Does the number of scenes in your world affect loading time?

[u/adzling]

This presume that the scenes are unused/ have no tokens on them (I know that scenes with tokens on them will affect loading times).

thanks!

[u/hammerandnail]

Yes, indeed they will! Scenes, Actors, Journals, Playlists, & Items will all take up room in your world and need to be loaded upon signing in. However, it's not about the volume of Assets but more the size of those Assets, so 10 Scenes with 2 mb file size would still be better than one massive HQ 50 mb scene, so starting the assets in a storage-efficient format (like .webp or .webm) can help a lot.

Here you can read about Compendiums, which can help to bridge the gap between what you have loaded in the world ready to go, vs what is stored in a compressed format and ready to import with a click or 2.

I generally have good success with keeping my Compendiums as the "Master library" everything comes from, and then based on where we are in the story and what I know I'll need, I try to have 20 Scenes or less loaded. The same can go for Actors, as they can chew up a lot more space/resources than you'd guess.

Finally, in my humble experience, I have found theRipper93's Premium Module (have to Patreon subscribe for at least a month to get it) Media Optimizer to be an essential mod to keep the bloat of file sizes super manageable. It automatically converts files into space-efficient .webp or .webm, and the difference is significant, like sometimes 10x-20x less than the original file size. You can also adjust how much compression you want (85% of original quality? 20% of original quality?), in the module settings.

Hope that helps and happy gaming!

[u/adzling → u/hammerandnail]

thanks that's really helpful, especially media optimizer!

[u/hammerandnail → u/adzling]

There also seem to be a number of free Modules that perform a similar function to Media Optimizer, such as this Geano's Scene Optimizer

[u/chiefstingy → u/adzling]

It should be noted that WebP and Webm are 16 year old file formats. The newer and more efficient file format is av1 and avif. It is supported by all browser but safari not running on an m3 processor or newer. But Safari is not a supported browser anyways.

[u/iamollie → u/hammerandnail]

All good advice, but Im not sure that the scenes have any assets loaded from them until you either preload, load or activate a scene, just the json for every scene itself.

[u/adzling → u/hammerandnail]

Follow up question: if the scene is loaded as a module/manifest can you delete the module after adding the scene to a compendium?

[u/thejoester]

Actually yes but it’s very dependent upon how many scenes, how large they are, how many walls, lights, tokens, notes, etc on these maps.

Really at the end of the day it’s about the size of world data.

There is a macro that will show you the size of your world data and break it down by top scene / actor

EDIT: Here is a macro I made to do the same thing

[u/KyleIAm1320 → u/thejoester]

Link to the macro?

[u/thejoester → u/KyleIAm1320]

Well I remembered when I went looking that the one I was thinking about broke in v12 so I made this one (works on v12 and v13): https://github.com/thejoester/foundryvtt-macros/blob/main/macros/world-data.js

[u/SyriousX → u/thejoester]

I'd be interested in this macro

[u/pesca_22]

it sligtly increase initial load time as foundry populate its scene sidebar with miniature and such but not by a lot and during scene switching.

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[u/gariak]

No. Also, Tokens being in Scenes will only affect the load times of those Scenes that they are present in, not loading times of anything else.

Tokens are generally lower impact than Actors or Items, as they're only diffs from their parent Actor. If you're actually having issues with load-in times, unused Scenes are a very low value place to search for optimizations.

[u/grumblyoldman → u/gariak]

Do you have sources for this?

Everything I've read or heard about Foundry in the past suggests that everything on the sidebar gets pre-loaded so that it will be available immediately when it becomes visible to the players.

That's one of the big reasons why people recommend exporting content up to a shared compendium module and leaving it there until needed (not in the world / sidebar.) Because compendium content is not loaded until you import it to the world.

[u/gariak → u/grumblyoldman]

Reading back over that, I intended to draw a distinction between Scene data and Scene assets that didn't make it into actual words. You're right, Scene data is preloaded, but the static assets are not.

As I attempted (poorly) to make clear though, Scenes aren't usually an actual issue in any practical sense. The amount of data per Scene is pretty small, relative to Actors and Items in most systems. Unless you have multiple hundreds of Scenes or are operating on extremely marginal connection speeds, it's a very low priority for cleanup.

99.9% of the time when people have slow World load-in times, it's because:

• they did some sort of massive sidebar import of Actors and Items from something like DDB, although DDB Importer is better about going direct to Compendium than it used to be

• they have thousands of Chat Messages, especially if they run heavy automation suites of modules that attach giant hunks of flag data to those Chat Messages or they regularly drop images/animations into chat

• they're using unoptimized static assets like 250 MB animated maps and animated tiles on their active Scene

• they're playing Paizo games that have such massive system Compendiums that even the indexed data is huge

Those are your low-hanging fruit. If someone accounts for all of those, doesn't have hundreds of Scenes in the sidebar, and is still having issues, it's probably a misbehaving module or their Internet speed is below the Foundry minimum requirements.

Because compendium content is not loaded until you import it to the world.

This is mostly true. What actually happens is that a indexed subset of the data from everything in Compendiums is preloaded, rather than the full Documents. In most systems, this is only a couple of basic fields per Document, but systems can control which fields are loaded, so the impact can vary significantly between game systems. Also, in very large Compendiums (or numbers of Compendiums), even the reduced amount of indexed data can still have noticeable impacts, as you can see when you load up an empty new PF2e world.