MapTool Very Sluggish in local game

[TheIneffableCheese]

Hi all,

This past week I used MapTool for the second time with my group. Last session I ran a client, and we had a single computer with a large monitor connected as a client for player interaction.

There were some usability issues with that set up, so this week, we had the large screened computer and an additional three laptops connected as clients.

The first map ran fine, but the second map I loaded ended up slowing to an absolute crawl. It didn't happen immediately, but within about 10 minutes the lag made it unplayable. I tried restarting MapTool, shutting down everything else I could on the server machine, and even rebooted and relaunched MapTool, but nothing worked. We ended up having to punt and pull out the old battle mat and minis that I'm trying so hard to get away from.

Any thoughts on what could have possibly caused this, and are there best practices to keep this from happening in the future?

There was some VBL (it was a cavern complex, so I used the "block it all, and carve out the chambers" method of VBL creation), but it was not a huge map. The PCs all have vision turned on, and I had the same for their mounts, but testing the saved file this morning with no attached clients had the same sluggishness even with nothing else running. I tried turning Vision off for the map entirely - that didn't seem to help.

I have since removed vision from their mounts, and in the future will try just running with PC vision on. However, I'm not at all confident that this was the problem.

We're done with that encounter, so I don't think that this hiccup will be too much of an issue in the future as long as I can figure out how to keep it from happening in the future. I love having MapTool at the table, as I would much rather set up maps and encounters ahead of time instead of drawing on the mat as needed. Also, my players LOVE the dynamic vision and lighting. However, if this is going to happen regularly I don't think I'll be able to continue using the program. We have a very limited amount of game time each week, and I cannot spend it troubleshooting issues.

[aliasmask]

The first map ran fine, but the second map I loaded ended up slowing to an absolute crawl. It didn't happen immediately, but within about 10 minutes the lag made it unplayable. I tried restarting MapTool, shutting down everything else I could on the server machine, and even rebooted and relaunched MapTool, but nothing worked. We ended up having to punt and pull out the old battle mat and minis that I'm trying so hard to get away from.

This sounds like the Fog of War data on PC tokens is getting too big. I would try clearing the tokens of that data with ctrl-shift-O or using the context menu of a PC token under "Expose" to clear the soft fog. It also helps if you set your default vision distance to 240 and make sure each existing map is set to 240 as well (assuming 5ft grid squares). 240 works well for both day and night maps.

If you're using one of the 3.5 frameworks, then there may be an option to clear soft FOW automatically. Using the Bag of Tricks (BoT) under settings there is a check box but I forget what it's called.

[TheIneffableCheese]

Thanks for the tip! I will definitely try this if I get a similar slow down.

I've built my framework on top of the Bag of Tricks, so I will definitely look for the Clear Fog macro.

[aliasmask]

No problem. We get this all the time: http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php ... 05#p258122