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Xerek
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'?'

Post by Xerek »

why do images come up with a big red question mark?

i just saved a campaign i was working on, and the background now won't come up, it just displays a big red questionmark

Xerek
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Post by Xerek »

it also has done the same thing for token images i made with tokentool. when i connected with my friend, for a while it would only show a big red '?'

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Post by Xerek »

well, i just loaded my campaign properties file and it fixed the problem. why is that? that only defines my tokens, not the images...?

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Steel Rat
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Post by Steel Rat »

When images are loading or no longer available, the placeholder will show instead.
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emperor799
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Re: '?'

Post by emperor799 »

Hi, I thought this issue had been fixed in 1.3b50, is there a way to fix it?

Having the serving client add tokens seems to prevent it, but if players load their own tokens which then go red question mark, deleting it and having the serving client add it later doesn't seem to help.
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Azhrei
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Re: '?'

Post by Azhrei »

The OP doesn't say what version he's on, but yes, it's (mostly) been fixed.

I say mostly because I still get the "?" when I create a new map -- the "?" shows up in the preview window on the right.

It also shows up when I use lmarkus' campaign macros and want to change a token state using a dropdown box (he grabs all the images and puts them into a dropdown list). I occasionally get the "?" when scrolling through the textures and/or image explorer panels.

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Hawke
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Re: '?'

Post by Hawke »

I've found that the ? will show up if you don't have enough RAM. Some have stated that running out will crash MapTool, but I had a few of my players having this issue (usually with the largest megabyte images) and we finally narrowed it down to ram usage. They popped up to the next .bat file and it cleared right up.

Not sure what images you're looking at, but might consider doing the same!

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Azhrei
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Re: '?'

Post by Azhrei »

Nope. I run with 768MB for MT and never get above the 500MB mark or so.

The images I'm referring to are always very small: state images, token images, and so on. Certainly nothing more than 100K or so, most below 30K.

Craig
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Re: '?'

Post by Craig »

Azhrei wrote:The OP doesn't say what version he's on, but yes, it's (mostly) been fixed.

I say mostly because I still get the "?" when I create a new map -- the "?" shows up in the preview window on the right.
I actually find it is worse. I get it now in token portraits on mouse over when I never had problems before. This is in b50 and the latest SVN.

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emperor799
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Re: '?'

Post by emperor799 »

I've only ever had it happen with token images (not portraits). I just ran a game in 1.3b50 and had 6 players: 2 loaded their own token fine, one I loaded fine, and 3 other loaded their own and went red question mark.

I'm using my own jpg maps in a black background, running Xerik's 4e TK/Pyro combined props + TK's table images. I have a gig of extremely low-latency RAM and run the gig launcher and Skype and nothing else.

I've also had it happen with myself and other hosting versions b45-b49. Rarely do we have a session where everyone's token image loads if the server isn't the one to load them all.
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Big_Mac
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Re: '?'

Post by Big_Mac »

emperor799 wrote: I'm using my own jpg maps in a black background, running Xerik's 4e TK/Pyro combined props + TK's table images. I have a gig of extremely low-latency RAM and run the gig launcher and Skype and nothing else.
That might be the issue. JPG's are NOT the optimal format for textures and images. Try changing it to a PNG and set it to the same scale as you run your server default 50ppi.

edit: forgot the not!!
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jfrazierjr
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Re: '?'

Post by jfrazierjr »

Big_Mac wrote:
emperor799 wrote: I'm using my own jpg maps in a black background, running Xerik's 4e TK/Pyro combined props + TK's table images. I have a gig of extremely low-latency RAM and run the gig launcher and Skype and nothing else.
That might be the issue. JPG's are NOT the optimal format for textures and images. Try changing it to a PNG and set it to the same scale as you run your server default 50ppi.

edit: forgot the not!!

Errr.. what? for textures, unless there is very little variation in colors, png is far worse at file sizes. png is tons better than jpeg for things which have large blocks of solid colors but sucks(filesize wise) with pixels that have color variations near each other(which is what most textures are) in which case jpeg is almost always better.


Of course, there are other issues to consider such as jpeg's can't handle transparency while png can to consider. Of course, my understanding is that image source does not matter since they are converted to a common format within maptool anyway, or at least thats what I took from several conversations I read(which could be a misunderstanding on my part!)
I save all my Campaign Files to DropBox. Not only can I access a campaign file from pretty much any OS that will run Maptool(Win,OSX, linux), but each file is versioned, so if something goes crazy wild, I can always roll back to a previous version of the same file.

Get your Dropbox 2GB via my referral link, and as a bonus, I get an extra 250 MB of space. Even if you don't don't use my link, I still enthusiastically recommend Dropbox..

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emperor799
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Re: '?'

Post by emperor799 »

To be clear, the backgrounds are loading just fine for everyone, as are jpeg and png tokens that the server loads into MT. It just that some times some user's tokens don't load properly. And it's not even specific tokens, one player had his token load correctly, a few weeks later it didn't, then last night it loaded fine again.

I've also had players tell me that, say, token 3 is a red ? to them, but it isn't to any other players, or token 2 will be a red ? to two of the player and the server/gm, but will show up for everyone else.
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jfrazierjr
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Re: '?'

Post by jfrazierjr »

emperor799 wrote:To be clear, the backgrounds are loading just fine for everyone, as are jpeg and png tokens that the server loads into MT. It just that some times some user's tokens don't load properly. And it's not even specific tokens, one player had his token load correctly, a few weeks later it didn't, then last night it loaded fine again.

I've also had players tell me that, say, token 3 is a red ? to them, but it isn't to any other players, or token 2 will be a red ? to two of the player and the server/gm, but will show up for everyone else.
Ok.. my understanding is this: The token is transferred to the client machines separately from the image asset. IF the token gets there before the image asset does, the token cannot find the asset and thus assigns the "unknown" image to the token, hence the red "?". If this is the correct understanding, the simplest way to work around this issue is to drop the image version onto the map so that the asset gets sent to the clients and THEN after a few seconds, drop the rptok file which points to said asset onto the board. Then just delete the temporary copy.... Now... I can guarantee that will work, just going off of what others have noted in the past.
I save all my Campaign Files to DropBox. Not only can I access a campaign file from pretty much any OS that will run Maptool(Win,OSX, linux), but each file is versioned, so if something goes crazy wild, I can always roll back to a previous version of the same file.

Get your Dropbox 2GB via my referral link, and as a bonus, I get an extra 250 MB of space. Even if you don't don't use my link, I still enthusiastically recommend Dropbox..

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Azhrei
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Re: '?'

Post by Azhrei »

jfrazierjr wrote:[...] Of course, my understanding is that image source does not matter since they are converted to a common format within maptool anyway, or at least thats what I took from several conversations I read(which could be a misunderstanding on my part!)
And that is my understanding as well. However, FullBleed did some checking of the MapTool memory bar after loading different image types and found PNGs to take more memory than JPGs. I'm guessing that would be because the JPG doesn't have any alpha channel, but then the JPG should've been 75% of the size of the same PNG, but that's not what his numbers indicated. He didn't say whether his test images were all the same raw image simply converted to various formats, though.

The numbers are in the first post of this page of the thread. (Should be the Aug 12 2008 post.)

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