BRPG on Sale!

[heruca]

All Battlegrounds licenses are now on sale, probably until iCon 2008 is over (end of March). For the new prices, see the Store page on the main site.

[heruca]

Just a reminder that this sale will end on March 30th.

[heruca]

Today is the last day of the sale, which ends at midnight, EST.

[Kepli]

Hope a lot of people took the opportunity to get BRPG

[ingeloak]

wish i could have. but my group is stubborn. im coming from one end of the spectrum (old school table top, with little to no visual aid for years, and now i have the chance to have some really good looking stuff) and my group is a bunch of video game players, wanting something simple and strategic.

one of them (in my opinion) lets others' posts influence his judgement too much. he read about the bug reports and says BRPG is clunky and obtuse. frankly i dont understand why he says that, because everything about BRPG makes the DM's job easier. i see it because i had to resize a bajillion underlays to fit the grid for Gametable, and BRPG has a nearly effortless snap to grid feature. i dont have to resize an object using a 3rd party program, and BRPG has rotation that really works (without having to fudge the size of an object or having it get chopped off).

one thing to support his argument is that BRPG seems to run very slowly on his machine, despite being 4 times as powerful as the recommended requirements. is there a tweak we can do to smooth this out?

[Dormouse]

one thing to support his argument is that BRPG seems to run very slowly on his machine, despite being 4 times as powerful as the recommended requirements. is there a tweak we can do to smooth this out?

Is it only his machine it runs very slowly on? Is his machine notably less powerful than others in the group? Is he running other software concurrently? Is it only some aspects of BRPG that run slowly?

If not, I wonder if there is some hardware/software combination that Director does not run too well with. Maybe Heruca knows.

It would certainly be helpful to everyone if clear causes of slow running could be identified. IIRC, there have been some reports of this, though most people don't have such problems & I don't know if Heruca has received or kept records of the hardware and circumstances involved.

I think this whole group dynamic thing quite interesting. My own view is that the choice of VTT is mostly up to the GM, with the downside that the GM is then responsible for the cost. And if a number of people take turns at being the GM, it becomes much more complex.

[heruca]

one thing to support his argument is that BRPG seems to run very slowly on his machine, despite being 4 times as powerful as the recommended requirements. is there a tweak we can do to smooth this out?

It's possible, I suppose, that there is some combination of hardware, software, OS, and/or drivers that could be causing this slowness. I'd need more info about your friend's setup, and Dormouse's questions are a good start.

A bit of clarification about what your friend means by "slow" would also help. Is it slowness in panning and zooming? Overall slowness? Slow Fog of War performance?

I have to admit, however, that I have set the minimum system requirements for BRPG entirely too low. They are based on the Director Player minimum requirements, but I will need to raise those specs to account for the fact that BRPG now needs to be able to handle four bitmap layers (map, grid, manual FoW, and dynamic FoW) that are each up to 4000x4000 pixels, and most of those layers have an alpha channel to support transparency.

[ingeloak]

his machine and software:

AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3000+, MMX, 3dNow, ~2.0GHz
1280MB Ram
RADEON 9800 Series video card w/ 256 MB ram
Windows XP Corporate

Issues: I loaded the campfire sample map and the application slowed to a crawl. zooming in and out was a laborious choppy effort.

[Edited by Heruca to split the thread.]

[heruca]

The system specs look fine. Perhaps a bad driver, or perhaps a conflict with some third-party software that's installed on the system, is what's causing the sluggish performance.