Questions about licenses and mechanics

[Arcleo]

How do the Full and Ultimate Licenses work? If you are hosting a game and have the Ultimate licenses, can people who have not paid for a license join your game and create characters, etc? The demo seems very restricted, are these restrictions lifted for versions which can connect without a license to the Ultimate host?

If you buy an Ultimate license, and one of your friends (who had been connecting without a license) wants to host, can you transfer the license to a different machine?

Lastly, and this may be too technical but I am curious, how is information transported? Is it encrypted and all information goes through a central fantasygrounds.com server? Or is each game contained in its own ad hoc network? Is the host the server? If the host is the central authority server, how does this work with dynamic IP addresses?

Thanks,
Zach

[Valarian]

How do the Full and Ultimate Licenses work? If you are hosting a game and have the Ultimate licenses, can people who have not paid for a license join your game and create characters, etc? The demo seems very restricted, are these restrictions lifted for versions which can connect without a license to the Ultimate host?
Unlicensed installations can connect to a GM running the Ultimate license. A Full license can only host for other licensed versions. There are no restrictions on running using the Ultimate license, any ruleset or number of players can be used (though FGII will start to be unwieldy for the GM with very large parties, depending on the GMs computer spec).

In answer to your queries:
- exactly the same except the Ultimate can host for unlicensed players
- yes
- yes


If you buy an Ultimate license, and one of your friends (who had been connecting without a license) wants to host, can you transfer the license to a different machine?
Not legitimately, no.


Lastly, and this may be too technical but I am curious, how is information transported? Is it encrypted and all information goes through a central fantasygrounds.com server? Or is each game contained in its own ad hoc network? Is the host the server? If the host is the central authority server, how does this work with dynamic IP addresses?
The server runs on the GMs PC. If you use an alias to connect, which helps with dynamic IP addresses, the GMs PC tells the fantasygrounds.com server the IP address it's using. Players then look this up when they connect using the alias. The encryption is done as the player downloads from the GMs PC, creating the campaign file on the player's computer.