On the fly images - too slow ?

[phantomwhale]

Hey all,

I had my first experience with "on the fly" images today, as I quickly grabbed snapshots from a PDF and saved them as JPG files (~40Kb) into my campaign images folder.

I was picking these images up after only a few seconds in my interface, loading them up and hitting "pre-load image" on them. Then after about 45 seconds, hitting share image, once the preamble chat had happened.

Only... it took almost 7-8 minutes until most of my players saw the image ! This was about the same loading time (if not much more) then some of my maps (~2.5Mb each)... And whilst these large maps were problematic (one set of players have an iffy connection which meant they dropped twice and therefore had to keep reloading the map) it is really the inability to quickly chuck out 40-50Kb images that concerns me now.

Is this a known network protocol problem with FGII ? Or have others seen such times for such small images ? I can't believe it's a bandwidth problem as we were sharing 3-4Mb screengrabs over Skype now and then whenever bugs came up, and they came over in under a minute.

As a tonic to this, we had lots of good experiences too, and my players (old friends of mine, admittedly) are very keen to come back next week. So it's not all bad. Just a shame I can't quickly pull up images on google and blast them over currently !

Many thanks,
Ben

[EugeneZ]

I've never seen anything like this in FG2. I use campaign images and module images all the time. They all load in the expected time. I know some of the older versions had weird bugs where they'd transfer massive amounts of token data sometimes. Make sure you're using the latest version and try emptying your token box and trying again just to be sure!

[Leonal]

One thing I've experienced sometimes is that if parts of the data fail to arrive due to packet loss then FG just keeps on sending data even if it will get nowhere.

Also if you preload, but share before the preload is finished then it may en up not working. (Not entirely sure about this one)

[phantomwhale]

One thing I've experienced sometimes is that if parts of the data fail to arrive due to packet loss then FG just keeps on sending data even if it will get nowhere.

Also if you preload, but share before the preload is finished then it may en up not working. (Not entirely sure about this one)

I am using the latest version (2.7.2), and there were no tokens involved, just plain images.

I did try and preload and share before the image had finished, and also found that manually "turning it off and on again" (e.g. unsharing, closing and resharing images) ended up fixing the problem fairly quickly (although those who already had the image experienced a small wait for it to "reload"). Maybe I'll wait for the preload to finish (think there are icons for this, right ?) before sharing next time, and see if this speeds things up.

[EugeneZ]

Even if you think no tokens are involved, there were bugs in the past where the contents of your tokenbox would cause slow-down, even if you weren't using them. Or something. I don't really remember. It's the only thing I can think of, since I don't have the problem.

[phantomwhale]

Ok, we had another session. Some people noted timeout / lost data errors on their chat. Some aggressive re-sharing of data fixed that up, and overall no major data load problems. Images that were fully "preloaded" before sharing appeared like magic (as they should !)

So hopefully I've found my workaround for bad network data sending. Might still be a low level networking thing that might be done here, but don't see it being high on the FGII wishlist, esp. as few others are seeing an issue here.

[phantomwhale]

Hmmm - session yesterday had the same problem. 40-60Kb images left to preload for 3-4 minutes, and seemingly never loading. Reclicked "preload" several times, still nothing. Finally just hit share - a couple of people got the image, others say it never loaded.

Also had an odd issue with a map not getting reshared properly, and in the end I "wiggled" a couple of tokens, which suddenly bought a couple of players up to date.

I have two pairs of players each coming from one house, I wonder if two players on the same network is causing the issue ? Probably not, but... We also had a couple of network drops (everyone disconnected) so it's probably down to our bad network connection. Although Skype and FGII chat is pretty smooth, so clearly you can still get good network behaviour over a bad network !

Anyway, very frustrating - FGII without images can be very "univolving" for players, and I can't do any timely "reveals" at the moment. No opportunity to upgrade the network at the moment (not mine, I'm a guest) but will try that in May / June.