Fantasy Grounds continuous crashing.

[bhalverson]

Anyone getting this crash over and over again with your new patch for Fantasy Grounds? It takes me a solid 30 min. just to open up my server for my players to hop in. I have maybe a total of 1 GB worth of data... didn't think it would crash this hard from just a Gig.

I've uninstalled it as best I can with removing all relative files of fantasy grounds from my computer and reinstalled it. It doesn't crash with fresh new campaigns I make, but only this one and only campaign. I'm thinking something is corrupt, which I'm crossing my fingers it isn't.

6212

Thanks much,
Blair

[Nickademus]

First set of questions everyone will ask:

Any extensions? Any modules open in the campaign? Any special FG setting like network diagnostics or test/dev mode enabled?

[Trenloe]

A few things to check:


On the first screen of Fantasy Grounds, press the "Settings" button and make sure that "Enable Network Diagnostics" is NOT checked.
Check how many tokens you have under <FG App Data>\tokens - Fantasy Grounds now does a lot more work with tokens when the GM loads the campaign, this is due to the token search facility that is new in FG 3.0. Tokens can also take up a lot of FG memory so reducing the number of tokens loaded each time is a good thing to do in general.


If you are running a 32-bit operating system Fantasy Grounds can only work with a maximum of 2GB worth of memory - in practice I have seen ti crash when to gets above 1.7GB memory. Open Windows Task Manager and monitor the memory used by FantasyGrounds.exe if the application crashes when it gets to 1.7GB memory use then you will need to reduce the amount on memory used by FG - the first thing to do is reduce the number of tokens being loaded (see point 2 above). If it is crashing at much less than 1.7GB of memory use then it could be something to do with the data in your campaign you're loading - try loading a new blank campaign and see if this has the same issue.

[Moon Wizard]

Delete the modulestate.xml from your campaign directory to reset all modules to closed. That's usually the culprit.

JPG

[damned]

1GB data?
My current campaign has been running for a year and my live campaign directory is less than 10MB and I have less than 40MB of modules loaded...
Do you *really* have that much in your campaign folder?
If you *do* - there is no way in the world that you need it all.

[bhalverson]

Hot diggity look at those replies :D I'll test out all your methods right now...

@Nickademus: yes I do have Exts and Mods in my game and I just checked the settings... it looks like Network Diagnosis and Debug were indeed checked.

@Trenloe: As previously stated, I unchecked the network diagnosis button and we'll see how this works with that out of the way. As for the tokens, I'm running the Rise of the Runelords campaign and have indeed implemented every monster and NPC not available in the bestiary or NPC extensions available. I'm currently on a 64 bit OS with Windows 7 due to my 16 GB of RAM so you can definitely see why I was shocked it was crashing... usually only see that when rendering VFX and 3D movie assets... Just tested this out and it bumped up a GIG I noticed. I noticed I have around 45 tokens in the host folder. Also on a side note, power to ya for living in Denver. I live there too and it's a rather awesome place... random snowing yesterday too which was quite unexpected; or expected given Colorado in general haha.

@Moon Wizard: Good knowledge to know Moon Wizard, I'll try and get in a habit of deleting that when / if this happens again :) thank you.

@Damned: I am a man of quality unfortunately haha, so I tend to be a little overboard when it comes to high resolution maps and tokens. All the same though, should be running just fine as is ^_^ and this is only chapter 1 of Rise of the Runelords so it's just those maps, character tokens, data, game props, and random pictures of areas, etc.

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

Alrighty, so I tested these things out and they are all showing good results on the first try, but when reaching the remainder of tests, it does begin crashing again. I am beginning to think it MIGHT be because of the overwhelming data on the campaign file... I suppose I'll try putting some maps and such off to the side for later sessions. I did try making a new campaign and it did seem to load just fine so I feel it is quite relative to THIS campaign. Going to slowly drag data and files over to the new game and do a test run or two after every move until it crashes to locate the culprit.

[bhalverson]

*GASP!*

Looks like dragging the tokens (app data > campaigns > *game* > tokens) over started the crash...

UPDATE (3/8/14): minimized the tokens drastically to only having the ones needed for each sub-chapter in chapter 1 of rise of the runelords. Can open FG with ease now without it crashing.

