I mostly wanted to report the technical aspect of last evenings session. But as an aside, hennebeck did a great job prepping the adventure for MapTool and overall his hard work made the game a success.
Audio:
We used Ventrilo which was stable.
I made a bad choice to run without a headset (but was using push to talk). It is especially true for a non-regular group, headsets are required to allow multiple folks to talk at the same time. I will not make that mistake again.
Connectivity:
None of us were able to connect to hennebeck (although he had tested and thought all was ok the night before) so he emailed the campaign file to me and I hosted it but loaded up as a player.
Overall that seemed to work well. I know that from my perspective, I could only see what a player could see and never got extra GM info so that part of the technology worked flawlessly.
Unfortunately one of the players was totally unable to establish a firm connection and eventually had to give up. We were unable to discern why that trouble was happening.
A couple of the people had VERY slow load times of the images (I have unthrottled FIOS bandwith so my upstream is way more than capable for the needs of MapTool). Once the images finally loaded they were generally stable.
I am wondering if large cache directories might be an issue? I recently deleted my cache when I found it had over 18,000 files in it...(yes that is not a typo).
Light:
I learned a new trick! Make a light source (was called Personal in that campaign) that has a range of 0.3 or so. That way the person can find their token even if they do not have a light source. That worked perfectly.
I really enjoyed the multiple colored overlapping lightsources. This was a 4E adventure with no darkvision and this is the first time I have played without darkvision on the board and it is really nice. Darkvision really needs to get fixed.
Vision Blocking and Fog:
We ran into the error I had seen in one of my other campaign files. When someone zoomed extremely, the fog disappeared and they could see the whole map.
Also there was some visual effect (the person was going to post up a screenshot) was occuring?
?
Yes, this issue is still there...
Macros
Hennebeck did a heroic effort getting the tokens set up with macros for the game. For something like RPGA events, a standard really needs to be enforced or your DMs will go insane with the setup workload.
With that said, overall the macros worked great.
I was a bit overwhelmed with the number of macros and it was really hard to find the desired macro in the heat of battle. I think the proposed optimizations will help that a lot.
With the sophistication of the new macros, folks really need some putter time to get to know them. I would recommend emailing a basic (no map) campaign file before a session so they can play about and understand the capabilities.
After the session I poked about the campaign file to learn new tricks. One thing I do is place notes in the notes and GM notes fields of an object. But until those elements get exposed to macros, they are cumbersome to use during game play. Hennebeck placed his text to send to the players in macros all on one token. I see merits to both and like the extra approach.
Living Forgotten Realms: DALE 1-1 The Prospect
Moderator: Azhrei
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lmarkus001
- Great Wyrm
- Posts: 1867
- Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 12:30 am
- Location: Layfayette Hill, PA
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lmarkus001
- Great Wyrm
- Posts: 1867
- Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 12:30 am
- Location: Layfayette Hill, PA
DM Controlling The Maps
Hennebeck was using the various tools to control what the players could do or see at different points in the game. One of those things was the Continuous View setting.
I found this distracting and from a technical point it is a HUGE impact on performance. I wanted to have a little bit wider view of the battle but every time I changed my view it would pop back, and then when the GM would zoom in and out and scroll about, I would do that too. But the impact would come with other folks when they went to move their tokens. Token movement became very hard to control, some of the players were very hard pressed to move their tokens.
I think a "refresh time" setting for the continuous view mode would be beneficial. If that was set to once a minute (or whatever you liked), then the players would get focused to the area as the GM desired BUT they would also be able to zoom/pan a bit. Right now the refresh is < 5 seconds.
Hennebeck was using the various tools to control what the players could do or see at different points in the game. One of those things was the Continuous View setting.
I found this distracting and from a technical point it is a HUGE impact on performance. I wanted to have a little bit wider view of the battle but every time I changed my view it would pop back, and then when the GM would zoom in and out and scroll about, I would do that too. But the impact would come with other folks when they went to move their tokens. Token movement became very hard to control, some of the players were very hard pressed to move their tokens.
I think a "refresh time" setting for the continuous view mode would be beneficial. If that was set to once a minute (or whatever you liked), then the players would get focused to the area as the GM desired BUT they would also be able to zoom/pan a bit. Right now the refresh is < 5 seconds.