Playtest Report

[garrion_sw]

HOST: Windows 10, 24 GB RAM, Fantasy Grounds Unity Ultimate

CLIENTS: 3 PC and 1 Mac via Cloud connect

RULESET: CoC 7e

SESSION LENGTH: 4 hours

OBJECTIVE: This test session was done to test the capabilities of the software in its current beta over the length of a standard game session.

The host ran well with a few moments of lag sporadically through the session, most notable when the clients were going through the connection process. However this also happens in classic so it was not unexpected. There were no crashes to the host during the process, nor any script errors. The clients however had several instances of losing connection, the mac being the worst. During the 4 hour session there were about 8 instances of the Mac client dropping from the host. The PC clients did much better, but they also had a few drops from the session. One of the clients received a string a script errors in conjunction with a disconnect at one point. The overall amount of lag for the clients varied but did seem to increase through the length of the session.

One item of note is that the client computers did not experience a system wide slow down of their processing. Web browsing and other functions behaved normally. The lag was only occurring within the FGU program.

The map in use during the session had a large amount of walls, doors, and terrain VBL layers. The VBL of each type performed as expected and the clients were able to interact with it as expected. There was one unusual effect though where all the PC tokens could see each other even if they were not in the same room and the area was out of their sight. The area would be dark but the companion PC tokens would appear on the black portions of the map. NPC tokens were hidden from view as expected. The clients were able to handle a relatively large amount of tokens on the map, around 20 at first. At another point there were about 45 tokens on the map and this brought the clients to a virtual halt due to lag issues. There was lag in typing, dice rolls, and movement of tokens - sometimes by as much as 10 seconds. Again the mac had worse issues with this and came to the point where they could not even interact with the character sheet to make dice rolls. The host computer never experienced any of these issues, beyond a little difficulty "grabbing" a token for movement. You had to be very deliberate about clicking and holding on it for a moment before starting the move.

Another unexpected issue was that each client could only see their own icon in the top left of the screen. Normally each client that has claimed a PC is able to see each other but not in this case. The host was able to see all connected clients and their claimed characters. The clients also lost the icon for their own characters in the top left after disconnecting and reconnecting. The only way to open up the character sheet was by going through the CT or double clicking the token on the map.

Interacting with the UI was a breeze. Zooming, panning, and window movement was much smoother than with FGC. The boundless map is a welcomed feature for continuation of maps. The ability to place map images as tiles on their own layer is wonderful. This lets you snap map segments together to make one large map, hiding and revealing each layer as desired. It also allows the layering of multi-level maps. The maps can be scaled within FGU to fit the grid and stacked over the top of each other, switching them on and off as the party changes levels and each layer having its own VBL designated. The boundless edges let you continue off-map with hand drawings or theater of the mind. Though I have owned FGC for many years, I have a lengthy background with MapTools. This nearly matches the capabilities of that program's mapping abilities which is a major accomplishment. Nothing has ever been able to come close to its capabilities in that arena. Other than the lighting and personal vision limits that are planned down the road I'd say you have hit a home run here. FG offers the total package in campaign management, play tools, and mapping capabilities with Unity.

All in all, I believe this test session went well considering that the software is not ready for live session play. I was able to put the program through it's paces and detect a few flaws. I hope this report helps in some way.

[Zacchaeus]

What's a VBL?

[stephan_]

Vision Blocking Layer?

[Zacchaeus]

I'm assuming the LOS occluders. Possibly Vision Blocking Line.

[garrion_sw]

What's a VBL?

Yes, Vision Blocking Layer. What you also refer to as occluders. VBL is a common MapTools (MT) term so it stuck with me.

The thing with that program is that you have five sets of "tools": interaction, drawing, area template, masking (referred as Fog of War), and VBL tools. The interaction, drawing, and template tools interact with four different layers: token, hidden, object, and background. Fog of War and VBL tools apply to all layers universally, unlike FGU's features which can be applied to each layers individually or be their own layer. Each tool has a set of drawing tools that let you draw out different shapes.

The Mask or Fog of War functions to hide the map from the players, creating nothing but black in unrevealed areas. If an area is unmasked you will see a subdued, shaded area of the map but not any active tokens in the area. FoW can be set as a hard point that the GM has to manually reveal or there is a setting that lets FoW auto-reveal as tokens visual ranges move into it. Each PC has their own vision and the FoW is revealed to them separately, so what one player has explored is not unmasked for another.

VBL functions separately from the FoW. It prevents the FoW from auto-revealing because vision never enters that space, unless the GM manually reveals it. However, if the GM did so, because vision is blocked you would only see the underlying map and not any tokens within the blocked area.

As indicated above, each token has a "vision" which can be toggled on or off. These are defined in the campaign settings and can be a multitude of things: conic (for facing), square, normal, lowlight, darkvision, blind, etc. Also defined in campaign settings working in conjunction with vision is "lighting". Lighting is also defined in various parameters: all or nothing, gradients, dim vs bright, conic, circular, etc. Map vision settings can be: Off, Day, Night. If Off, tokens can see everything that is not blocked. If Day, tokens can see everything that is not blocked within their vision range defined by their vision type. If Night, tokens can only see things that are not blocked, is within their vision range, and are illuminated by light (unless you have darkvision which sees all things not blocked out to their visual limit). Each token can see the light given off by other tokens, so you may see the area around you, then have darkness for 10 units and then see another area illuminated 20 units away by another PC or a "torch" token.

Sorry if I've gotten a bit verbose here, but I wanted to share the features of the program because I'm hoping that FGU will pick up most, if not all, of those some day. I highly recommend that you at least check it out for comparison when you are making your development plans. As I said in my earlier post, nothing has been able to touch MapTools for years in the arena of tactical mapping and vision functionality. However, that is it's pure focus. There are no campaign management tools, there is no DLC, there is no friendly generic character sheet. You have to be adept at coding to create frameworks that support macro functions tied into a character sheet or rely on those created by other users, which are mostly limited to the big name games. I love what the crew has done with FG since they took it over and Core was a HUGE step forward in generic functionality. Unity is going to place it up there at the top of all VTTs by filling in the gaps that it was lacking.

PS. In a different post I has mentioned a shortcut key to "reverse/delete" something that was drawn. In MT, this is "Shift". If you draw a segment, reveal the mask, draw a piece of art, etc. Without changing modes you press shift and draw out the shape and it does the inverse of its intended function. For example, if I unmasked an area and went too far, I press shift and draw the shape of that I want it to place the mask back over. If i was drawing an occluder with the square drawing tool but there was a segment I didn't want occluded, I would press shift and draw another square and it would remove the occluder segment contained within.

[Moon Wizard]

Thanks for the overview of your session.

I've added a ticket for Carl to look at the lag with large numbers of tokens; and I just pushed an update which fixes portrait visibility on the player client for PCs which other players own (worked fine if unowned or owned by player).

My next big task is to look at the networking as a whole to see what we can do to improve it.

Regards,
JPG