FG Problems last night? (Sunday 10/12/2014)

[seycyrus]

At about 9PM Eastern Time My group and I got together for our regular session, and had problems. My FG would spin and grey out (not responding). My players would get connection errors, FG would crash etc.

The only thing I think I did that was a bit out of the ordinary was that I had made a few maps that were a bit larger than the 1MB recommended size (one was about 2, and the other 3). The curious thing was that we would have all of the above problems even when I hadn't shared the images! None of the images were set to pre-load either.

Did anyone else have problems last night? Any other thoughts or comments?

Oh yeah, I'm running FG v.3.08 GURPS with Languages and TableRolls extensions. I've had minor problems in the past with one player or another being kicked at random times, but last night everyone was having problems.

[Trenloe]

As you only briefly connect to the FG servers at startup time (for alias resolution and a free player with the GM is using an ultimate license) - after that initial contact with the FG servers (essentially the first couple of seconds after pressing "Join Game") there is no more contact with the FG servers. All of the communication is between the players and the GM. So, it's not a time based thing specific to Fantasy Grounds last night.

If you had big maps, just the GM opening them will slow FG down for a few seconds - the larger the map, the longer it will take to open it. This is just opening the map, not even sharing it. If the GM is slowing down, then the players will see a slow down. From your description of "FG would spin and grey out (not responding)" then there is definitely an issue with your GM side being overloaded. If the GM is not responding then the players will get connection errors or FG just booting them out, etc. - which was what you were seeing.

Also, be careful with the amount of tokens you have in your <FG app data>\tokens folder. These will all be loaded when you start and they all take up memory. If FG is using a lot of memory (close to 2GB on a 32-bit system, close to 4GB on a 64-bit system) then you will start seeing slow downs and other strange behavior, which will all have a kick-on effect to the players.

So - keep your images below 1MB if at all possible. Reduce your tokens if you have a lot of them - move them into modules is a good way to do it.

In future you can keep an eye on the amount of memory the Fantasy Grounds.exe is using - start windows task manager and if the memory use in a 32-bit system is over 1.6GB then you'll start to have issues.

[ddavison]

Also, make sure you don't have other file types inadvertently added into your token or image folders. I saw cases in the past where people had executables and other stuff that got placed there on accident and this caused problems within FG when it tried to index and list all the images and tokens.