Originally Posted by
sirnoobsauce
It should only have to replicate the portraits that are in-use (at least as of 2.0, in the earlier versions it would actually pre-create portraits for every single NPC and charsheet record in the entire campaign, which causes very poor performance). On the current version, there shouldn't be that many portraits being replicated (unless you have just a huge number of identities in use when the clients connect).
But because of a couple of quirks of FG there isn't much I can do about the clients having to download them each time. So basically: the chat doesn't support tokens, only portraits. But the only way to dynamically create a portrait in FG is to create an identity and set it there via the User interface. But I have to then delete the actual identity right away, because otherwise they would show up in the Character Select and massively clutter up the campaign. So as a result, the host instance is creating all of the portraits dynamically at runtime, and then those portraits have to be pushed to the clients each time.