Masking does not stick

[gdudgeon]

In FG classic, for a couple of maps, my masking setup is not remembered after I close FG and later reopen it. A couple of times now I have revealed specific areas on the map (a jpg file that I squeezed down to ~8MB size), and it looks fine in FG. If I close the map and reopen it, I still see the masking as I drew it. But when I close the entire application and later open FG and look at he map, the masking has been reset to default: everything is masked. Any ideas what's going on?

[Zacchaeus]

8Mb is far too big for Classic. Recommended is less than 1Mb and no more than 2048x2048.

And welcome to FG.

[Trenloe]

Welcome to the FG forums!

Make sure there are no double spaces in the filenames - this prevents FG from saving information within the application against an image, as the XML engine reduces multiple spaces together down to one space, which results in FG not recognising the original filename after a restart of FG and so thinks it's a new file - hence losing anything previously related to the file.

[gdudgeon]

I don't think double spacing in the name is an issue, but I'll double check.

Regarding file size, I'm used to using large files in Roll20 - I like the visual details. Is there really a hard upper limit of 1MB for maps?

[Trenloe]

FG Classic is a 32-bit application and so it has a finite memory usage of a little over 3GB, even if your computer has much more memory than that.

File size affects sharing time to the players - 1MB or less is the recommendation to keep sharing time reasonable.

Number of pixels in an image affects memory use and is more important than just looking at file size. 2048 x 2048 is the recommended size for images within FG Classic. It's OK to have one or two images a little larger than this, but not much larger. If you require images with a lot of detail it's recommended to split them up into a number of images, each within the recommended image size.

[LordEntrails]

Hard limit... sort of.
FGC is a 32 bit application. When you send an image to the client FGC will open that image (and all images) in RAM. A 32 bit process can only use about 3 GB of RAM (regardless of how much RAM is physically in the computer). So if you share lots of large images, or one really big image) to your players, Windows will crash their computer because FG will run out of memory available to a single process.

Large image file sizes also require more time to send to your players. Depending upon everyone's bandwidth and tolerance, large images may or may not be acceptable to folks.

I used to use images larger than the recommended size in FGC (I now use FGU), BUT I was very aware of the issues and did a lot of process size monitoring on a client (Host handles images better than clients do) and was very active about unsharing images when no longer needed.

The recommendations are based upon community experience. Most folks don't want to worry about unsharing images every sessions, and don't want to monitor/test client process size, and don't want a session to crash or misbehave during a game session.