Organizing a campaign

[birdskull]

Hola! I'm working on my groups upcoming campaign and I've got quite a lot planned. Lots of maps... Knowing maps cause memory issues (which I already have bumped into) I was thinking how to best organize my campaign into modules. Is there any point in having Items, NPCs and "text based" stuff in FG organized into modules, or is the memory issue only connected with images? E.G.: If running Undermountain, could I theoretically have tonnes of items and Story entries in my Campaign and only load the maps from parts of Undermountain as a module? Or should I also organize my items and NPCs into modules? I see some people make adventures in separate modules and then load in those modules when in use, but I fear there could be a lot of "I need this map from that adventure now that the players want to check out that place again" etc.

[Skillkoil]

As long as you unshare maps/images once they have been viewed and no longer needed there should be not much issue with memory getting eaten up. The best way to organize a campaign in my opinion is through the Story button. Create chapters and pages and number them so they stay in order then link to all your encounters, quests, npc's, parcels, etc.. from insdie the story so you have everything available in one place.

Hope this helps!

[Zacchaeus]

Map issues are generally on the players side when too many of them are shared. That said if you are creating a campaign with an awful lot of maps then you might run into issues. For example Tomb of Annihilation has over 70 player maps and a fair number of DM maps as well as dozens of images. With that module open I'm running at around 425Mb of memory so that's well short of any kind of limit on my side of the fence.

Generally you will want to pin locations to your maps or maybe just encounters so you would want the story and/or encounters to be in the same place as your maps. That would mean creating possibly multiple modules with all of the detail needed to run that part of the adventure.

You could create an overview module with information pertinent to any location and then load in additional modules created for a particular area or place.

As I said, however, unless you are going to have hundreds of images then I don't think you need worry about the size of the module on your end. Just make sure that you un-share unneeded images as your players move through the dungeon.

[Valyar]

When you are using a module from the store, the things are pretty easy - you load when they need something from it and then unload to reduce the clutter in the libraries.

When you are having your own adventure or something that is not available in the store, things get more interesting and all is up to your personal preference as a Game Master. Below is outline of my routine. I use Realm Works in parallel to Fantasy Grounds, because it is much better campaign organizer than what currently FG offers. This is what I do and so far it works flawlessly (I don't play games available on the store, so I have to prepare everything at least once :) ):


All goes into Realm Works first, as this is what I use as Game Master in my face to face or virtual games.
I prepare the adventure in advance by creating the necessary resources in FG: Images, Maps, NPCs, Items and everything that I will need to show to players or use during sessions. I.e. this is very fast as I copy everything from Realm Works and the only time sink is finding the proper map. (In F2F games we use wet erase markers and vinyl battle map by Chessex). I don't put story entries or maps with pins, Realm Works already has this.
We start playing and during the length of the adventure, I modify or improve what i have created either on the fly or for the next session(s). Sometimes the adventure gets even better than the original (or the planned).
When the adventure ends, I export everything to a module and clean up the current campaign (the campaign is archived as master before exporting the module). Items that are in player's inventory don't disappear or have their links destroyed, because they are copy of what was once in the campaign. I know there are drawbacks, but the way I GM negates those.
If i need to refer to something from the previous adventure, I load the module. If it is something that should remain for the duration of the campaign, I just copy it and don't bother with loading the respective module
I use the Story/Quest libraries to keep notes and track of what has been completed.

[birdskull]

Map issues are generally on the players side when too many of them are shared. That said if you are creating a campaign with an awful lot of maps then you might run into issues. For example Tomb of Annihilation has over 70 player maps and a fair number of DM maps as well as dozens of images. With that module open I'm running at around 425Mb of memory so that's well short of any kind of limit on my side of the fence.

Generally you will want to pin locations to your maps or maybe just encounters so you would want the story and/or encounters to be in the same place as your maps. That would mean creating possibly multiple modules with all of the detail needed to run that part of the adventure.

You could create an overview module with information pertinent to any location and then load in additional modules created for a particular area or place.

As I said, however, unless you are going to have hundreds of images then I don't think you need worry about the size of the module on your end. Just make sure that you un-share unneeded images as your players move through the dungeon.

Ho hum. Well, my FG started sucking up over 3gb of RAM last night, and my campaign is smaller than ToA. So something else must be acting up...
Still going to organized differently, though. :)

[damned]

How many Tokens do you have?
Tokens are handled poorly memory wise...

[Valyar]

Token's size 'helps' as well :D

[Zacchaeus]

Ho hum. Well, my FG started sucking up over 3gb of RAM last night, and my campaign is smaller than ToA. So something else must be acting up...
Still going to organized differently, though. :)

As well as tokens as damned mentioned how big are these maps?

[birdskull]

I had a bunch of maps that where 2000x2000. I've reduced all those that didn't suffer from the quality loss. Had 4-5 images that were larger than 2000x2000. Deleted those. Tokens made up around 350 mb of RAM. Could the bad allocation-crash be due to the oversized maps.

