able to produce darkvision and making it a priority to develop a solution to it (meaning they didn't have one before. They still don't! They "hope" to have one for UDL "soon.") speaks volumes about development leadership and the entire way this operation is structured and managed.

The feedback for years, again literally years, from users has been that this is a top priority. Roll20 hasn't been listening.

On the workaround doublespeak, that seems to be standard Roll20 practice: gaslight your customers by pretending that something everyone knew was a feature was, strangely, not a feature and never there in the first place. We went through this with AFoW in 2019. 

On the darkvision fiasco, yeah, that's mind-boggling. They "hope" to have a solution? LOL. We're nine months into this supposed "updated" dynamic lighting rollout and there appears to be no path to true feature parity and stability. Just patch/hack jobs in response to previous patch/hack jobs, dressed up as exciting new features! They didn't know that darkvision is a huge priority for a large portion of their customer base? Roll20, listening to your users involves ... actually listening. Not pretending to listen. Real receptiveness to customer feedback. It's not hard. 

I am convinced that the only reason UDL is still being pushed is because someone in charge feels that it would be too embarrassing now to scrap the entire thing and go back to the drawing board. Which on some level is accurate -- it is embarrassing for Roll20. But because optics are more important than, you know, actually making your customers happy, here we are.

I will say that for me and most of my Player's, the Legacy Dynamic Lighting works fine ... but the Advanced Fog of War is so much trash.  If UDL ever got to the point where it was doing what those two systems offered in promise together, that would be great, but till then, don't lie to me and say they're at feature parity.  I'm a Pro Subscriber and I'm with you guys till that time runs out, but I will most definitely be looking at my options between now and then.  Roll20 is no longer the sole VTT around.

Jomo said:

Not sure what is going on here, but ive got a map and i have established the Dynamic Lighting edges/bounds. I made a door in that layer and put some tokens with darkvision/vision turned on, but when i move it (or just delete it), there is no visibility past the threshold of where the door was. I can move the token into and out of the room, the vision is fine, but its registering as if the "door" is still there (for lighting only, not movement), and as such, tokens cant see into the room:

Very frustrating and only just noticed it an hour before the session. Any ideas?

I experienced the same bug on my game, using the official module "Lost Mine of Phandalver" for DD5.

From what i gather, UDL doesn't allow the use of "doors" at the moment : when the line is moved on the dynamic layer, only movement becomes available, but all my players can't see anything past the door. In effect, once you draw the dynamic lighting, moving it does nothing for players.

It's really annoying and i didn't seem to find any way to fix it. I can only say it seems related to "explorer mode" because if i moved a door before i put the players on the map, they can't see the door and all is working fine.

It only happens when you move the door in front of them. Unfortunately, doors are made to be open while the players are here...

Have the same issue with doors, but have found that if you move door, refresh browser, then go back and remove door it works....I know a lot of steps just for one door, but that is what I have been having to do, or just use the old DLS.

Bob J. said:

Have the same issue with doors, but have found that if you move door, refresh browser, then go back and remove door it works....I know a lot of steps just for one door, but that is what I have been having to do, or just use the old DLS.

But I assume that ALL players would have to do this, and EVERY TIME that a door was opened or closed!

That breaks immersion quite a bit.

Another reason UDL is not fit-for-purpose.

Farling said:

Bob J. said:

Have the same issue with doors, but have found that if you move door, refresh browser, then go back and remove door it works....I know a lot of steps just for one door, but that is what I have been having to do, or just use the old DLS.

But I assume that ALL players would have to do this, and EVERY TIME that a door was opened or closed!

That breaks immersion quite a bit.

Another reason UDL is not fit-for-purpose.

That bug breaks using DoorKnocker for me. 

Nothing new concerning UDL on the Roundtable. Disheartening.

I don't recall seeing any UDL questions.

keithcurtis said:

I don't recall seeing any UDL questions.

