MapTool 1.2 Development Release Build 21

[trevor]

The "Oops, missed something" release:

Build 21 (3/22/2007)
* Fix NullPointerException when using copy-pasting tokens
* Players can now only impersonate tokens that they own

For more recent updates, check the previous release:

http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?t=1628

[Jector]

I was about to call an intervention on you, trevor.

20 and 21?
I was here freakin' yesterday! Trevor's doing stimulants!

[Steel Rat]

Very cool about the Impersonate I was going to post a result of my test yesterday. Suffice to say the only REAL problem was people being able to download the map and graphics. Many folks were getting stuck at various percentages of loading. Of course the original map I was using was huge, 32 mb. After I compressed it things got better but there were still problems.

Overall, though, people were able to connect fine after I punched a whole in my router.

[Jaxal1]

What is impersonate and what does it do?

[dorpond]

What is impersonate and what does it do?

Funny you ask that. I asked the same question to Trevor yesterday.

The main reason for Impersonate is so that a player can speak in character.
So let's say I login as Dorpond but my character name is Inarius, then I can /im Inarius

So now, every time I chat, it will say Inarius is talking instead of Dorpond.

If I want to speak as my familiar, I could do the same thing but using my familiar name instead.

The problem with the way it was was that players could impersonate player or the GM for that matter. That could be very problematic to evil players

Keep in mind however that if you hover your mouse over the players name in chat, it will tell you who actually typed it in. While that is great, it isn't something that a DM would do throughout the whole game so that method just wan't good enough for this issue.

So Trevor fixed it!
Yay Trevor!

[dorpond]

Of course the original map I was using was huge, 32 mb. After I compressed it things got better but there were still problems.

That is the problem really. If you think about it, if you have 5 people trying to get that data, Steel Rat is uploading 160meg worth of data.

As many of you know, upload speeds are much slower than download speeds. I am not sure what your upload speed was Steel but that is definately something to consider.

I also noticed that a couple people that were having slow issues getting map data seemed to have lower end PC's. Not sure how that would affect getting map data through the network card but that was something I noticed anyway.

[Steel Rat]

I have a pretty fast connection, but yeah, it's all relative. Though even a lower end machine is going to be able to display an image faster than it can be downloaded, so I don't think that's the issue. The bottleneck is always going to be the network connection, not the card or the local home network, but the cable/dial-up/DSL connection.

[trevor]

Relatedly when you do have large images or lots of images to transfer, you can send them to your players as a zip file before game and have them unzip it and add the directory to the Image Explorer, MapTool will notice and use the local copy instead of downloading from your server.

[Steel Rat]

Won't that mean they'll be able to browse the maps offline at their leisure?

[trevor]

Won't that mean they'll be able to browse the maps offline at their leisure?

Correct. So I wouldn't send large maps, but if you use a lot of stamps or textures you can send those. They don't really give anything away. That's one of the nice things about making the maps directly in MT, even though they have all the images (textures and stamps) they can't actually look at the map without being in MT as a GM.

That being said, this is one of the motivations for creating that image serving script we talked about a while back. Basically allow putting your big map images onto a server and letting people download it from there automatically instead of from the maptool server.

[ego093]

Players can now only impersonate tokens that they own

THANK YOU! My players spent 5 minutes /im-ing each other when it first showed up.

[trevor]

Players can now only impersonate tokens that they own

THANK YOU! My players spent 5 minutes /im-ing each other when it first showed up.

Heh, I didn't think it would be that big of a deal when I first wrote it, but apparently players can be quite scheming

[dLANbandit]

/im trevor

/say "I'm a Little Tea Pot!"

[Steel Rat]

Yeah *Dorpond* they can *Dorpond*

[trevor]

/im dLANBandit:Trevor is the master of my universe !

/im Steel_Rat:Daisy, daisy, tell me your answer true !

/im trevor:lol !