Fantasy Grounds Unity engine

[notrealdan]

This is a long way off being reasonable given average connectivity and the power of computers using the program.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that nearly any computer in use today running Fantasy Grounds can also play videos, and that's what this feature comes down to. The bandwidth for this at the client side should be close to say, using YouTube, and only until the video is cached. Bandwidth would still be a problem for many at the ~200MB mark I mentioned before for sure, but there's also no reason the video files needs to be that large.

These video files (using Dynamic Dungeons for example. not trying to pick on them) are large and are probably optimized for local playback and quality at the expense of everything else. If this became a thing, I'm sure we'd see versions optimized for this, with much smaller file sizes. As a quick test, I just re-encoded a 184MB video from DD down to about 30MB and the quality is very close to the original to the naked eye. That's still not a small chunk of data to push up to each client, but it's closer to manageable and the original video creator could probably push it down smaller. DD also provides static image versions of the video maps, so maybe just fail back to those automatically if the performance is below a threshold?

If they launch something cool that 3/4ths of the userbase cannot get a good experience with, it would be suicide to advertise that feature.

As I said, I wouldn't expect this to be a day-one feature in FGU. If it ever came, it would certainly be down the road a while, and would of course be optional anyways.

As LordEntrails said, there are plenty of other things that will and should get development attention first.

[Nyghtmare]

I would suspect that the power of the computer is more of a bottleneck for anything than the bandwidth.

Hasn't that always been the case in gaming?

[notrealdan]

I would suspect that the power of the computer is more of a bottleneck for anything than the bandwidth.

Hasn't that always been the case in gaming?

But this is little more than video playback. It's not like the scene needs to be rendered in real-time, like in a video game. What computer can run Fantasy Grounds but not YouTube (or even both at the same time)? Granted, you have to account for things like grid overlay and future things like FoW, LoS, etc., but I don't think the difference between doing those with a still image and a video should be out of reach of any PC capable of running FG in the first place. I think things like water and weather effects that they've already shown off would be more intensive than this since they have to be done on the fly. In that case, I agree it would be more computing power vs bandwidth.

Still, I don't think either (compute power or bandwidth) are unsolvable problems.

[Trenloe]

In many places bandwidth is an unsolvable problem. That is, it can’t be increased with the current infrastructure, country limits, etc., etc..

[notrealdan]

In many places bandwidth is an unsolvable problem. That is, it can’t be increased with the current infrastructure, country limits, etc., etc..

Very true, it can't always be solved, but you can do things to work around the problem. For example, fall-back to a static image if available bandwidth is low. This could be automatic based on a threshold, or if you know your bandwidth is a problem (or metered, or you don't like video, or whatever) there could be a setting to always skip the video and just use a static image.

[Oberoten]

Consider though that any file being pushed out needs to be so simultaneously to N players. Say you have a 30mb file and six players and boom 180mb upstream. Assuming you have voicechat as well that swallows a 10mbit line quite thoroughly. Heck I have a 100mbit and Discord chokes when I pull up big images

[celestian]

Consider though that any file being pushed out needs to be so simultaneously to N players. Say you have a 30mb file and six players and boom 180mb upstream. Assuming you have voicechat as well that swallows a 10mbit line quite thoroughly. Heck I have a 100mbit and Discord chokes when I pull up big images

Sounds like a network issue. You shouldn't be choking up with 100m connection

I used to have 20-50 meg maps in Maptools (yeah, huge... back then I wasn't worried about size cause maptools didn't complain) and while it did take 2-3 minutes for one player to get all the map (he is on a satelite setup) it wasn't obscenely long. Just having the map shared early on and have the player connect while he's grabbing a beer/coffee.

That said I doubt FG is concerned about huge files just yet They'll keep the systems minimal until the system can deal with larger files and even then I'm sure their content will be a balance of quality and size. DMs however can do what they want and push out 1GB images if they like

[Moon Wizard]

Just ask Zacchaeus what his network speeds are...
JPG

[Talyn]

Just ask Zacchaeus what his network speeds are...

Ouch! Shots fired!

[Oberoten]

OfC : I think one of the problems with the OLD architecture is that it uses http 1.1 as file transfer protocol.

- Obe