Yea, it’s very odd.

keithcurtis said:

I don't recall seeing any UDL questions.

Funny, there seems to have been plenty in this thread. I'm unfamiliar with the roundtable though, I'm assuming the questions are vetted? If they are, they likely want to stay mum on this whole thing considering the shitshow it is.

No, they put up a specific place to submit questions about 2 weeks before the round table. As far as I know, they try to address all those, though some may be condensed together if there are several on a similar topic. Then I think they answer some that get posted in chat while they are streaming.  At least, that is how it appeared to work judging from ones that I have watched after they were posted to Youtube.

Questions or not, I would've liked to see them at least mention the current UDL situation and if it will be remedied in the near future. They spent a lot of time discussing server changes (good stuff) and upcoming marketplace releases without being questioned about it.

They try to get all questions that are submitted in chat. Some simple ones are answered by a moderator, so might not get recorded, but they are usually on the order of "how do I turn on feature X". I looked for UDL questions and didn't see any. I'm perfectly content with LDL and confident that when it finally goes away, the replacement will be at least as good.

There's a lot of fear and concern that LDL will go away before UDL is acceptable. I think a lot of folks felt that "feature parity" meant "LDL will go away now." I think feature parity was announced a little soon, but I interpreted to mean "It now addresses everything LDL did", not that it is bug-free and ready to replace. Both LDL and UDL have a darkvision approach. That's parity. UDL dv has yet to match the utility of LDL dv means that it's there, but it's bugged or not ready. "Parity" is probably not the best word. There will be a HUGE announcement and significant grace period when sunset is ready to actually begin.

Until then, I'm using LDL and it works just as it always has. UDL is something that happens in the margins.

CTRL-L is not working for token view, anymore.  I seem to get a view of what every player-character sees, not just the selected one.  Also, it would be awesome if this same command worked for players with multiple tokens on the map to get an idea of what the selected token sees (right now, everyone has to measure their vision boundaries for each token before deciding on a target).

The new dynamic lighting has not worked well for me since day 1 as a player. Moving tokens around on maps where the DM has enhanced dynamic lighting enabled results in things moving at like 1 frame per second.

I do not have hardware acceleration enabled as it causes numerous other problems for me on other sites.

I've never used the new dynamic lighting myself as DM. What do my DMs need to do to make it work?

keithcurtis said:

They try to get all questions that are submitted in chat. Some simple ones are answered by a moderator, so might not get recorded, but they are usually on the order of "how do I turn on feature X". I looked for UDL questions and didn't see any. I'm perfectly content with LDL and confident that when it finally goes away, the replacement will be at least as good.

There's a lot of fear and concern that LDL will go away before UDL is acceptable. I think a lot of folks felt that "feature parity" meant "LDL will go away now." I think feature parity was announced a little soon, but I interpreted to mean "It now addresses everything LDL did", not that it is bug-free and ready to replace. Both LDL and UDL have a darkvision approach. That's parity. UDL dv has yet to match the utility of LDL dv means that it's there, but it's bugged or not ready. "Parity" is probably not the best word. There will be a HUGE announcement and significant grace period when sunset is ready to actually begin.

Until then, I'm using LDL and it works just as it always has. UDL is something that happens in the margins.

Parity is certainly not the word they should be using since it means "the state or condition of being equal" which is not what UDL is compared to LDL, as this thread continues to highlight daily. Saying "Both LDL and UDL have a darkvision approach." is like saying we've both got cars to drive to work, but one of them has their wheels fall off every 5 minutes. That's parity in that we both have cars, but we don't both have working cars now do we?

With that idea in mind you can understand why people had such a knee-jerk response to LDL being "sunsetted" as no one wants their working car replaced with one that constantly malfunctions whilst being told "they're both cars, that's the same thing". Not to mention Roll20 has demonstrated a past habit of just doing it without warning as with the failed zoom update fiasco a while back, or the AFoW stuff that broke the feature for a long time.

