Performance Problems

[CampbellR66]

Our group is starting to have significant performance issues.

I need some advice on how to structure the campaign data.

The Background we run a weekly game with 4 to 6 players with 2-3 of them logging in from different workstations on different weeks spread over several towns in the UK. We have been running the campaign almost for a year.

As the DM I have 10MB cable service offering approx 700k uplink bandwidth.

Initially as i expect most DMs do I just added material to a single campaign with maps, tokens and text pasted from PDF's. This eventually became un manageable so i switched to keeping characters and adhoc material in the main campaign and created modules to hold the campaign ... this seemed to be the collective wisdom on haow to do things ....

There seems to be a big problem with the FG cache method, in the one big campiagn it seems to only download individual items that have changed ... once modules are used it seems to want to download eveything again if even a single bit of text has been added, each time the module is re-exported the problem occurs. I do not have the time to completley convert the module (Mysteries of the Moonsea) in one go and work 1 -2 weeks ahead of when the material will be needed. Last session lasted 4 hours and not a single player completed the re-cache and the whole game was run old skool on skype only.... not good.

What am i doing wrong?

Please will the Devs consider functionality for pre-caching tag on items and allow out of game time log in to pre-build cache only.

The pre cache only seems to work if you trigger it manually and only for players that are logged in at that instant. I have tried openning up all the big maps in the morning and telling players to log in during the day to pre-cache .... it does not work.

[ddavison]

Instead of re-creating your mod between each session, have you considered leaving the previous mod as-is and creating a new one? In your game you could then have multiple mods open and each would have a different section of the adventure. I would have to check the file dates, but my guess would be that re-exporting the mod each session may update the dates and interfere with the caching mechanism.

[CampbellR66]

Instead of re-creating your mod between each session, have you considered leaving the previous mod as-is and creating a new one? In your game you could then have multiple mods open and each would have a different section of the adventure. I would have to check the file dates, but my guess would be that re-exporting the mod each session may update the dates and interfere with the caching mechanism.

Yes i had considered this and i expect it would help but I would be adding 3 modules a month to the list and referencing between them... well i do not know how i would do this. There would be a lot of tabs at the bottom of the section. I guess I could plan differently to get all the reference data in a single module early on so that only maps etc were in the weekly modules.

I had planned on incrementally adding to the module campaign so that at the end i had a complete conversion of the PDF for FG for re use. There is no way to merge modules is there so i can combine the seperate sections a few times a year?

I would still encourage the introduction of an out of game time log in and sync function as this would improve ongoing playability.

[Sigurd]

Consider what actually changes?

Can you have a changed data module for a month or two and then roll it back into the primary module?

Some things change a lot at first but then settle down quite nicely.


Sigurd

[Griogre]

Out of curiosity how big is your cache file? I have serveral groups where I've been running the H1-H3 modules for the last year or so and the cache on those campaigns is 11-14 megs. One thing to be aware of, is typically, most of the cache size is created from graphics. Thus the file size of your maps and other images tends to be more than 80-90% of the cache size. In other words, the amount of text - story, item and monster is pretty meaningless compared to your map size.

Knowing this, usually the long term best preforance advice I can give you is keep your maps and images *small*. Like making sure each image/map is under 1 meg max, while working hard to make them 500K or less - and trying for no more than 300K.

In the medium term another thing you can do is after you finish your next adventure is delete your campaign's cache and have the players also do so. The cache does hold all the old modules data and if you are not going back to them you might as well get rid of it.

Finally, since your campaign seems to have ground to a hault the best thing you can do for an immediate fix is have your players each login to FG using a different login next session. You'll need to free their characters so they can see them after they login. Because ownership of cached material is determined by login ID that will stop all old data transfer. You will need to re-send or pre-load the maps under the new login but the current map(s) should be small compaired to what it sounds like you are transfering now.

[Doswelk]

We have one user who has a similar problem... If his FGII crashes it corrupts his cache. So I use a trick we came up with a while back (when we were advising people who were playing over dial-up)

After you finish making your changes to the modules you could try the following:

1) Start FGII as GM
2) Start another session (on same pc or another as lon as it's local) as a player and join the "game"
3) The player session will cache the data
4) close down both sessions of FGII
5) open the cache folder (inside the FGII data folder) on the PC you created the "player" session on (this again can be the same PC)
6) There will be a folder with the name of your campaign.
7) There will be a campaign.dat file in there, you need to distribute this to your players

I am guessing (I could be wrong) but you may have a Virgin Media broadband service (the specs looked it), they provide webspace. I put my cache file in my webspace and my players download it from there.

As long as you can get the file to the players they can download it (at faster than FGII uploads it) and the game starts quicker!

[CampbellR66]

The cache file is 75 meg for a years worth

We had another mare of a session with 2 players unable to join the game.

We deleted the cache directorys and transfered the cache files from a working machine to a defective one... this seems to have worked.

I have been screen grabbing images from pdfs and rescalling them to 50px per 5 ft for battle maps ... these produce files that are 2-3 mb in size. I had considered reducing the scale.

If the manual work around is to regen a cache file and distribute it ...could the FGII software not automate this to allow transfer out of game time. The DM generates the file and leaves the server running in sync mode. The clients log in and trickle the update down out of game time.

Any way ... I hope we are running again thankyou for the cache replacement advice as this seems to have fixed it.

Regards

Rob

[joeru]

If the manual work around is to regen a cache file and distribute it ...could the FGII software not automate this to allow transfer out of game time. The DM generates the file and leaves the server running in sync mode. The clients log in and trickle the update down out of game time.

Can't really see how this is different from the GM just putting up the server at a predetermined time before the real session and the players logging in and caching the ruleset... Unless you mean that the server is pretty much always running in sync mode, in which case it'd run as a service, consume system resources and possibly reserve bandwidth at a time when I really don't want it to.

[CampbellR66]

At the moment the module/maps etc do not cache unless the player client is logged in when the DM either issues the display item command or issues a pre-cache.

The ruleset may cache ... I am not sure and i assume that is in the campaign.dat. The {module}.dat however only changes as the dm issues pre cache or dispaly commands.

I have been experimenting with this with a local client and the way to do it is to display every item likley to be needed by players while the local dummy client is logged in to get a module dat file i can then put on an email or FTP server for the players.

Could a dat file not be generated at the same time as the module export as an option on the export command?