Why would tokens, which are so small in data, crash the system so easily? Is this being looked into by "maintenance?"

[Zeus]

*GASP!*

Looks like dragging the tokens (app data > campaigns > *game* > tokens) over started the crash...

UPDATE (3/8/14): minimized the tokens drastically to only having the ones needed for each sub-chapter in chapter 1 of rise of the runelords. Can open FG with ease now without it crashing.

Why would tokens, which are so small in data, crash the system so easily? Is this being looked into by "maintenance?"

How many tokens did you have in total and what was the average file size? Also in which token subfolder were the tokens copied to:


Fantasy Grounds/tokens/shared
Fantasy Grounds/tokens/host
Fantasy Grounds/campaigns/<campaign name>/tokens





For comparison I tend to have no more than 30 common tokens that I use in play which I store in Fantasy Grounds/tokens/shared for sharing with clients - this helps to keep client connection times down. I don't store tokens per campaign. However I do use modules with NPC/trap data, each one with an associated token. My 4E bestiary modules have hundreds of NPCs which I can use during play selectively without impacting campaign load times.

[damned]

How big is the pdf file for chapter 1 of Rise of the Runelords?
To get it UP to 1GB in size you would have to upscale all the images which cannot add quality, only size.
There is so much discussion in here about optimizing your image sizes - why - because the game will run better :)

[Blacky]

Check to see if you really need things that big (I know people who only uses 200px tokens for human sized creature, which is big a waste of space unless the whole gaming table as Retina-like screens for example).

My current campaign folder is 25MB, with over 40 gaming nights under its belt. 149 images in the folder, 200 tokens. But I remove everything that's not needed anymore. My ruleset is old and my images small (most portraits are clipped to 500px, 32px tokens for medium size), but even if that were not the case double their size I would have a campaign folder under 100MB.

Do also remember that the FG bitmap downscaling algorithm is bad. Unless zoom is needed (for maps, some handouts, and some props), having for example a 2000x2000 portrait of a NPC would actually reduce its visual quality once displayed.

I'm all for visual quality, and do find that sometimes people on the FG boards have very low expectations in that area, don't demand enough from the FG software, but 1GB seems like a lot.

[Targas]

I got all token packs from Immortal night, created module files for each token pack, created a LowRes Version for each pack where all humanoids are 100px square, 4 legged monsters, giants, 200 px square and dragons 400px square. Instead of 220 MB tokens zipped, I just have 38 MB zipped and it is really good enough, as squares are 50px each.
My maps are up to 5000px square with up to 3 MB. I wouldn't recommend bigger maps, therefore 100px squares are out of discussion.

3 MB maps doesn't seem to be big, but knowing that 8 mb of maps will blow up internal memory consumption to 1000 mb, if all opened at once and FG will crash with more than 1700 mb memory consumption on a 32 Bit OS you will get the heck of it.

I can activate/deactivate each token pack as needed and only those which are used in personalities/encounters/NPC's are saved with the campaign, keeping size low.

My portraits are 63px square, as bigger portraits would be reduced to this size within FG in the C&C ruleset.

[ddavison]

I would also recommend checking your token folder, portraits folder and image folder for other file types that may have been dragged there accidentally. We had one support request a while back where someone had inadvertently copied over a folder that had PDF documents, executables, etc. and it was causing issues with Fantasy Grounds when it tried to load each one into memory.

[Blacky]

Or even a big picture. Inadvertently putting in a 4000x4000 pixels map into the Portrait folder can make FG cry for its mommy ;)

[Callum]

Just to check - are you using the system where you have a main campaign with the PCs in it, and modules for each adventure? For a long campaign with many parts - like Rise of the Runelords - you really should be doing that. Especially with your desire for quality! ;)

For comparison, the folder for my eight-year Age of Worms campaign (closing in on 300 sessions) is 65 MB. But I also have a campaign folder for each chapter, ranging from 3MB to 9MB in size, which I exported as modules and opened in the main campaign as I was running them.

I've also just started a Rise of the Runelords campaign, but we're only 15 sessions in to Burnt Offerings. I have a 3 MB campaign folder for that, with a 5 MB Burnt Offerings (incomplete) and a 3 MB Sandpoint module.