I mean hell, the proof that it's not at "parity" is the fact that you're still choosing to use LDL instead of UDL.

Hi Brian,

Turns out as a DM I can drag stuff through the lighting barriers. I didn't know I could this, one of the support helped me with this. Thank you as well for the help.

Brian C. said:

Written Warrior said:

Hi There,

I'm trying to set up a campaign for my friends to pick up our in person game. I upgraded to have Dynamic Lighting. But When I test it out I can just drag a token through barriers and doors. Is there a way to fix this?

You probably do not have Restrict Movement set.

https://roll20.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037258654-Dynamic-Lighting#DynamicLighting-LineofSight

Hi Craig,

Haha, that is exactly what it was. Thank you.

Craig said:

And be sure you're not the GM of the game. The GM can move tokens anywhere on the map, regardless of Restrict Movement. If you are the GM, create a 2nd "dummy" account with a character token for that account. Login to that account to test the movement.

Brian C. said:

Written Warrior said:

Hi There,

I'm trying to set up a campaign for my friends to pick up our in person game. I upgraded to have Dynamic Lighting. But When I test it out I can just drag a token through barriers and doors. Is there a way to fix this?

You probably do not have Restrict Movement set.

https://roll20.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037258654-Dynamic-Lighting#DynamicLighting-LineofSight

I purchased Rime of the Frostmaiden here and found that UDL is enabled. Given the number of issues cited here with UDL, why does R20 force it on a new purchase? I see there is a script to convert Legacy to UDL, but not the reverse. Is there a script out there to convert me back to legacy or do I have to do this by hand?

BTW - this is a terrible way to try to press adaptation. It just means I won't purchase any more modules until UDL is fixed. 

Hoot said:

I purchased Rime of the Frostmaiden here and found that UDL is enabled. Given the number of issues cited here with UDL, why does R20 force it on a new purchase? I see there is a script to convert Legacy to UDL, but not the reverse. Is there a script out there to convert me back to legacy or do I have to do this by hand?

BTW - this is a terrible way to try to press adaptation. It just means I won't purchase any more modules until UDL is fixed. 

When you set up the game does it not have the tab for Legacy Dynamic Lighting on the individual pages? If not that sucks!...

I've been using Roll20 for more than a year now, and I need to say, for the most part, I think it's pretty awesome. I get to play with my friends from all different time zones and it provides capabilities I just couldn't duplicate in-person. I'm not saying it's better than in-person play, but it has its own sweet vibe and is so convenient. As a GM, I love being able to whisper to players individually without needing to write notes, and the individual lines of sight and lighting just add so much to the game. And being able to reveal images of monsters, or handouts, at the click of a button is great, as is the compendium functionality.

But, I've beein lurking on this thread for months now, and I'll admit to being puzzled. I have stuck with LDL all along, partly because of the bugs being reported in this thread, but also partly becaue I don't really understand how UDL is supposed to be better. It seems like the main selling points are a less puzzling interface (cool) and faster response (sweet, as some of my players are not running on stellar hardware). But are these things true? Imagine the bugs folks have identified are solved at some point - what advantages would UDL have over LDL?

The driving motivation is better future proofing and the possibility of new features. The technology behind LDL has pretty much run its course. Example: UDL allows for tinted lights, something that many folks have asked for. It may also allow for one-way vision blocking and other improvements. It is proving difficult to implement however, which is why you have both technologies available to you, and likely will for some time to come.

Hoot said:

I purchased Rime of the Frostmaiden here and found that UDL is enabled. Given the number of issues cited here with UDL, why does R20 force it on a new purchase? I see there is a script to convert Legacy to UDL, but not the reverse. Is there a script out there to convert me back to legacy or do I have to do this by hand?

BTW - this is a terrible way to try to press adaptation. It just means I won't purchase any more modules until UDL is fixed. 

