"Prepackage" campaign for your players?

Hail and well met ROB_IN_MN,

While I can't go so far as to say what you are attempting is officially supported it should work. I have to give you credit for craftiness though! :geek:

Your players will need to make sure they completely replace the directory in player/campaigns (so it has only the files you send them) and make sure the directory is named correctly. Also note that directory name is associated with the alias you type in as the judge and the campaign name you are using.

You should be able to test this by wiping clean your local Player's campaign folder and introducing the directory you've prepared and giving it a try.

As for hidden monsters, the images for them will not be transmitted until they are visible to the Players and a broadcast is sent.

So you are welcome to try this but you may indeed run in to some strange problems at runtime. I don't really recommend it but if network speed is a really big slowdown for you to initially push out maps it could be worth it in your case.

 

Also in response to your question at the end, v3.0 will be a free upgrade.

While sometime along in the future we may be forced to charge for an upgrade, it won't be happening anytime soon.

 

Very Interested.

 

I'm also interested. My players are constantly complaining about the slowness of transferring new maps.

 

Have you made any headway on this. It seems for my players that it is taking one person a long time (sometimes he has to reboot/log off computer complete in order to load the map and monsters.

I would like to know if this works as you intend it. =)

 

We were having the same problems with slow map loads for my 3 players. I now drop the maps onto a dropbox and let the players download them ahead of time. We went through 7 maps this last session with no load times at all.

Nick

 

Nick, are you using the same method as the OP to do this? If not, how exactly are you doing it? Once your players download the maps from Dropbox, where do they put the files? Thanks ahead of time.

Edit: Also, when you do this does it preserve fog of war and any creatures on the map? Or are you just sending a plain JPEG file or something?

 

We were having the same problems as the original host and came upon the solution before I saw this thread unfortunately. I logged in a player session and my wifes computer and then started transmitting data to both player session to figure out how the players were loading the data.

Basically if you open your GM session and log in a 2nd player session and then transmit every map to the player session you'll have all the data. I dropped the entire file from:

d20pro > player > campaigns > Alphabet soup (this should match for each player in your campaign)

into a zip file and dropped it out. The players just need to download the zip and drop the files into the same directory and resolve conflicts as needed.

When you power up your session and transmit, the players will already have all the data and the map will load appropriately. Fog of War and everything is transmitted during the creation of the file to your fake-player session so they get the map in that state. Anything that you have changed since then will transmit as appropriate with the normal load times for fog of war/creature updates. We had a few maps that I tinkered with after sending it to my players and the load time for the map was instantaneous and the updates were inconsequential.

 

Excellent!

 

It would be a wonderful addition or feature if you could export a "campaign" to players that basically made a file that you could upload and then the players could just chose import campaign and look at the file. Not sure if thats even a possible feature implementation but we can dream can't we.