I hve about 5-6 players joining to my game and incredible slowness just for me.

[bawsr]

I have 75 meg up and down. I don't see any bottleneck on the router. It takes Minutes to roll the dice. I have turned off my tv which I thought might have been causing the issue.


Any suggestions on what to look at or fix? The players all roll dice fine see everything fine. Me, as the DM, takes a long time to just roll a dice or move anything around.

My machine has a very decent video card and 32 gig of ram but I was reading that FG is only a 32 bit app.

Any suggestions or ideas of things to check out?

[Moon Wizard]

Some questions that might help:

What kind of machine are you running on?
Are you spreading FG across multiple screens?
When you bring up Task Manager, how much memory is FG using? (may need to look at detailed view)
What OS are you running?
Do you have the Compatibility Mode setting enabled in FG Settings?

Regards,
JPG

[bawsr]

i7 processor 32 gig of ram. gt 660 TI 2GB video card

I had previously been spreading across 3 screens. I have stopped doing that.

Not currently running. I will look at Task Manager next time for the bottleneck.

Windows 10

I do not have compatibility mode setting enabled in FG

[Moon Wizard]

Are you running multiple monitors on the machine? If so, do you see the same issue on FG if you have only one monitor plugged in?
If you are running through Steam, make sure that the Steam Overlay is turned off. Right click on Fantasy Grounds, and turn off the Steam Overlay in the Properties.

Let me know what you find on the memory usage.

JPG

[bawsr]

I probably will not be playing until Friday night again :). I will check Memory usage then.

I did have steam overlay enabled. I will try with only one monitor plugged in. I think first I will be extra careful not to drag the app cross the monitor boundary and see how that works.

Is there a plan to upgrade FG to handle more memory? It does seem to be a little bit constraining. I also took out a large amount of Tokens that I had purchased.

[Moon Wizard]

Please disable Steam overlay. This will definitely impact performance.

Memory usage comes down to graphics overhead. Reduce graphics usage to manage memory go now. We're looking at this as part of next major revision.

Regards,
JPG

[bawsr]

Awesome thanks for the update.

When you say next major revision do you mean next three months or next year? Fantasy ground really needs a lot of real estate for the screens Especially for us DM's.

I am looking at buying the D&D complete bundle for Fantasy ground. I guess I am missing strahd but My wife has threatened to beat me to death if she ever has to run Ravenloft again :) She said.. she doesn't like never getting to go home again :D

[Moon Wizard]

The next major revision is a ways out still. We haven't announced any timelines, but it will probably be marked as v4 when it does.

We have other smaller updates in the pipeline this year as well.

Regards,
JPG

[seycyrus]

Lots of people drag their FG across multiple screens without any loss in functionality. Unfortunately, your problem seems to be system specific.

[bawsr]

ok... I played all on one screen today and the it slowed down again. It was a long time to roll dice. I would try to grab the damage and it would still grab attack dice. It was a little faster than last week without the steam overlay. It took a long time to roll dice.

My memory usage for Fantasy grounds never went much about 1.7 gig.

I am a little frustrated. It is very slow for the players running the game. I so no specific event that started the slowdown.

Is there a recommended configuration/hardware/videocard/memory amount? My laptop runs fantasy grounds better than my desktop although I have seen slow down on it.

I am willing to buy a new computer to fix this issue. I would really rather not lose all my investment in Fantasy Grounds and look for another remote game playing tool. It had been working really well up until the last couple of patches.

[Moon Wizard]

Depending on your OS, 1.7G may be too much. If your OS is 32-bit and doesn't support the large memory flag, that will be the point where the app begins to have memory issues on older OS options.

Can you try closing some modules (both tokens and adventures)? You can even reset to scratch by deleting the modulestate.xml file in your campaign directory.

If you've added custom tokens to the tokens folder, can you try removing those?

Also, check size of campaign images folder too.

Sorry if I'm repeating some stuff. I'm on my phone, and it's very hard to review previous posts while entering message.