You can opt to have the module converted to UDL when you install it. The default is still LDL. The module is natively set up with it. Just create a new instance of the game and don't choose the conversion option.

This thread is massive. I hope I'm not repeating what others have already spoken about.

I am using UDL for my game and will be starting my first game session tomorrow. I made all my own maps and tested them with a PC token. Everything seemed fine - Nightvision, light emission, light multiplier, everything. Then today I loaded up all the player tokens and have discovered that all the tokens are sharing all the vision settings. Only two tokens have light multiplier 200% but all tokens can see twice as far. Some tokens have nightvision but ALL tokens can see nightvision. The individual token settings haven't changed. Does anyone know why? My big game premiers tomorrow...

That's a bug that got introduced with the last update. The vision is actually separate, but Ctrl-L reports all tokens. You can test more accurately with a Dummy Account.

Sean M. said:

This thread is massive. I hope I'm not repeating what others have already spoken about.

I am using UDL for my game and will be starting my first game session tomorrow. I made all my own maps and tested them with a PC token. Everything seemed fine - Nightvision, light emission, light multiplier, everything. Then today I loaded up all the player tokens and have discovered that all the tokens are sharing all the vision settings. Only two tokens have light multiplier 200% but all tokens can see twice as far. Some tokens have nightvision but ALL tokens can see nightvision. The individual token settings haven't changed. Does anyone know why? My big game premiers tomorrow...

Fortunately I'm pretty sure this is only a bug in how line of sight appears for the GM. Your players should see the way they are intended still. You can test this by giving yourself control of one of the players' sheets then using the button in settings to rejoin as player. This ought to give you the perspective of the player who control's that character. You can repeat this process for each character if you want to be certain, make sure you remove your control of each previous character.

YES! I continued playing around and it does look like a bug in the GM vision. Thank you very much!

Persephone said:

Sean M. said:

This thread is massive. I hope I'm not repeating what others have already spoken about.

I am using UDL for my game and will be starting my first game session tomorrow. I made all my own maps and tested them with a PC token. Everything seemed fine - Nightvision, light emission, light multiplier, everything. Then today I loaded up all the player tokens and have discovered that all the tokens are sharing all the vision settings. Only two tokens have light multiplier 200% but all tokens can see twice as far. Some tokens have nightvision but ALL tokens can see nightvision. The individual token settings haven't changed. Does anyone know why? My big game premiers tomorrow...

Fortunately I'm pretty sure this is only a bug in how line of sight appears for the GM. Your players should see the way they are intended still. You can test this by giving yourself control of one of the players' sheets then using the button in settings to rejoin as player. This ought to give you the perspective of the player who control's that character. You can repeat this process for each character if you want to be certain, make sure you remove your control of each previous character.

Palanthis said:

Jomo said:

Not sure what is going on here, but ive got a map and i have established the Dynamic Lighting edges/bounds. I made a door in that layer and put some tokens with darkvision/vision turned on, but when i move it (or just delete it), there is no visibility past the threshold of where the door was. I can move the token into and out of the room, the vision is fine, but its registering as if the "door" is still there (for lighting only, not movement), and as such, tokens cant see into the room:

Very frustrating and only just noticed it an hour before the session. Any ideas?

I experienced the same bug on my game, using the official module "Lost Mine of Phandalver" for DD5.

From what i gather, UDL doesn't allow the use of "doors" at the moment : when the line is moved on the dynamic layer, only movement becomes available, but all my players can't see anything past the door. In effect, once you draw the dynamic lighting, moving it does nothing for players.

It's really annoying and i didn't seem to find any way to fix it. I can only say it seems related to "explorer mode" because if i moved a door before i put the players on the map, they can't see the door and all is working fine.

It only happens when you move the door in front of them. Unfortunately, doors are made to be open while the players are here...