[LordEntrails]

Funny that you mention Undermountain, see my signature.

My version of the first level of UM has over 250 maps that are generally around 2000 x 2000 pixels and ~200kb each (the images folder is about 175MB). Several are much larger than this. One is 3900 x 5800 & 4.3 MB and two are 2000 x 3000 & 3MB each. EDIT: oh, and most maps are 100 pixel squares.

I have zero problems with memory issues with this campaign. I've run it with almost a dozen different groups now and no players have reported problems. BUT, I am very good about unsharing maps that the players no longer need (even if they would still want them). I also do not have tokens in my shared tokens folder, and those tokens that I use are generally 75 or 100 pixels square.

Undermountain I run completely off of the DM Overview map. Which has a story pin for every location. Each location (story entry) then has a link to the local map (battlemap), Encounter (which has NPCs pre-placed), treasure parcel (which has links to the items), and then links to related stories too. You can find various posts int eh forums here with images of the overview map and it's pins I've posted as I've worked on it.

Regular adventure modules I put together using chapters (see the link to best practices in my sig). Such are pointless in UM since nothing is linear, their are multiple entrances, exits and teleports. That why the overview map is so critical. I do break up UM into each level, because you really don't need more than one level open at any given time except for the brief moments you are moving between levels.

[Zacchaeus]

I had a bunch of maps that where 2000x2000. I've reduced all those that didn't suffer from the quality loss. Had 4-5 images that were larger than 2000x2000. Deleted those. Tokens made up around 350 mb of RAM. Could the bad allocation-crash be due to the oversized maps.

To get to 3Gb on a DM machine you would need vast amounts of stuff open. Just as another example in my current campaign I have SKT, Dead in Thay, the DMG, PHB, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, Sword Coast Adventure Guide and a couple of map packs open. FG is still only using about 1.1 Gb of memory even though there are hundreds of images loaded.

The question damned asked was how many tokens do you have loaded. That would be token modules open and especially tokens that you have residing in your tokens/host folder. If you have tokens in that folder then remove them all and create token modules for them. See here for details (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?43011-How-to-make-a-Token-Module&p=382389#post382389) of how to do that. If you have many token modules open then close them. You don't need module tokens open once you've allocated a token to an NPC or player. So only open a token module to allocate a token and then close it. As another example I have a token module which is about 200Mb in size. If I open this in the aforementioned campaign my memory usage leaps by 1Gb - but still FG is running at 2GB with even this open.

As regards images a single or even multiple images which exceed the recommended size won't use up sufficient memory on the DM side to cause issues. Unless the maps are monstrous like 4-5 times the recommended 2048x2048 or weigh in at colossal sizes far exceeding the 1Mb recommendation. And even then the issues will only become apparent when you try to share these maps with your players. From what you are saying to are running at 3Gb with just your campaign open. So you have something huge which is causing the issue. This is most likely a ton of graphics and/or tokens since the XML files are negligible in comparison. Or, you have every module that you own open as well as a ton of graphics and/or tokens. My guess is tokens are the biggest issue you have.

[birdskull]

I have 10-15 of the Devin Night token packs. I've tried with them loaded and unloaded and they are negligible, it seems. There's something going on with FG here that just isn't right. I load my campaign with most of my images deleted from the folder in the campaign directory: RAM use is up in like 2,5gb. I close the campaign and open it up again. RAM usage is at 800mb. I load up all my token modules, almost no change in usage. I click on each token pack to see if the loading of the images does anything, but no. No change. Click around on buttons and FG stop, spinning symbol pops up, few second pass by. 2,5gb RAM use... It looks like FG just suddenly needs another 1,5gb of memory.

[birdskull]

Funny that you mention Undermountain, see my signature.

I watch your videos and follow your fb-page. 😊

[Zacchaeus]

Try in a new campaign. Check memory and then gradually open up things to see what happens memory wise. Give token modules a bit of time to open. If there a lot of tokens it can take a while for them to load. Also are you using any extensions?

[birdskull]

I deleted all my host tokens consisting of <200 mb aswell as the token modules. Host tokens cut memory use by almost 1gb alone. The rest was token modules. Thanks for all the help, folks! And for the FG Team: I hope FGU is coming along and that it handles memory issues better than a 90 yo, drunk, senile man. ��

[Zacchaeus]

Deleting the token modules does not help. Modules only use memory when they are open within a campaign. Deleting the host tokens certainly does help and is likely to be the root of your issue. I have used FG for years without any memory issues at all. But you do need to be aware. As noted above create token modules, no need to delete all your token collections. Only open token modules when you need to and then close them when done.

[birdskull]

I want to be able to have everything I need open. Noodling with the load/unload business is an annoyance. How FG handles image and tokens is a big detractor for FG and I can't really fathom that it's a viable solution at all. But for now I guess I'll have to do umpteen clicks back and forth when making adventures. :)

[Andraax]

Put all the NPCs with the tokens you need into your adventure module. Then, when you open the adventure, you'll have the tokens you need already available.