FG 3.3.4 causing Discord lag

[Matchstick]

Hello!

I tried to run a game this morning but our Discord connection and FG just did not get along. As soon as a second player would join FG my Discord would start showing nothing but yellow and red in its connection box. With one user it seemed OK. With another program (Elder Scrolls Online, which is obviously much more network intensive than FG) Discord was nice and green, no problems, for hours.

I closed all the background processes I could. The only thing running other than FG were a couple instances of Wordpad, one of Notepad, and a PDF viewer (all with game notes).

This did not always happen. We played just fine about a month ago. All of us were on 3.3.4 today.

I'm running Night's Black Agents, so the campaign is pretty light. Just the ToC campaign with the NBA extension (and the Window saver). I have only two shared images, both of which were downloaded by the players last time. There was no indication on the client end of anything downloading. In fact we all looked at Task Manager and saw almost no processor being used by FG, and almost no networking being used on each machine.

I'm going to work in a reboot today at some point (Windows 10) and hopefully we'll be able to try again next week. We didn't want to use up all our time troubleshooting today, so after doing some poking around we just swapped over to ESO (bummer).

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!

[LordEntrails]

When a player connects to your game, FG downloads the ruleset and anything you have shared/pre-loaded that they haven't already downloaded from your campaign. When FG does this, it doesn't use the most efficient networking architecture/protocols (because they were written so long ago). Depending upon what happens with an update, much of this information might have to be downloaded again. I don't know if 3.3.4 would have made such a change or not.

The easiest solution is to launch your campaign in advance and let your players connect 30 minutes early or the day before etc.

[celestian]

If you have "Overlay" enabled in Discord you might want to try disabling that. I've had issues myself with that tho not specifically with FG.

[Moon Wizard]

Yes, you will want to disable any overlays for both Steam and Discord when running FG.

Regards,
JPG

[Matchstick]

When a player connects to your game, FG downloads the ruleset and anything you have shared/pre-loaded that they haven't already downloaded from your campaign. When FG does this, it doesn't use the most efficient networking architecture/protocols (because they were written so long ago). Depending upon what happens with an update, much of this information might have to be downloaded again. I don't know if 3.3.4 would have made such a change or not.

The easiest solution is to launch your campaign in advance and let your players connect 30 minutes early or the day before etc.

We had run the same game a month before, and I hadn't added any downloads, so it shouldn't be that. I think the players get prompted as well, it indicates on their end that they are downloading something. Yours is a good thought, but we even checked the Network tab in task manager and it was inactive on both my side and theirs.

I'm not running FG through Steam (FG and I predate Steam if you can believe that :)), and Steam was one of the things I cleared out of the background. I'll start Discord right now and see if I have an Overlay. If I do it's not something I recall adding; I don't even really know what it is. :)

[Matchstick]

Yes, you will want to disable any overlays for both Steam and Discord when running FG.

Regards,
JPG

Alrighty, I went in to Discord and undid Overlays for everything. I also added Fantasy Grounds as a game within Discord (I read an old thread mentioning that). I've rebooted too. I'll see if I can find a time to test and update this thread.

Thanks all!

[Laerun]

Hello!

I tried to run a game this morning but our Discord connection and FG just did not get along. As soon as a second player would join FG my Discord would start showing nothing but yellow and red in its connection box. With one user it seemed OK. With another program (Elder Scrolls Online, which is obviously much more network intensive than FG) Discord was nice and green, no problems, for hours.

I closed all the background processes I could. The only thing running other than FG were a couple instances of Wordpad, one of Notepad, and a PDF viewer (all with game notes).

This did not always happen. We played just fine about a month ago. All of us were on 3.3.4 today.

I'm running Night's Black Agents, so the campaign is pretty light. Just the ToC campaign with the NBA extension (and the Window saver). I have only two shared images, both of which were downloaded by the players last time. There was no indication on the client end of anything downloading. In fact we all looked at Task Manager and saw almost no processor being used by FG, and almost no networking being used on each machine.

I'm going to work in a reboot today at some point (Windows 10) and hopefully we'll be able to try again next week. We didn't want to use up all our time troubleshooting today, so after doing some poking around we just swapped over to ESO (bummer).

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!

Any ideas if you have 'unshared' any resources such as maps and images that are no longer need for you session? Have you opened and shared too many modules and Fantasy Grounds tokens? Has anything changed or been ADDED to your current game? How many players do you have?

[Matchstick]

Any ideas if you have 'unshared' any resources such as maps and images that are no longer need for you session? Have you opened and shared too many modules and Fantasy Grounds tokens? Has anything changed or been ADDED to your current game? How many players do you have?

Three players. The ruleset is pretty limited for Trail of Cthulhu, I'm not even sharing the little bit of the SRD that's been done. For the most part it's the Night's Black Agents extension with three character sheets (no extra characters) and two images (that just have explanations for the Night's Black Agents skills). I haven't assigned any tokens to the character sheets, but I do have some tokens. Most are in the DM area (I can't remember the terminology). Honestly, the only thing that changed (with the standard "that I can honestly think of" disclaimer) is the upgrade to FG.

[Bidmaron]

If I remember right, when FG does an upgrade, things have to redownload again if they had any change, and that might be what's causing your problem. Take down Discorse. Let you players log in and connect for a while to get any updates. If you nuked the cache, things definitely have to re-download. Discourse is a bandwidth hog, and so is FG during sharing.

[Matchstick]

If I remember right, when FG does an upgrade, things have to redownload again if they had any change, and that might be what's causing your problem. Take down Discorse. Let you players log in and connect for a while to get any updates. If you nuked the cache, things definitely have to re-download. Discourse is a bandwidth hog, and so is FG during sharing.

That would certainly explain it. I thought when we did it previously they got a message on their clients saying "downloading" or something, but I could be wrong. What I'll do is (as mentioned above) have them connect prior to the next session just to make sure that's not the case.

Lots of great help up here! Thanks!