In my games, I've just been making the doors as a separate line on Dynamic Lighting Layer (I use lime green for walls and a bright red for doors), and the when the door gets opened, I move the door line to the GM layer so that it's completely off of the Dynamic Lighting Layer and won't affect vision. And the players can't see the door's line because it's GM-only vision. :)

keithcurtis said:

The driving motivation is better future proofing and the possibility of new features. The technology behind LDL has pretty much run its course. Example: UDL allows for tinted lights, something that many folks have asked for. It may also allow for one-way vision blocking and other improvements. It is proving difficult to implement however, which is why you have both technologies available to you, and likely will for some time to come.

Thanks. Keith! This helps.

keithcurtis said:

Hoot said:

I purchased Rime of the Frostmaiden here and found that UDL is enabled. Given the number of issues cited here with UDL, why does R20 force it on a new purchase? I see there is a script to convert Legacy to UDL, but not the reverse. Is there a script out there to convert me back to legacy or do I have to do this by hand?

BTW - this is a terrible way to try to press adaptation. It just means I won't purchase any more modules until UDL is fixed. 

You can opt to have the module converted to UDL when you install it. The default is still LDL. The module is natively set up with it. Just create a new instance of the game and don't choose the conversion option.

I can't opt out. I just clicked new game, selected Rime and the only choice I get is name of game and character sheet. I do not see a choice for Dynamic Lighting. I just created a new instance and maps come up UDL enabled. On my original game, I certainly did not (nor would I) have run the conversion tool to go from LDL to UDL. At this point, I have done too much customization with macro's, api's, and handouts to just start over anyway. I am going to have to change to LDL by hand.  

Titus said:

Hoot said:

I purchased Rime of the Frostmaiden here and found that UDL is enabled. Given the number of issues cited here with UDL, why does R20 force it on a new purchase? I see there is a script to convert Legacy to UDL, but not the reverse. Is there a script out there to convert me back to legacy or do I have to do this by hand?

BTW - this is a terrible way to try to press adaptation. It just means I won't purchase any more modules until UDL is fixed. 

When you set up the game does it not have the tab for Legacy Dynamic Lighting on the individual pages? If not that sucks!...

no, UDL is just on by default so I have to convert each page from UDL to LDL by hand. However, if LDL were on by default, I could simply run the conversion script if I wanted to go to UDL. I don't want UDL. 

I just created a RotFM game and can confirm. Despite not converting, the default on all pages I tested was for UDL. It's not undoable, but it shouldn't be happening. You should file a Help Center Request.

keithcurtis said:

I just created a RotFM game and can confirm. Despite not converting, the default on all pages I tested was for UDL. It's not undoable, but it shouldn't be happening. You should file a Help Center Request.

Thanks Keith. At this point, I am already deep into doing the conversion to worry about trying to resolve for my game. But, no, this should not be the case. Hopefully the Devs will notice it here and fix for others.

Richard M.H. said:

Please, can I ask a straight up question? With great appreciation, I would like to know: How do I revert everything to simple Fog of War? I am new to Roll20 for the last six months, but I really just want to revert my dozens of maps and even my purchased maps, and all character tokens to simple Fog of War. (I spend 10-20% of my time changing tokens and maps on the fly, and constantly after each ribbon-move - when I used to "reveal" a rectangle in one mouse action.) Any thoughts? Any quick and easy way to "undo" the last few months?

For each page:

1. Turn off Updated Dynamic Lighting.
2. Turn on Fog of War.

Without any Dynamic Lighting on the page, all the other lighting settings for tokens and what not are ignored.

I had such a good time on Roll20, that it saddens me to see the state of this new lighting system ... It make me switched to Foundry and the difference in development and the number of features with Roll20 is impressive.

Foundry's dynamic lighting system is already pretty good, and the next update brings it even more features and improves rendering (flickering light, better blending).

Why the development of new features is so slow on Roll20? I was pro for more than three years and most of the requests have never been developed: personal compendium, skin for interfaces etc.

