Need information to help decide when to switch to V9

Hi everyone. I run two campaigns on Forge and am contemplating adding a third. For the most part, it works really well and the players like the experience. My main campaign hosts friends from two countries, three time zones, and five cities. One of the players is in Hawaii and his Forge / Foundry experience is lackluster at best, to the point that in my mid-campaign survey he clearly indicated that the tech isn’t working for him.

I would downplay the concerns and assume they are due to substandard connectivity in Hawaii, but he plays in and runs games on Roll20 without issue, including our previous year-long Strahd campaign. Another way to downplay the concerns would be to assume he has poor hardware, but he has a brand-new high-end laptop so that isn’t it either.

With V9 being stable now, is it possible that migrating will alleviate some of the performance issues? I could not find evidence in the change logs that made me think so but I thought I would ask. TIA.

I would not believe so, no. Unless you think their grievance is due to module issues that have been fixed in v9.

If you could tell us a little bit more about their issues we would gladly help, as we want to provide the best experience to everyone.

When it comes to it, it doesn’t sound like the user is having issues loading the game, but is having issues randomly while playing. Closer to rubber-banding → Taking a long time to load upon clicking (character sheets or journals), or when moving it isn’t very responsive.

I would recommend disabling all modules for troubleshooting. Start your world in safe mode, and see if they still encounter the same amount of issues while playing around. If they don’t, you can try Trouble with Modules

Secondly, make sure they have Hardware acceleration enabled. You can follow this tutorial: How to fix/turn on your browser's hardware acceleration
There is also a related issue with with Intel Graphics and Foundry at this moment.
Have a look at this post and see if it seems related:

Good news for people experiencing issues with webgl and the “always disappearing scene requiring a refresh every few minutes” problem with this graphics setup. Webgl causes the Intel HD 620/630 series GPU to crash following a recent series of driver updates. Rolling back to driver version 27.20.100.8280 will fix the problem. The version under that, 27.20.100.8190, also tested stable, in case that one doesn’t work.

Here are the steps to verify and correct the problem:
Go to WebGL Report in Chrome to check your machine’s webgl capability.
If the unmasked renderer is Intel HD Graphics 620/630 series, go here to run this test to see if the bug exists in the driver you are currently using. Ordinarily this test should run continuously forever. If you have this buggy driver the webgl test should crash after about a minute. This is proof the GPU is crashing. Hello, SciChart.js world!

Solution: Go here and download and install the above mentioned driver version to roll it back. Intel® Graphics – Windows* DCH Drivers
UPDATE If you are on a Dell or HP laptop, the above Intel drives will be incompatible. For example if your current driver is version 27.20.100.8854, you will not find that driver among those listed on Intel’s site. The correct driver version to download in this case is 27.20.100.6888 from either the Dell or HP driver download centers. (Note this was tested on HP ProBook 430 G4 Notebook PC).
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us?app=drivers
Official HP® Drivers and Software Download | HP® Customer Support

Thanks, I appreciate the reply. I am working through the settings with his computer. We will see if that helps.

You mentioned whether it was loading issues or random issues while playing. There are issues while he is playing, but the real problem is the load. He will connect and be stuck with nothing on the screen but the anvil in the top left corner for minutes.

We are playing tonight so I will see if there is any change.

Thanks again.

Ah, so it is related to loading! :wink: Could you provide some information on World Size Check , while I also have reason to believe it might be connection related. Could both be checked please? ^^

Okay, interesting. The game I am having issues with is the 128 Mb one.

The backup I downloaded on Sunday for the Chult game is 26 Mb.

Let me know what else you need. Thanks for doing this!

Oh, that seems like it is way too big. As the Tutorial said, a normal world should be around 10-30MB, that seems like some bug or a lot of imports of characters.

Could you export the world, open it up in a zip file and show the sizes inside “data”?

First of all, thanks so much for helping me with this. Much appreciated.

Here is a screen shot of data for my Chult game as requested.
image
The other game has similar results but with “fog” being only 810 kB.

By this information, I am guessing your compendiums are enormous. If you check “Packages” inside the world export.

If you don’t have a second backup, please make one. Then try to delete the packages, then re-upload.
If that fixes the issue, I would recommend putting everything over into a shared compendium, that you disable at the start of a session, to keep the compendiums from loading.

Then you enable the compendiums when you need something in your prep/need to put something away.

I don’t see any folder named “Packages” in either the world export I did earlier today or in the backups I regularly do. I see a “packs” folder if that is what you mean. When I do my backups every week, I also do an export of the modules, but those exports are only 850 kB so I assume that is not where I am supposed to look. Can you clarify where I should look?

I apparently do not understand how to use the Compendiums. I had a good conversation with the Encounter Library guy back in the summer, but I guess I didn’t understand how to do this. Is there a good article you can point me to?

Ah, packs indeed.
Sadly I am not able to give you further directions on where to understand Compendiums/Encounter library better.

In 0.8 I believe Compendiums changed. The new compendiums load upon Game Entrance, which causes all your players to load your packs folder / (120MB) of content every time they enter. Anyone with a slower internet connection will be on that “loading” gray screen for ages before getting into the game.

Okay, I think I figured things out. It took actually having to go through things again with this new information for me to really (I hope) understand how to use Compendiums. I have decreased the size of the export from 120 Mb to 80 Mb, but the total size on components outside of Compendiums is now less than 20 Mb. For reference, the screenshot below can be compared to the one above to see how much smaller things are. Thanks very much for helping me through this.
image