The slave wagon on Barathas

jespley · Post by **jespley** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 3:06 pm

Last night, our group had another adventure. This time the gladiator slaves had been moved from the gladiator pit to a slave wagon taking them to another city. Several hundred elven raiders attacked the caravan and a bold escape was attempted.

Maptool worked great at first (as usual) but once the PCs busted out of their cage and started moving around, things started bogging down. We had vision enabled for the PCs and moving around the wagon with windows exposed and then obscured the elven raiders. I did have literally 250+ elven raider tokens.

A couple of players reported very sluggish response from maptool when they tried to move their tokens once we got into this state. When we tried to switch maps within the campaign in the middle of all this (in order to look at a world scale map), things got even slower. Even on my computer (the host), things were completely bogged down. When I added a translucent template for a spell, things were really bad. Eventually, we were able to limp our way through the encounter.

This is not a very useful troubleshooting thread since it wasn't a controlled experiment but I am curious about guesses as to most significant sources of our lag. Was it:
1. Network related? Unlikely since I was having it but maybe we were having several problems at the same time. I'm not completely sure how much lag each of my players was having but several complained.
2. Caused by the 250+ elven raider tokens and rendering them?
3. Caused by vision calculations for 5 PCs looking at 250+ elven raiders?
4. Having one PC have his light turned on (causing the yellow translucent glow to be rendered)?
5. Switching maps in the middle of all this rendering difficulty?

In any case, I'll probably avoid 250 actual tokens in the future but it was fun to try and we couldn't have done it without Maptool.

Post by **trevor** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 3:28 pm

Sounds like fun

1) The networking isn't likely to impact your rendering speed
2) This is possible, will have to investigate further
3) Not likely since it only needs to calculate 5 vision shapes
4) Not likely
5) This probably didn't make it worse, but didn't necessarily make it better (while switching). Once you switched to a different map, did it start responding again?

Would you be willing to send me your campaign file so I can profile it and figure out where the bottleneck is ?

Post by **trevor** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 3:31 pm

I love the screencap. I don't see anything immediately obvious what would cause the problem, that many tokens should be cake for MT.

If you could send me the campaign file, I can figure it out.

RPTroll · Post by **RPTroll** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 3:48 pm

Holy Smack that's a lot of raiders. It does look like fun, however.

Post by **trevor** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 4:08 pm

Another question, does this map bog down on your machine when it's just you working with it (nobody else connected) ?

jespley · Post by **jespley** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 4:38 pm

Ok, I've got the campaign up at my website:
http://www.jaredespley.org/screenshots/ ... Sept.cmpgn

It doesn't really bog down while I'm working on it by myself.

I was also running a Skype conference call off of my same machine while we were doing this so maybe I just overtaxed my machine. I have a CoreDuo machine though and we hadn't had any problems in the past running both maptool and skype off of my machine.

I also noticed that the .tmp directory in .maptool is huge -- about 1.7 GB! I deleted that as I have only about 3 GB of free space on my harddrive.

Thanks for looking into this, Trevor. Don't spend too much time on this particular issue, though. I suspect that there were too many variables involved to easily track down the problem.

Post by **trevor** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 4:49 pm

The odd thing is that it doesn't seem to happen when you work on it alone.

I'll take a quick pass and see if anything obvious comes up

Post by **trevor** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 4:58 pm

I've loaded up the campaign, and it ran really quick, just like you mentioned it does for you with no one connected.

Tell me more about what you saw. When you say it bogged down, what specifically were you seeing ?

Did it take a long time to pan the map ? Zoom ?

How about moving tokens (either watching others move, or trying to move yourself)?

Were many people trying to move tokens at the same time ?

jespley · Post by **jespley** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 4:59 pm

One other thing -- the campaign that I just posted isn't the one that we were actually using last night. It's a modified version of the one that I had created before we started playing. Once we started playing, I added some more raiders (I decided I needed even more on the screen to drive home the point to the PCs). The reason I don't have the actual campaign is because of the save bug I just reported.

Hawke · Post by **Hawke** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:01 pm

This sounds like a Dark Sun setting to me...

jespley · Post by **jespley** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:03 pm

trevor wrote:I've loaded up the campaign, and it ran really quick, just like you mentioned it does for you with no one connected.

Tell me more about what you saw. When you say it bogged down, what specifically were you seeing ?

Did it take a long time to pan the map ? Zoom ?

How about moving tokens (either watching others move, or trying to move yourself)?

Were many people trying to move tokens at the same time ?

For me, I started having trouble having the tokens move. I'd select a bunch of tokens, try to move them, and the rendering would take several seconds to move them across the map.

Once I added the effects template, things got worse. It took 20 seconds for the template to show up by which time I had started trying to add another. Deleting both of these took another ~ 10 seconds each.

Zooming also was super slow. I tried to zoom in and out and it several seconds to do so and it did so in stuttering steps.

I'll ask my players what specifically they were experiencing. One player in particular said, he was having a really hard time moving his PC's token.

jespley · Post by **jespley** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:05 pm

Hawke wrote:This sounds like a Dark Sun setting to me...

It is.

I started with the idea of a combination of Barsoom and Athas but at the moment, I'm running it more as a straight Athas world because actively developing details for such a homebrew has proved too time consuming on top of everything else.

Hawke · Post by **Hawke** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:08 pm

I, too, am running a Dark Sun game. I've done some modifications by adding two major cities (I wanted to have some major stuff go down where I had 100% control) and tweaking it up a little bit. That wagon would've been perfect for a giant attack we had early on in the game while leaving Balic - unfortunately I was using orpg at the time.

We should get together sometime and swap some Dark Sun materials! Perhaps I'll even use your campaign as a placeholder this week as they travel between cities.

Sir Flak · Post by **Sir Flak** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:26 pm

What were the vision ranges on those tokens. I notice things slow down for me if i give PCs fairly large vision ranges.

Post by **trevor** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 9:51 pm

Sir Flak wrote:What were the vision ranges on those tokens. I notice things slow down for me if i give PCs fairly large vision ranges.

The curious thing is that it's fine when it wasn't in-game. That is, when you load it up and just dink around