Load-times for character sheets and maps

[Ken L]

I stocked a cleric character with all divine spells up to 4th level, and I find that when I switch to the abilities tab, fantasy ground will literally freeze for about 20-30 seconds just to populate it..

Likewise, when opening large maps in excess of 2000 square pixels, will do the same both opening and closing.

Is there a way around this? Can I force-load my server-characters so at the very least, my spell casting players won't have to freeze each time they open their ability tab for their characters? Note that once it has been opened once, it will behave normally there after until the character sheet is closed. Upon re-opening the character sheet and jumping to the abilites tab for the first time, the same event occurs.

[Zacchaeus]

I take it you mean actions tab rather than abilities?

I can't reproduce this but then the likely explanations are probably many and various. First thing to try would be to see if this happens on a new campaign with no extensions loaded. Next possible culprits for slow downs that I'm aware of is massive token folders and huge campaign sizes with dozens of monster maps; is this possible?

Other things that I see are spreading FG across multiple screens; having Steam overlay enabled and having cross platform compatibility mode running (or not running) when necessary/unnecessary . If none of those things apply then I'm out of ideas I'm afraid.

[damned]

I think Ken L usually plays Pathfinder. I have read some things in the past about performance and lots of spells... but it was a long time ago...

[Zacchaeus]

I think Ken L usually plays Pathfinder. I have read some things in the past about performance and lots of spells... but it was a long time ago...

Ah, right. In that case ignore what I said :)

[Ken L]

I take it you mean actions tab rather than abilities?

Yes, actions, not the abilities tab. From what it sounds like, there's no solution.

I recall that there was some way to force-load, but that may have been isolated to modules.

[Artrem]

Ken, we have this same issue in our pathfinder campaign as well as we've moved into the higher level play. We have isolated the issues to the action tab with it's spells (and their effects) as the likely issue. We are currently at level 19 in our campaign and our cleric seems to be the biggest issue with opening the action tab. He has all his spells in his tab and we get the same studdering (20 seconds or so) you've described when he or myself (GM) opens his action tab for the first time. I also get the same with our druid who has made multiple weapons/effects for each wildshape forms. Even now, I see that any monsters that I coded in spells and effects are causing this issue now at the higher levels.

I have tried many things, new campaign file, no extensions, no tokens, no maps, recreating character sheets, and it appears isolated to when I have the spells in the character sheet or an action tab with alot of weapon/effects for the player to use.

This has been happening since around level 12 for us in our campaign. So, this is what I do as a GM to help with this loading times and to make the game smoother for us:

1) When I start the campaign for the night, I open each player's character sheet and click on the action tab (after I've opened the tab once for me, it doesn't cause the loading time each time after) so I can view it in game without issues.
2) I drag any NPC's/monsters that I think they will likely fight into the combat tracker and open their sheets as well and leave them in the combat tracker masked.
3) If you use the party icon (I with the 3 heads in the upper right corner), I open it as well and click on xp and inventory tabs.

I do all of these steps prior to players connecting and it prevents any delays during our campaign that may be caused by me opening up my sheets on my computer.

Prior to the PC's loading in, they typically click the flushdb button (nuclear sign in the upper right corner of their join game tab) if they've played more than one PC at a time for the last session.
They then log in and maybe a slight loading time when they first click on their action tab, but otherwise we play without any issues. The players all open their action tabs prior to playing. Some players (melee classes) have no issues as we've described above.

It does only seem to be an issue the first time the action tab is opened. After that, it doesn't seem to be an issue.

Since, we've followed this pattern we have had very little issues for the past several months. Hope it helps you as well!

Artrem

[Moon Wizard]

You will most likely have an issue if you load all the cleric spells into the interface, rather than just the spells that will actually be used or memorized by the cleric. It's a limitation of the way that the interface for the spellcaster's was originally built up for 3.5E.

When I played a cleric in Pathfinder, I only loaded up the spells actually memorized, and then used the spells module to swap in/out when needed. Since most people usually re-use the same favorite spells from day to day, it hasn't been a general issue.

Regards,
JPG

[darrenan]

It becomes more of an issue as you get higher in levels and the NPCs (which have the same issues on their actions tab as PCs) have more spells memorized. I believe this issue was first reported a year or two ago, so it's nothing really new.

[Ken L]

Will this be addressed in the next major version?

[damned]

Hi Ken L the next major version wont initially (according to the current plans) change the way any of the rulesets work.
It will be mostly behind the scenes upgrades and then the initial new feature sets.
It sounds like this issue will require a rewrite of parts of the 3.5e ruleset and that is separate to the update.
However - more ram and multi threading may alleviate the issue somewhat anyway but we wont know until we see it...

Id add it to Moon Wizards wishlist and see what happens.

[Callum]

I've experienced this issue with the 19th level spellcasters in one of my campaigns - but the delay is only a few seconds. However, like JPG suggests, we only put the spells currently prepared (plus a few alternates) into the Actions tab.