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Map slowness

Any tips on having fast / large maps? Making one that is currently 120 x 75 units.  Has commercial map background bought on roll 20 that doesnt look large and about 60 tokens. Now super slow if I copy and paste tokens
Roland, I've found there are multiple factors to dealing with large maps on Roll20: The actual dimensions, you mention 120X75, which is super large by Roll20 standards. The resolution of the map. Obviously, you want as much detail as you can, and many come at 144 or higher resolution, but that comes at a cost. People have different thresholds for "acceptable", so you might experiment with what you are comfortable with. 72dpi is "standard" — the 144dpi is double that resolution to supply more detail — and may be fine for large areas of generic forest or swamp or whatever. Consider breaking a larger map into a sections such as lower res larger view and higher res smaller section. You can also tile smaller map sections multiple times, which is more cost-effective memory and speed wise if you have terrain that is very similar. File type for the artwork can affect how it looks. You can get smaller files with JPEG, but it can cause some nasty artifacting as the trade-off. PNG doesn't compress in the same manner so keeps the detail but at the cost of larger files. Keep your goals in mind. If you need ultra detailed map detail you may be able to improve speed using a combination of techniques above, but you might also want to consider other VTTs. I like Roll20, but I'm told others handle larger maps better. I consider the maps helpful but not literally true (ground doesn't have a grid on it when I walk around), so I'm ok with the quality tradeoff to get more speed moving around. But your games may play differently. I hope some of that might help. Good luck! M
1599498485
David M.
Pro
API Scripter
Are you using dynamic lighting? Is it faster when DL is turned off? Finally, be sure to use as few DL "segments" as possible. E.g. a tree trunk doesn't need to be a circle in the DL layer, just use an "X" or a very limited-sided polygon, etc. The VTT is constantly ray tracing the vision from all of your tokens with all of the drawings on the DL layer, which can get pretty taxing. Also, be sure to not have Global Illumination on if you are using advanced FoW. They are known not to play nicely. If using UDL this probably doesn't apply with Explorer mode, but I could be wrong.
Thanks Markie!  I'll try to split it up in two. Its a tier 4 5e encounter where the party will be overtaking an airship filled with cloud giants and their cronies and trying to destroy it before it can reach the other side of the map where the cloud giant's flying city is, with massive numbers of anti-aircraft weapons. Should be epic if the speed doesnt kill it!!!
turning off dynamic lighting fixed it! If I want to keep the castle hidden, I guess I can just put a black rectangle in the object layer over that side of the map and then have the big reveal?
I found it was when Advanced Fog of War was enabled along with the legacy DL, especially when the global illumination flag was enabled. I switched off the Advanced Fog of War and got good performance.
1599514436
David M.
Pro
API Scripter
Regular ol' Fog of War would work, too. Glad that helped, but kind of a bummer DL isn't working though. Is the DL layer that heavily populated with a bazillion line segments? One thing to check would be to see if "has sight" is checked for all of those 60+ tokens on the map. Assuming these are all npcs, that is probably not really necessary, since the GM can see everything already. You can use the measure tool to check LoS if you need to. The system will perform ray-tracing on ALL tokens with sight, but should ignore those without. If the only tokens with sight on the map are the PCs, it might not be much of a burden?
David: almost nothing in the DL layer.  Very possible I have vision turned on for all.  The map is fully working now so I can monkey around with the settings without fear that I was building something that would never see the light of play!  I'd write back if I figure out what the specific problem was...
1599588550
David M.
Pro
API Scripter
Sounds good. Definitely check for the dreaded advanced fog of war plus global illumination combo that we mentioned, too.