Regards,
JPG

[bawsr]

I am running a 64 bit Windows 10 PRO. I do have 32 Gig of ram. Both my laptop and desktop have 32 gig of ram.

I had hundreds of tokens. I removed those a week or so ago just to validate. They are still gone.

My campaign folder is about 2 gig in size.

I run the game from a laptop or desktop. I tend to move the files back and forth. I have left zip files (as backups) in the campaign folder. From what I hear you saying.. that could be a bad thing. Would that be worthwhile to cleanup?

I did go through and close all the modules I didn't absolutely need. The only extraneous modules I have loaded are the new Fifth edition feats (since everyone is wanting to check them out. I do have the Players handbook and the basic rules shared for players. DMG, POTA and a map module for myself.

[Trenloe]

Does your computer hibernate at any point? It has been reported by a few people that hibernating can make the dice very slow to respond. I'd recommend rebooting your PC just before you play (this will be a good idea in general if you're having performance issues) and don't have it set to hibernate at any point.

[Moon Wizard]

2G is huge for the campaign folder.

What are the file sizes in your images and portraits folders?

What the the resolutions of the files in those directories?

If those directories aren't the ones with the big files, which ones are?

Thanks,
JPG

[bawsr]

I am running two different campaigns..

the campaign directory I was running last night size is 461 MB.. My other campaign folder for my other game is 98 mb. I do have tons of campaigns and modules I am working on and playing with (Rolemaster, Mutants and Masterminds, 4e and 3.5 game. 2 1 on 1 games, a savage worlds game) and so on..

my top level directory in campaigns has 1.47 gb worth of zip files of backups of my current campaigns. I also realized I dumped a ton of maps with subdirectories in my images folder because I could never find the map I wanted.. that is about 450 mb of files :)

SO I get the feeling that the recommendation will be to remove those maps from my images directory :D I spent a lot of time gathering maps I thought would be useful and also buying some maps so I would have variety to use.

[Zacchaeus]

Those are still vast numbers; my ENTIRE campaign directory totals 195Mb spread over 30+ different campaigns.

[Trenloe]

Yeah, very large file sizes there. I recommend moving all of those 450MB of maps/images into one or more module you can activate when needed. But before you do that, make sure they have been optimized for FG - try to get them below 1MB in size (smaller if you can). Don't use PNG files, use JPG with quality between 50-75. Also, if you have large dimensions on some maps, consider reducing the resolution - 50 pixels per 5' square is fine.

Additionally, if you've shared a lot of images/maps with the players, go through and remove the (p) icons from the entries you no longer need - this is an overhead on your players which can have a kick-on effect to the GM.

[bawsr]

I think a lot of it coming from the large amount of Maps in one of the campaigns and all the backups. Should I remove those? I do have a game to run in a couple of hours.

[Trenloe]

I think a lot of it coming from the large amount of Maps in one of the campaigns and all the backups. Should I remove those? I do have a game to run in a couple of hours.
Yes, remove any extra files/data/images/backups from your <FG App Data>\cmapaigns\<Name of your campaign> directory. Try to get the campaign directory for your game down to a small level - just what you need to run the game. Then see if this makes a difference to the performance issues you've been having.

[Zacchaeus]

I think a lot of it coming from the large amount of Maps in one of the campaigns and all the backups. Should I remove those? I do have a game to run in a couple of hours.

Yes, the more stuff you have in a campaign the harder everything is needing to work. As Trenloe says roll up your maps into modules so that you can just open up one when you need a map rather than having it sitting there all the time.

[bawsr]

ok I was cleaning them up as I was waiting for an answer :) Lets see how it performs this evening! Thanks for the assistance.

I assume no matter what I do, that trying to display it on my big tv is going to cause the game to have performance problems?

[Trenloe]

I assume no matter what I do, that trying to display it on my big tv is going to cause the game to have performance problems?
I'd get it working OK on just one screen first. Then you can do some testing on additional screens.

[damned]

Hey bawsr I dont think your big screen TV is causing the issues - unless it is to do with the multi screen multi video card issue that some people have experienced...
EDIT: To be safe do as Trenloe suggests and test it without the big screen first....

