Call Conferencing

[dragonmarked dm]

hello all. I'm new here to the forums and just bought FG. My friends and me are planning on using Fantasy Grounds in conjunction with Skype call conferencing and do away with most of the chat feature except for die rolling and such. I was just curious if anyone else was trying anything close to this and how well it worked. For those who don't know what Skype is, it's a free download, free internet call that allows you to do call conferencing at no cost.

[kepli]

Works fine as far as I know, but keep in mind you can only have 5 people at a time in a Skype conference. :wink:

[Razaan]

We've been using Teamspeak to augment our FG experiences and it's worked quite well.

Though we typically limit the voice chat to OOC and everything ingame becomes typed so that nothing "important" is overlooked.

[dragonmarked dm]

thanx. ya, luckly we just have 5 people counting me.

[richvalle]

We are using team speak as well and it works fine.

One thing I am also trying to do is to keep 'in-character' talk to FG chat and all the out of game talk/questions in voice. Only one game so far so its too early to tell how its working.

rv

[Steel_Wind]

I've been using SKype so far - but there are alternative in Teasmpeak and Ventrillo.

Whatever voice conference tool used, imo, this approach mose closely resembles face-to-face gamng and makes FG a real and viable alternative.

I'd go so far as to say that voice confrencing during play is a vastly superior game experience than gaming via irc style chatting.

[sunbeam60]

We've been using Skype exclusively with amazing results.

We're five players, 2 in Denmark, 1 in England, 1 in Scotland and 1 in Brazil.

It works like a charm! I rarely think about lag at all, and I know my players are the same. It is literally like sitting at the same table and comes highly recommended.

A note on software; We spent a lot of time trying out different technology and found Skype superior in every regard: Voice quality, lag, ease of use, ease of setup. I've got some non-technical players in my campaign and had it not been for Skype I don't believe our game would have been going now.

Mind you, at the time Project Gizmo was not available. While I haven't tried Gizmo's conference calls yet, the quality/lag on one-to-one is as good as Skype's, so I believe you could use that as well.

[Mendorian]

I suppose there are a couple of benefits and drawbacks to each.

Skype sound quality has been excellent, though it has the 5 person limit. On the upside, it is a distributed system, so you don't have one person "hosting" a server, which might be an issue with one person hosting that and FG at the same time. That said, my group hasn't had any trouble, and that's 3 people remotely connected and me running both over a cable connection.

Teamspeak for me was a bit less stable, and one person is running the server. It has decent quality and the autodetection for hands-free works well, if not quite as well as Skype.

Ventrilo is also server based, but it has a very low bandwidth footprint. It's sound quality is not quite as good, and we found we have to use a Push to Talk key to avoid having syllables cut off of the first word, which can be fiddly.

So far, in a small group, Skype is the clear winner. Now, if I could just get the silly thing to stop rebooting my Linksys router every time it connects to the skype servers... (anyone else have that issue? Soon as I click on connect in Skype my router reboots. Once it's reloaded everything is fine...)

-Mendo

[Mendorian]

Oops. Sorry for the dupe.

-Mendo

[sunbeam60]

According to Skype itself (https://support.skype.com/index.php?_a=knowledgebase&_j=questiondetails&_i=92), the conferences are not completely decentralized. The person who initiates the conference should be the one with the best upload bandwidth.

[Hrathor]

Hey Dragon, welcome to Fantasy Grounds.

[Brenn]

We rent a high quality vent server from NRGServers (not just for FG, for online gaming primarily) $15 a month and it's working out quite well. While not quite on par for sound quality with Skype it does trump anything I've heard from teamspeak(which I've used extensively in the past). 50 person limit too, not that you'd ever get that many on FG, but it's better than being capped at 5.

[sunbeam60]

Project Gizmo imposes no cap, I believe.