Art Credit: Eledryll Maps
Since launching our new virtual tabletop engine (codename: Jumpgate) in March 2024, it has become the default option for creating new games on Roll20, earning a more than 90% satisfaction rating among players and GMs. In fact, 93% of active games use Jumpgate. Starting next month, Jumpgate will become the sole option for creating new games, and we’ll officially drop the Jumpgate codename. Any existing games using the Legacy tabletop will stay exactly the same and will still be available to play.
In this blog, we talk about what this means and why it’s happening.
What’s Improved?
Jumpgate has been officially out of beta since earlier this year, and since then, we’ve collected and used real game feedback to address over 300 bugs, improve the user interface, and develop new features. Most recently, the team focused on performance improvements, including an experimental update that dramatically improves performance on maps with many tokens.
A good example of a map that performs pretty poorly in Jumpgate games today (and isn’t so hot on Legacy, either) is the Player’s Map of Chult from Tomb of Annihilation. We took some benchmarks with and without the new setting to illustrate the improvement.
System Info: Chrome, Windows 11
Simply panning around the map, we see the following framerates (how “smooth” it feels to pan around):
- Legacy Engine: 25-26 FPS
- Jumpgate Engine: 21 FPS without Experimental Performance Improvements, 80 FPS with Experimental Performance Enhancements
To enable in your games: VTT Settings > Graphics > Enable Experimental Performance Enhancements
Additionally, animations in all Jumpgate campaigns run up to 10 times smoother, and games use half the CPU (as long as you have a frame rate limit set to 30 or 60) and one-third of the memory compared to Legacy campaigns.
While the Legacy tabletop served the community for years, it eventually developed a bit of a reputation for being clunky, slow, and buggy, especially as the tabletop grew to support millions of users worldwide. Not only was the underlying technology increasingly difficult to maintain and update, but the dozens of new features and quality of life improvements made to the new tabletop over the last year simply were not possible within the confines of the decade-old infrastructure.
Check out the video below to review 35 updates you might have missed, from improved context menus and settings to updates that make using Dynamic Lighting easier, and the new Foreground Layer and token Reactions. Plus, follow our announcements for more upcoming releases like Map Pins (sneak preview)!
Why the Change to Game Creation?
Focusing support efforts on a single tabletop engine moving forward allows us to ensure that engineering and design efforts are spent where they’re the most impactful. Keeping Roll20 responsive to user requests and feedback is important to us, and streamlining to a single way to create new games makes that much more achievable.
What It Means for Your Games
- The tabletop engine is the foundation of your game. It impacts overall performance, tools, and features on the tabletop itself, but does not affect the game system or adventures you use in-game (your Compendium, Character Sheet, maps, tokens, Addons, and Modules all stay the same).
- Existing Legacy Games are not changing or going away. If you’re currently running or playing in a game using the Legacy engine, you can keep playing without interruption.
- Making copies of Legacy games will result in Legacy copies
- If and when you’re ready to upgrade your campaigns, a Legacy copy, snapshotted at the time of upgrade, will remain in your library in case you want to compare the two or continue using the original.
- All newly created games will use the Jumpgate engine, and the “Jumpgate” label will be retired. Moving forward, games not using the new engine will be labeled “Legacy”.
Reporting VTT Feedback
If you encounter any issues with games using the new tabletop engine, or have ideas for future enhancements, please reach out through our in-game bug reporting, our support portal, our forums, on social media, or the Roll20 Discord server.
Our community team and Forum Champions are available to help troubleshoot, share information, and escalate issues to the right teams for improvements and fixes.
We know change is hard, whether for Players or GMs. Throughout the development and rollout of the new tabletop engine, our design team has conducted countless interviews with both to ensure that the changes being made to menus, interface design, and features were meaningful and helped make playing easier and better than before. Our goal is to provide tools to enable the largest number of people to play their way as possible, and with your continued support, we’re more likely than ever before to be able to serve the needs of millions of users.