[bawsr]

absolutely. I was just wondering if it was worth the effort to try multiple. Simplify the problem resolve then expand the scope of the test.


Thanks to the both of you for your insights. I feel like a typical user. (blame the update rather than something I did) The slowness may have started after put all of those maps in but I didn't play on my desktop for a couple of weeks after that. I didn't put together the direct correlation between the two events.

Thanks again. Here's hoping that things are back to working.

[bawsr]

Ok.. the first time trying it was faster than before but it is still very slow. It making the game much slower. I am really trying to decide if it wouldn't be better just to have me roll dice and update statistics. I check the ram... I am not close to 2 gig used by FG at all. I reboot before I start. It takes about 3 seconds before the dice roll if I can click it. When I target a character, I try and click the weapon for attack it will roll albeit slowly. When I try and roll damage. I cant select the weapon damage (off of the combat tracker) I click the damage dice and it rolls again.. I click the damage dice and highlights everything.

Fantasy grounds doesn't have to be in the first 4 gig of ram does it? I did reboot and try to shut down everything else.

The group (5 characters) fought two ice trolls and it took about an hour and 15 minute or so to resolve the combat. If I would have had dice, it would have been a 15 minute combat at most.

I am not sure where the bottleneck is. I am running task manager and I don't see any bottleneck. Disk is fast (Raid 1 disk system) and ssd. 2GB video card ) 32 GB ram. The network doesn't seem to be high. I have two players local and 3 over the network. I currently have the local players going directly to my IP and the remote players using the 4 word alias.

I am trying to provide as much data as possible.

If you can provide me what the bottleneck is and I can get around it I will. If it was bandwidth, I would upgrade to 150 meg up and down. The application limits the memory. I can move everything to SSD if that would help.


My campaign directory is now..

31 mb

I cleaned up This campaign to 5 mb.

I am running rise of TIAMAT module and currenty in the ICE Caves.

I loaded up Ice caverns map, DM and player (Player map of ICE caves is large) It did seem to have an impact when I hid most of the map from the players (the layering).

I am trying to feed information to see if a solution can be found. I appreciate any help.

1 player is on a tablet (2gb of ram) The rest are on laptops between 4-16 gig of ram)

Any suggestions are appreciated.

[damned]

Hola bawsr How big is the cache for this campaign on the players computer? Is it slow without players connected? Is it slow without the 2GB player? Did you run off teh one screen or still off the two screens? Did you share the Tiamat module or the DMG or the MM? Im happy to connect up and test with you. Send em a PM.

[bawsr]

I have tried a few different options over the past couple of weeks. Yesterday I did some other tests. I do appreciate the offers. I had two games yesterday and both seemed to go better.

Just to answer a couple of questions, I will let you know what I think the issue was also.

The 2g Player didn't paly for a couple of weeks. It was just the same. I didn't think that was a common cause. The caches, I had people clear their caches. I do not share TIAMAT, DMG or MM. Only the Players handbook.

I did start with one screen.. one or two didn't make a difference.

I know that is was told to start it without the steam overlay. I did set that and started the game and didn't notice any different on Friday NIght game.

Saturday (both games) I actually tried shutting *EVERYTHING* down.

I will see how the game runs tonight and see if I get repeated better performance. I occasionally get where I try to grab damage and grab attack dice instead but it was much much better than it had been previously.

Now on to one thing I did different that *I* think made a change. I did load the game without steam overlay. I always have steam up and running (one of the main contacts methods to contact players) I realized that part of the steam overlay being turned off wouldn't load steam.

I shut down steam altogether and all other apps (thunderbird and IE and all)

It seemed about 10 times faster than previously.

Let me see how the game runs this evening. If I have a problem, I will take you up on the offer of trying to connect up and helping me troubleshoot.

Thanks!

[damned]

The steam overlay definitely conflicts with the Fantasy Grounds game engine. This is a known issue.

[Trenloe]

Yeah, mentioned by Moon Wizard as a probable cause in posts #4 and #6 of this thread.