Inefficient network protocol; warning against large maps with many characters
(This is not a complaint, rather documentation so that other people understand the current limitations.)
This is with rolisteam 1.9.3.
When I hosted a game last week, I was the game master. I had prepared a large dungeon-crawl session with 200 goblins on it. When players connected, it took between 2 and 10 minutes for them to see anything.
After the session, i noticed that my scenario file was 33 MB large. Sending it by email took several minutes too; this is simply due to the relatively poor upload speed of my ADSL. Then I did some experiments and determined that:
- the background image (which is 1.3MB .png) contributes to the size of the vector map but not by an inordinate amount;
- replacing 5 goblins by 1 NPC labelled "5 goblins" reduced the size of the scenario file by a full 150 kilobytes;
- removing the avatar image from the NPC "goblin" reduced the size further by 50 kilbytes per goblin indicating that the image is duplicated in the scenario file for each mob that uses it.
Also, if the scenario contains several maps, they seem all to be transmitted to all players even if the game master does not open them. Therefore, game masters should create separate scenario files for each large map that is likely to be used for the entire gaming session.