Sharing pictures

[thrilljack]

Had our first FG session the other week, and I have to say it was awesome. Everything went smoothly, except we had a couple snags with pictures. One of my players could get the map to load. He could see the tokens and such but not the image of the map as I revealed it from the mask. We all figured it was because he has a crappy campus connection. Also, when I tried to load one of the bigger pictures they never got past the loading screen.

So, anything I can do to streamline picture sharing? How long does it typically take to share an image without preloading it? Is there a particular format or max size I'm supposed to keep my pics under?

[Griogre]

Usually the limitations on pics is the host's up bandwidth. If you use the same map again you might find the other person gets it because the other players already have it cached and you may not need it transfered to them.

The time it takes to transfer is related to the size of your group and the image's file size. I like to keep my images size under 100k and work pretty hard to make sure they are less than 300k. Make sure you use pngs or jpegs and not bmps.

I have a DM, though, that transfers maps of several Megs. He tends to have the same problems you mentioned. It takes a long time to transfer and sometimes people don't get them. On the other hand we are somtimes weeks on one of these maps.

On the big picture when it is loading you do not want to change the view, add tokens, pointers, change the mask, draw anything on it or put a grid on the images until *everyone* has the images. If you or a player do change the image in mid transfer and it will start over the transfer over to anyone who hasn't yet gotten the entire image. The best thing to do with large images is preload it and don't touch it untile you get the "web". This keeps the players from messing with it.

[Blue Haven]

Just to help you guys if you have Avast anti-virus you must turn it off because it wont let you see the images it was a nasty problem and took me a lot of time and games spoiled to find out that...

[Foen]

Hi, you might want to take a peek at this thread. They are play-testing via dial-up connections and one of the players is in Australia...

Stuart