FG Bandwidth Usage

[Qai]

Tried the search function, but couldn't find anything. Maybe I missed it...

Does anyone know the average bandwidth that FG uses for approximately 5 players + GM? I'd like to know this because of hosting my own TeamSpeak server for the same group. Usually my groups rely on RaidCall, which is a really good free 3rd-party server voice communication platform. However, sometimes RC has the craps and because of this I decided to set up a local TeamSpeak server as a backup when RC is down. RC will still be the go-to place when it works, but I want to be sure that I can handle TS + FG on 2 Mbps upload. I can always play around with the voice quality setting in TS to limit bandwidth, but I would like to have a baseline from FG to work with.

Note: the idea behind a local TS server is 1) it's free, 2) it's local, so don't have to worry about yet another 3rd-party server crapping out, and 3) the implementation is practically identical to RC, which everyone is used to and the layout is perfectly suited for our purposes. For various reasons I want to stay away from Mumble, Ventrilo, Google+ Hangouts, and Skype.

[Trenloe]

You could use the free to use FG community TeamSpeak server as your 2nd choice, then only go to your local server if there were issues there (which I don't recall anyone having on this server): https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?17071-Voicechat!-Community-TeamSpeak3-Server

But, to answer your question - it will all depend on how much information you're sharing (size of images, tokens, etc.) and how often there is complex dice rolling activity in the chat window. But, your link should be OK - most TeamSpeak codecs are around 4-8 kbps, so you'll be looking at probably 50 kbps upload usage for TeamSpeak. The most network activity in Fantasy Grounds is (in order):

Players logging in and downloading/updating the local campaign cache.
Sharing images.
Adding a lot of tokens to the map.
Dice rolling - as the player information is sent to the GM and then the GM sends out the dice rolling info to all of the players.
Sharing large story entries or adding large story entries to the chat window. But this really isn't that much...

Your 2 mbps link should be more than enough unless you keep sharing 5MB image files!

[Qai]

Thanks a lot! Very helpful. I checked out the FG TS server. I actually really like this suggestion, despite that it's yet another 3rd-party server. But at least it's the same software as what I had intended for local hosting. So if for some reason FG's server doesn't work, just click one button and connect to mine :)

The list of things you mentioned that take up FG bandwidth in all likelihood is actually the worst-case scenario for me, because I spend time to create maps and lots and lots of custom tokens. Then there is always the first 10 minutes of initial gaming where people just keep throwing tons of dice because of the animations LOL.

Are the permissions set on the TS server that I could make a permanent group affiliated with my website/gaming groups?

[Trenloe]

Are the permissions set on the TS server that I could make a permanent group affiliated with my website/gaming groups?
You can create a semi-permanent channel on the community FG server that you will have channel admin rights to that sub-channel - allowing you to set a password, control the codec, kick people from the channel, create further sub-channels (useful for taking a player aside for a quick chat), etc.. The only thing with semi-permanent channels is that they are removed when the server is rebooted - which is very rare. The sub-channel is easy enough to add back in if this happens.

[Qai]

Awesome! Re-creating the channel isn't a big issue. Just a couple of clicks here and there.

[damned]

i have less than 1mbps upload. its slow when starting a new campaign and several players connect for the first time at same time.
other than that i have no issues with FG speed on my link speed.

[Mellock]

There's actually 2 teamspeak community servers, so if one has a problem, the other will probably still work. You can choose between an London one and a New York one. Check out the stickied post in the guild house forum. The longest it's been up was a little over 100 days, there have been only a few instances where it was only a few days between reboots. But it's no big thing to set up your channel again. I hope it helps you save some bandwith for gaming.

[Qai]

Thanks a lot Mellock. The head post has teamspeak.fg-con.com as the main server. If I followed the thread correctly, is the second server eurots5.gameservers.com:9280? Also, I've seen the following servers mentioned in the thread:

ts53.gameservers.com:9152
voice.fg-con.com:9280
fgts.servegame.com:9280
fgts.servegame.com:9152

I can connect to all of them.

[Mellock]

There are a different dns entries (names like voice.fg-con.com) that all point to the following two servers:
The London one is eurots5.gameservers.com:9280
The NY one is ts53.gameservers.com:9152

If you connect to the server, you will see in the welcome message which one you ended up on.

[damned]

ive created 2 aliases to the servers:
the US server can be found at: teamspeak.fg-con.com (we have seen 2 people whos computers couldnt resolve this correctly so the real server is: ts53.gameservers.com:9152)
the EU server can be found at: voice.fg-con.com (and if you cant resolve connect to this its: eurots5.gameservers.com:9280)

and once again - thanks to Mellock for these two servers.

[Trenloe]

I've put these addresses in the first post of the Community Teamspeak thread.