Darshyne said:

Why the development of new features is so slow on Roll20? I was pro for more than three years and most of the requests have never been developed: personal compendium, skin for interfaces etc.

A lot of the reason requests are slow is there's less and less people in Roll20's actual QA department, so the majority of testing falls to users. First on the Dev Server (where very few run games from), then it typically gets pushed to the rest of the server that winds up typically testing a much larger majority of bugs and reporting them. Unfortunately, based on how reports and information come out it appears as if one feature at a time is worked on, possibly due to the nature that many users are of the free variety. Additionally, there's a very very strange priority on requests, for example some of the most popular and necessary ones, lets say Page Organization, A Foreground Layer, Dark Mode, or Proper Page Duplication, have been neglected for a large amount of time (up to 6 years) without much on progress being made.

The unfortunate reality seems to be existing systems being changed get priority over systems that would provide a much much better gm creation and running experience. Votes hardly seem to matter given the ones listed above hover around 1000-500 votes each. 

Frankly at this point, it's a wonder why they pushed out this system and have not addressed the major complaints first, it has been... almost a year at this point. Most everyone is worried if UDL will be pushed out for LDL since some items were "not features but workarounds", along with the fact that it still does not meet feature parity and it's still being advertised as such in the forums (title of this) and on games that so many gms are having issues with.

Truly there should be some push back of this feature to dev servers for secure testing, possibly remove the extremely high potential there is right now for new or old gms to completely have their work destroyed and their players hurt consequentially. Dynamic Lighting before never had issues to the point of fundamentally making maps unstable or unloadable, if anything shouldn't UDL and LDL be able to convert seamlessly without the need for an incredibly buggy tool? It would help greatly as well if we could understand exactly what the conversion should be doing in case users are to identify what changed if we're the QA and testers of this new feature.

I honestly do not know how to politely express the level of my frustration that I purchased Rime of the Frostmaiden.

I have held off from converting to UDL due to the frequency and nature of the bugs present.  The description of the purchase advertises "GM layer information and Dynamic Lighting support" - it does not make clear that it relies on Updated Dynamic Lighting.  (I can confirm after trying again, there is no option to use the stable DL.)

I spent $50 so that I would not have to fuss over lighting settings - and I have never had so many problems.  Many of these have adversely affected my players' experiences and have caused them to petition me to switch to Foundry because Roll20 is unusable and game-breaking from their perspective.  For myself, I have spent hours fiddling and troubleshooting to get to the point where I can use the module at all.  

The poisonous icing on the cake is that the CTL+L function to see through a player's eyes is broken.  If another player has Night Vision enabled, they reveal areas as if those tokens were emitting light.  Best I can tell, the players are not affected with this issue - but it makes it impossible for me to troubleshoot or fix any token/lighting issues without recruiting a friend to log on with me to 'test' what a player sees.  (My boyfriend doesn't appreciate this gigantic waste of his time either.)

P.S. Yes, I realize that I can also use a dummy acount to troubleshoot.  However, both of these solutions are pretty finicky and cause problems with advertising for players.  I have found that many players will not even look at games that have "too many" players already in them.  So I have to go back and forth adding and deleting test accounts to reflect the players in the game accurately.  Again, more time and hassle to compensate for bugs.

Thinking switch to foundry too ...  

Valys, I can understand your frustration regarding Rime of the Frostmaiden. It should certainly have been released with LDL as the default. If conversion is to big a headache, I would suggest filing a Help Center Request to either request that the issue be addressed, or if you prefer, to request a refund.

I made a new game and figured I'd try out the new lighting system to see how it is.

I think I found a bug; it doesn't seem like Explorer mode is working.  I have a token (that I have set to myself) with vision enabled.  When I CTRL-L to see through its eyes, I can see the lighting I've set up, but when I move away, it doesn't "remember" where I've been.  It doesn't show past explored areas.

Yes, I do have Explorer mode activated.  Any suggestions?