Switching lights only affects parts of player group (using Darkvision)

[Weissrolf]

Ahoi. My group of 5 players had all PCs using Darkvision. In one room there was a single lantern light source which I switched on/off to demonstrate how their darkvision switches to color and back to monochrome.

Turned out that 2 of 5 players kept seeing colors after the lantern was off. When an affected player closed and reopened the map they would see monochrome again, but then another player would suffer from the issue that was not affected before.

If needed I can e-mail logs of my GM session and one player's logs who was one of the first two to be affected.

[Moon Wizard]

We would need the campaign, and the steps to identify the map affected, as well as the PCs affected. I was not able to reproduce locally.

Regards,
JPG

[Weissrolf]

Mail sent.

[Moon Wizard]

Thanks for the campaign files. I loaded up the campaign; and tried logging in as each of the four PCs you mentioned as affected; and then toggled the light for each one. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to recreate the issue. The scene changed between color and grayscale as expected on the player view.

Is there anything else relevant that you can think of?

Regards,
JPG

[LordEntrails]

Might their be a reasonable way to detect if this was due to packet loss on the players' end? Certainly seems feasible that a poor connection could result in the "switch" commands being dropped from various clients and therefore those clients not processing a change in the lighting conditions.

[Moon Wizard]

FGU uses a "reliable UDP" channel for communications. If a packet was dropped, it should be resent by the underlying transport (Mirror networking). We also added a simple packet count to detect if it did happen; and it should throw a log error as well.

It could be that there is a specific set of steps that Weissrolf's party ended up using which didn't trigger some lighting updates. We've been working on fine-tuning the updating to be a little less aggressive for performance reasons; so it might just be identifying a specific set of steps.

Regards,
JPG

[Weissrolf]

I answered via mail, not noticing that you answered via forum. So I repost the mail here again:

Since fixing it for one player (map reopen) immediately broke it for another I assume that having all 5 players connected was one of the ingredients to make the bug happen.

Extensions could be part of this. The following were active:

Previewer
Unity Compatible Better Module Window
24 Hour clock
5E (and more) - Equipped Effects FGU (only used for items on the hunter player)
Calendar Plus
Clock Adjuster
CoreRPG - Has Initiative Indicator (Overlay!)
CoreRPG - Wound Overlay (Overlay!)
Drowbe's Chat Aesthetics Resplendent Configurator
Feature: CT Open on Turn
FGTabber
Formation Graphics
Golarion Languages and Fonts
Instant Dice (but disabled in Options as it seems to break automated "persistent damage" rolls)
Pathfinder 2 - Shield Tracker
PF2E Modifiers Desktop Buttons
PFRPG.Theme.The.Lost.Star.V4
Token Height Indicator (Overlay!)
Zuilin's Whisper Window

Another issue one player had yesterday was that he could not start a roll by double-clicking on the weapon attack box on his char sheet, he had to drag the roll onto NPCs. In the past another player had the issue of his rolls not targeting his active target. I mention these, because I suspect one of the "Overlay!" addons to cause these issues. I disabled the Combat Highlighter addons because of that, but currently suspect the Height Indicator or Wound Overlay instead.

I kept turning the light on/off repeatedly many times, which might have triggered it at some point. One of my players had just done a relogin shortly before due to the double-clicking issue and was then struck by the lighting issue when another player fixed it by reopening the map. And it was always 2 players out of 5 being affected, just different players.

Things of note: The light in question is inside a sub-folder. More by accident than by intention as the sub-folder is meant to organize those many small lights in the other rooms. You may notice that a whole bunch of those sub-folder lights have no "Use Light" button to the right of their name. I also just tried to move them into separate sub-folders which worked for several lights until FGU just crashed to the desktop after moving one of them (just the same way I just successfully moved another one before). So lights + folders may or may not be a problem.

[Weissrolf]

When I switched the light in question I did not use the "Use Light" or visibility buttons of the layer list, instead clicked it directly and then used the On/Off button of the light tool. Next time I will try to use one of the other means with my group and have them report back, albeit I fear that it will work for all players because of the new session then.

[Weissrolf]

Next thing I noticed: right-clicking on light name entries in the layers list often allows me to Share and Stop Sharing a record. I find this odd for lights. Right-clicking on the Add Light, visibility or lock column pops up the Visibility right-click option instead.

I also noticed that there are more light entries without "Add Light" switch in the layouts list than there are unswitchable lights on the map. So even if we don't get to the bottom of the original issue there is lots to play with in this campaign file. I will delete all the rogue entries now to clean up my map and hopefully have less problems next session when the players enter these rooms.

[Weissrolf]

And two questions: After deleting all rogue list entries from the layers list there remain 9 lights in room C4 (left) that can be selected and switched via light tool, but have no corresponding layer entry. Turns out that these are on the main map and can be switched there accordingly.

Is there a way to move lights between layers without having to create them anew? Or maybe a way to merge layers?

I also wonder why all those lights were created a new layers anyway? I don't remember having created a new layer for every single light source I put on the map. This likely is the reason why there are so many "rogue entries", it sure never was my intention. I will now try to clean the mess by putting group of lights belonging to one room on a single layer. This way I also don't need to use folders to organize them.

[Weissrolf]

Here is another one: When a light is selected on the map then the tooltip of the layers panel sometimes gets confused.

https://i.imgur.com/41VllpO.png

Lots of small oddities to work on in this campaign file.

[Moon Wizard]

* Unfortunately, I do not have the time nor resources to locate, install, learn how to use, and debug third party extensions. As always, if you are having issues, I recommend trying without extensions to see if it's still an issue. If the extensions messed with the effects processing for vision at all, it could interfere with the types of visions applied to the tokens.

* I tested the lights in the same way; by selecting the light with the Lighting mode Select tool, then clicking the on/off button.

* The menus for the window (such as closing/sharing) are available whenever you right click in a window; otherwise, you would never be able to access them, since the controls would intercept.

* Merging/splitting layers is on our list for future improvements.

* I wasn't able to recreate the tooltip issue; but I assume it's a specific set of clicks/movements that brought about that scenario, such that the layer visibility button was used instead of the tool button.

Regards,
JPG

[Weissrolf]

None of these addons handle LoS or lighting while using the API offered by FGU. So it would be at least be unexpected to have them cause the lighting issue, but you never know.

[Zarestia]

Previewer
Unity Compatible Better Module Window
24 Hour clock
5E (and more) - Equipped Effects FGU (only used for items on the hunter player)
Calendar Plus
Clock Adjuster
CoreRPG - Has Initiative Indicator (Overlay!)
CoreRPG - Wound Overlay (Overlay!)
Drowbe's Chat Aesthetics Resplendent Configurator
Feature: CT Open on Turn
FGTabber
Formation Graphics
Golarion Languages and Fonts
Instant Dice (but disabled in Options as it seems to break automated "persistent damage" rolls)
Pathfinder 2 - Shield Tracker
PF2E Modifiers Desktop Buttons
PFRPG.Theme.The.Lost.Star.V4
Token Height Indicator (Overlay!)
Zuilin's Whisper Window


I had several extensions like the ones you listed with "Overlay!" causing issues with lighting and tokens.

[Weissrolf]

Which raises the question then why APIs used for token overlays would cause lighting issues? Maybe something to look into.

[Moon Wizard]

Since extension code can literally change anything to do with the ruleset interaction, that's a question for the extension developer.

Regards,
JPG