Not sure if this is simply caused by lag, but it does get annoying to look at after awhile. (And good thing I have no known issues with seizures, unlike my sibling...)

Sometimes, when I'm on a map area (Astryl's Vale areas, not the older areas), the map flickers as my character walks around. It only does that when he is moving. It's been happening off and on over the past week, I think. Sometimes, reloading the page fixes the problem while it sometimes doesn't (like right now). I've noticed that when it flickers, it seems to be displaying another image besides the map really quick before returning to the map. In the Orchard, it seems to be an image of a forest or apple trees or something along those lines. In Tranquility, it appears to be an image of a mountain / mountain range. It hasn't happened in the Lost Grove, yet, but my pets don't have a high enough level yet to survive for a lengthy amount of time there while I am working on acquiring potions and stuff for it. I probably don't spend enough time there to notice anything off.

It sounds like it might be a loading issue.

So the image you are seeing flicker is actually just the background image to the exploration area. The exploration window itself is see through. So if the tiles aren't loaded, you see the background image behind it.

The exploration system is not very efficient at all (it's very old), so it does a lot of unnecessary loading with every action that's taken.

If you have a slow connection and your browser is not caching the images properly, then after every action you take on the map with the tiles it may be causing a "flicker" effect as the map is cleared and then each tile is repopulated.


As to how to fix this, I'm not really sure. While improving your internet connection and your computer's power probably would - those are obviously not ideal or simple solutions lol. The only thing I can really suggest is to make sure your browser is up to date. I also recommend using Chrome or Firefox if you aren't already. And then also make sure your browser is allowing images to be cached.

As far as I can tell, it's up to date. Though my computer's internet shares the same router as the TV's Hulu, and I think streaming takes up a lot of data. It may be causing the issue when someone is watching TV while I'm on here. Though the problem randomly corrected itself about 5 - 10 minutes later on its own, and the map stopped flickering.

My browser is set to automatically delete cached stuff. How long does it usually take to cache all the images? If I leave the browser window and do something else for a bit, will the images work on caching themselves or do I actually need to be moving around on the map for that to happen?

It just depends. There's probably way too many variables for me to guess.

Basically, for every coordinate on the map it has to compile a series of images. For each image request, it will first check the browser's cache. If it finds it, it will load it directly from there and be pretty near instant. If it doesn't find it, it will have to send a request to the server asking for the image. The server then responds and talks to your browser and then eventually sends the data. Once your browser downloads the data, it then compiles it and turns it into an image on your screen.

While that process is usually near instantaneous (micro seconds), a slow internet connection will most definitely cause a delay. Especially since there are dozens of assets having to be loaded at the same time - that delay will add up quickly to the point where it can actually be perceived by the user (the flicker).

Alternatively, if your device or browser is overworked and out of memory or processing power, it can also cause a delay even if the images are cached.


Without having access to your device itself, I really have no way of knowing what the actual culprit is.

Proper caching should help, but there's no guarantee that's even the issue unfortunately.


I would look to Google and try searching things like, "How to make <my browser> properly cache images".

I may have found the problem. I'm not a coder so I'm not 100% sure if this is the only problem that causes it.

The firefox browser itself may have been the issue. It was running like 6 or 7 different processes for the browser in task manager, most of the processes around 150,000k each in size and even when I only had one tab open. It was consuming a lot of physical memory on my computer, around 40% or more. I found a way to disable this multi-process processing for the browser, and now my physical memory is around 30% with three tabs open and the only process running now at around 700,000k. Looks like browser program itself was gunking up my computer memory, which in turn may have added to the flickering affect when going around maps. I hope it helps, anyways. (I thought it weird that one program had all these processes going at the same time when I saw it. Usually it's one process per program when I needed to look for a process to force stop it on the rare occassions when end task doesn't work completely.)

The cache process is working properly as far as I can tell.

Sadly, as the years have gone on, browsers have gotten less and less focused on being efficient. They're relying on everyone having 16+ GB of memory and all that.

Probably by default at this point, browsers will run each individual tab as its own separate process running concurrent with all other open tabs. This helps to improve performance and allow instant response when switching between tabs. However, as you saw, this can consume a tremendous amount of memory. There are often times where my Google Chrome browser is consuming over 3 GB of memory all on its own - which is insane.

And once your device is out of memory, every action takes multitudes longer to process which most definitely can lead to what you were experiencing.

Glad that you were able to figure it out!

The only difference I've noticed so far is that my browser goes a bit faster and the rest of it is little appearance changes, like the drop-down lists being all small text now instead of big text. I haven't noticed any lag or anything with changing between tabs and stuff so I'm not sure if that is a real advantage in setting it up where running a single browser is like operating six different programs at the same time. The site where I found out how to switch it into a single process had someone complaining about how Firefox used to freeze and crash on their laptop all the time until they got it switched into single process mode.

Thinking about it, I haven't gotten a new computer in awhile, longer than I thought I have.

(I'm kinda annoyed that there is no easy way to make it efficient. You have to go through settings that could void your warrenty and break your browser if you accidently change the wrong thing. So you can ignore my complaining.)