Images not loading for players

[bhvanroekel]

Hey all,

I was running a game of MGT2 yesterday from 5pm EST to 6pm EST on a public cloud server. We ended up cancelling the session due to some technical difficulties (not all of which were FGU).

One of these problems was that when I shared an image, the players would open it and see "only a red X". Not sure if related, but after a few of them had opened the image, they said that the console window appeared and then all of their clients crashed at approximately the same time. My client was still fine, and did not show they had disconnected. These images were quite large images, but not unreasonably large (~50mb in total)

Was there a cloud server issue yesterday around that time? Or did I prepare the images wrong? I don't have logs from this event unfortunately, but I could see if one of them could forward me theirs.

Thanks in advance for any advice or help.

[matjam]

I feel 50mb images is too large.

Consider converting to 8bit PNGs and 70ppi; I find that you don't lose too much doing so and it's much faster to load for the client anyway.

I've had good luck with paint.net https://www.getpaint.net/

[bhvanroekel]

Gotcha. This is my first time not running out of a module so I was unsure of the file size.

[matjam]

The limiting factor is your upload speed;

50MB * 5 players = 250MB; most cable plans have a 10mbit upload speed which 1.2MB per second so, 208 seconds (3 1/2 mintues) to upload that amount of data to all your players.

If you're on ADSL, it's usually 1mbit uplink speed, 10 times that, so about 37 minutes. Best case.

Plus you have probably got other things going on like voice, video streaming, etc. You can run out of bandwidth on the upstream pretty quickly.

I compress everything down to about 1MB in size; 8bit PNGs look a LOT better than heavily compressed JPEGs, and I can send those files to everyone in a few seconds.

[bhvanroekel]

That makes sense. Didn't even think of all of those factors. Some of the images were exported from a PDF so they automatically upsized them to keep them legible. I'll have to re-export those.

[Trenloe]

Are you running out of a purchased FG module or are you creating the images yourself and loading them into FG?

[bhvanroekel]

I'm creating the images myself.

[Trenloe]

Even with FGU, which is a 64-bit application and can handle a lot of memory, it's good to be aware of the size of the images you're using - in terms of the file size (which affects share time to the players) and the total pixels (width x height) of the images (which impacts memory use and processing resources).

Even large pixel dimension maps (10,000 x 10,000) can be saved with the file size kept relatively low. The usual recommendation is to save a JPG with medium-high quality - 70-80% (depending on what app you're using). And if you don't need lots of pixels, then don't have lots of pixels, resize the map down to something that is reasonable for what you're showing. 100 pixels per grid square in FGU is a good starting point.

[bhvanroekel]

Sounds great. I was exporting from preview on Mac, and I input a fairly high number on the export to get a good quality, without knowing what the limits were necessarily.

[matjam]

Oh, mac? Pixelmator. https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/

not free but I do find it a ton easier than photoshop.

edit: oh, it doesn't let you set the bit depth on export :-(

edit: maybe use: https://tinypng.com/

or something like that.