Ultimate Licence and Offline Servers.

[turelus]

During yesterdays network issues I noticed something interesting and quite frustrating. As an owner of the ultimate licence I wasn't actually able to make use of my licence while the servers were offline.
I was able to continue the session because thankfully I had just enough player keys left and a couple of my players still had GM licences but if that wasn't the case I wouldn't have been able to run a session.

Why is it that while your servers are offline normal keys work fine the but ultimate one stops working, for the price of it I would kind of hope that should the service ever stop I would be able to continue gaming even without updates.

[Valarian]

It's not the Ultimate license that stops working, it's the unregistered licenses. The way things are at the moment is that Unregistered/Unlicensed players need to connect to an Ultimate license using the alias server. This does mean that the unregistered players can't connect to a game if the servers are down. The GM's license does still work, but only as a Full license would using the direct IP address connection. It might be nice, if the developers can do it, to have a cached Ultimate license check so that an unregistered player could connect to a "verified" Ultimate licence. There has to be something somewhere, as the launcher displays the Ultimate license status. Perhaps something for the the idea informer page?

[Trenloe]

Just to clarify what happens: an unlicensed player, when connecting to an Ultimate GM, needs to "ping" the Fantasy Grounds server to check that the Ultimate License they are connecting to is valid.

This is an attempt at preventing software piracy. As Valarian says, it might be nice is some form of caching of a valid ultimate license on the client side (or the GM side, perhaps) that has a time based flag. For example, if the Ultimate license has successfully verified that the license is valid within the past 7 days (or whatever time period) it will allow players to connect when the FG server can't be reached for verification.

[turelus]

Okay that makes sense, thanks for taking the time to elaborate on what the issue is.

It would be nice to have a chached verification on the off chance the FG servers go offline, though in the six years I have been using the program this was the first time I had ever seen it happen, so I can't complain too much. :P