Danimal66
May 18th, 2020, 05:18
I fully realize we are in beta / early release but after my experience tonight I'm not sure this program is ready to launch any time soon. My players were very frustrated and while the LOS was cool once we got it working I'm not sure it is worth the amount of lag we experienced. I'm just going to post all of our impressions / experiences in bullet point form but for reference I am running Dragon of Icespire, I have a high speed internet and a high end computer.
1. Lag: I can't express how unresponsive the program is. Once I get a server running any menu item I click on takes 10-15 second to appear, character sheets are the same. Players has issues targeting all night to the point where I had to target for every one. At one point I wanted to drag a monster into a room to spice up the combat that was going on. That process of clicking the NPC button, filtering by undead and dragging the monster to the CT which would of taken 30 second to a minute in FGC took me around 3 minutes while waiting for the engine to catch up to my inputs. Of everything we experienced tonight this was by far the biggest issue, hell it made FGC seems like a Ferrari and FGU a horse drawn carriage.
2. LOS: I thought I had LOS down but the majority of the videos are how to set up LOS on maps not how to use it. At first it wasn't working at all when I turned it on, then the players couldn't see monster tokens or other player tokens even when right next to each other. Finally I hit some magic combination of buttons and it worked for the most part. I ended up removing the mask layer as it was just more work to unmasked for LOS. I asked in another thread why I would use both and got a reply but now that I tried it I don't see the point. I'm not sure if LOS was the reason for all the lag or not.
3. It appears a feature lost in the move from FGC was the token lock. I have impatient players so I liked the fact they would need to plot their moves and then for me to approve them. Maybe I just couldn't find it but it appears this is gone.
4. My players couldn't see targeting arrows or ranges when they did actually target someone on their own. I could see these as DM but they couldn't Is this also gone?
5. Even though this was our first session earlier in the week I made sure everyone could connect. Tonight everyone of them tried to use the history link to get back to my server and it didn't work. They needed to find me in the list, which kind of makes the history part useless unlesss I am missing something.
6. When my players moved their tokens they experience major lag, I could move them without issue but I watched them try to move them and it was terribly slow.
Over all it wasn't a positive experience and they want to go back to FGC next week unless I can figure out why the session was so unresponsive.
Thanks
Dan
1. Lag: I can't express how unresponsive the program is. Once I get a server running any menu item I click on takes 10-15 second to appear, character sheets are the same. Players has issues targeting all night to the point where I had to target for every one. At one point I wanted to drag a monster into a room to spice up the combat that was going on. That process of clicking the NPC button, filtering by undead and dragging the monster to the CT which would of taken 30 second to a minute in FGC took me around 3 minutes while waiting for the engine to catch up to my inputs. Of everything we experienced tonight this was by far the biggest issue, hell it made FGC seems like a Ferrari and FGU a horse drawn carriage.
2. LOS: I thought I had LOS down but the majority of the videos are how to set up LOS on maps not how to use it. At first it wasn't working at all when I turned it on, then the players couldn't see monster tokens or other player tokens even when right next to each other. Finally I hit some magic combination of buttons and it worked for the most part. I ended up removing the mask layer as it was just more work to unmasked for LOS. I asked in another thread why I would use both and got a reply but now that I tried it I don't see the point. I'm not sure if LOS was the reason for all the lag or not.
3. It appears a feature lost in the move from FGC was the token lock. I have impatient players so I liked the fact they would need to plot their moves and then for me to approve them. Maybe I just couldn't find it but it appears this is gone.
4. My players couldn't see targeting arrows or ranges when they did actually target someone on their own. I could see these as DM but they couldn't Is this also gone?
5. Even though this was our first session earlier in the week I made sure everyone could connect. Tonight everyone of them tried to use the history link to get back to my server and it didn't work. They needed to find me in the list, which kind of makes the history part useless unlesss I am missing something.
6. When my players moved their tokens they experience major lag, I could move them without issue but I watched them try to move them and it was terribly slow.
Over all it wasn't a positive experience and they want to go back to FGC next week unless I can figure out why the session was so unresponsive.
Thanks
Dan