Creature Portraits

By "stick figures" I'm thinking you are meaning the default creature portrait outline set against a blank background.

There are a couple causes to this... 1) the player client could have a corrupt image, or 2) the player doesn't have enough RAM to display the image.

To test the first one:
Refresh Resources, then disconnect as Judge by pressing the close app "X" while the players are still connected. Then reopen the Judge and the Players should download a fresh copy of the resources (maps, creatures, etc).

To test the second one:
1) Ask your players to set their RAM allocation higher, or 2) reduce the graphic load on your maps and creatures. (or a combination of both)

To reduce the graphic load, use JPG images instead of PNG images. Unless you absolutely have to have transparency.

 

I have found the second part of that to be more often true than not.. It is very important to scale, compress and trim your images whether for tokens, or maps..
So many people just dump images into the app and then cry annoyance when it starts to bog down.

I try to keep creature/character tokens under 100x100px, only because of larger creatures. Standard 5ft (medium) creature can easy be 25x25px and still look very good.. For most maps I try to keep them under 500k.. Cropping images can help alot as well, if player X' token has 15px of wasted space around the person, trim it for them.. every little bit helps the app as a whole...

Gimp has a batch process (Main->filters->Batch) which will allow you to convert, scale, rename ect to whole directories of images.. which comes in very handy..

 

Another thing that may only be in my delusional mind... but that is image naming... tho d20p has never complained or burped on any image names no matter how obnoxious, when you have 500 images with names like "me and marg 2008 at the beach 800x1200.jpg" renaming that to something a little more meaningfull help alot -> "randy_pc.jpg"... This is just a tip for sanity...

It also did 'seem' that d20p was a bit more responsive when i renamed all my tokens removing spaces in place of underscores and removing spc characters.. honestly all my monster tokens are named like Aberr_1.jpg, Undead_1.jpg, fey_1.jpg etc etc...

I really recommend BulkRenameUtility which is a fantastic freeware file renaming utility. You can target and rename by convention whole directories..
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Download.php