Lagging FGII

[DMdomination]

I have FGII and it seems to be increasingly laggy for players. I had orginally had over 150 encounters pre-entered into the combat tracker but fearing this was the issue i deleted most of them. I have all the personalities and maps saved still and i have also noticed that PNG files and BITMAPS load instantly but JPEGS do not load. The PNG's load but only if they are unmasked when i load them. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to speed up FGII or prevent lagging other than deleting my personalities i have already made up. I know i asked a lot in one post but if you could help i would appreciate it. Thanks you...this lagging occurs no matter if it is one player connected or ten. Thanks in advance.

[Griogre]

What ruleset is this? How big pixel and file size-wise are those jpegs and what are the extentions of the file(s)? Are you using v.2.3.6 of FG? Are you using player modules to load maps?

[DMdomination]

d20, smallest JPG is 118kb biggest is 852kb but the PNG's and Bitmaps at 1,132 - 2,252 and they load quickly. I discovered last night if i remove the mask and preload the JPEG they load instantly. Mind you this was testing with a single player. What do you mean "extensions". Yes i'm usign v.2.3.6. What is player modules to load maps? I am just loading them normally. Not really an expert yet. Thanks for the interest and help.

[Griogre]

Removing the mask *should* not have made any difference to preloading them map (but there are some issues in earlier versions and with player map modules - neither appear to apply here though). Preloading the map cache's the map on the players computer - that's why it loaded instantly after you preloaded it - you always want to cache large maps. I suspect those jpgs are huge pixel wise. The bigger the map in pixels or file size, the more advantageous it is to preload it.

As a general rule you don't ever want to use bitmaps because they have no file compression and so typically take the longest to transfer. File extensions are the three letters after the period in a file's name IE. .png, .jpg, .bmp - these tell programs what type of file it’s supposed to be. Showing these extensions is turned off by default in recent versions of Windows. I was asking because while FG accepts most image types it doesn't accept all of them.

Did you know that your "up bandwidth" of you Internet connection is only one quarter to one third of your "down bandwidth" for most non commercial Internet connections? This means the when you share a map you only have a few hundred K of bandwidth which you have to split over all your players, such that it takes twice as long for two players, three times as long for three players, etc.

I don't think you have any real problem here other than your maps are huge for passing around on the Internet. You would do better if you reduced the size of your maps both by size and number of pixels. Try to keep your maps less than 300K and work hard to keep them less than 600K. Generally speaking, you don't really want any maps that are bigger than a megabyte.

[DMdomination]

I have discovered that if i preload the maps without a mask and send the maps it works great, instant load. I'm hoping to prevent any issues in our next game. Thanks for the advice I'll get back to you asap.

[Griogre]

Mask files are typically tiny and really shouldn't have much effect on anything - but there have been some problems with the mask in the past so there could be still be something wrong there. Bear in mind that if you send a map to a player with the mask on - that the map will look blank to the player.