My experience with Unity, I think I'm switching to classic...

[Dreadpeach]

I'm a DM new to FG and I picked it up on the recommendation of Matt Colville. The website encourages you to pick up fantasy grounds Unity because they believe it's ready for playtesting. I am of the strong opinion that it is not. Performance issues are basically destroying my gaming sessions week after week. It isn't ready. I could provide the devs with logs etc. but it doesn't change the fact that I am paying for a product that basically doesn't work and have invested around 100 quid in the digital modules, a descision I'm questioning.

I'm dissappointed FG classic and Unity are not on the same price plan. I will have to cancel a subscription to unity and start one on classic, why is that? what prompted this descision?

The sad thing is that when it works it really works and I love it, I'm running descent into avernus with the purchased module and it's fantastic. I love the line of sight it makes maps really easy to work with. there ARE a whole host of problems with the completely insanely designed UI to be honest aswell but that's not what this is about. You can learn to overcome that but you cannot learn to force the thing to keep all your players connected. You can't learn how to stop interuptions from players asking nicely to be booted from the server because they can't re-connect unless you do.

I'm dissappointed by my first time experience because of the recommendation to opt for unity over classic. And as an overall review, I'd have to say that introducing the software has caused more problems than it has solved because of these performance issues.

I really feel like an ******* posting this because I know ultimately the devs are doing their best but Is anyone else having issues to this extent? Is it unmanagabley broken for anyone else?

[LordEntrails]

Opinions and experiences on FGU playability are split. There are some folks (like you) who find FGU unusable. There are others (like me) that it is working well for. Ultimately it seems to work differently for different people to some extent as well as different people have different tolerance levels for performance.

I assume you have updated and tried again as of the last day or so? There have been several updates this week that address performance for many people.

All of your purchased modules will be usable in FGC as well as FGU.

[YAKO SOMEDAKY]

So far I have had good experiences with FGU, even thinking about "abandoning" FGC and staying only with FGU and even more, I hope you can stabilize FGU with speed and with servers without BUG and even more so when he launches official, we have already implemented dynamic lighting, instead of having only the line of sight.

[Dreadpeach]

Yeah this is relating to experiences I've had over around 7 sessions. We have 9 players on mixed OS's which I'm sure contributes to the problem massively and the issues vary week by week. I'm fairly certain if I had a group of four players I wouldn't find the issues as insurmountable but as it stands for this large a group it is far too unreliable. particularly with newer players who are trying to feel out the experience of DnD in general.

Good to hear the modules will transfer over

When the issues are resolved it will be great

[Trenloe]

Welcome to the FG forums @Dreadpeach, sorry you're having issues.

If you're moving to FG Classic you'll need to make sure you can do TCP port forwarding. If port forwarding will work for you, then it might be worth trying using the direct connection in FG Unity - i.e. setup the FG Unity server as "LAN" and then port forward UDP port 1802 on your Internet router to you GM machine's IP address (make sure it's UDP for FG Unity). Then give your external IP address to your players to connect. A lot of people experience much more stable connections going this route - but it does rely on you being able to do port forwarding with your ISP and Internet router. Something maybe to try before you cancel your subscription?

[Dreadpeach]

Trenloe - I have forwarded the port on my router I'll give it a try! Currently connected with my players and they are all connection without issue on this update so they dont want to try it right now haha I'll try it next sessionand report back thanks

[kevininrussia]

Here is what I have done to get FGU to run well enough to get by. Still hangs from time to time.

1. Prep before session adding the NPC's, items, and other things you might need for the game to a new group. This process will take forever because of the large data parsing apparently. I usually open a creature book then tab out and do something else for 5 minutes then check to see if Unity is still hung. Then copy the item or creature, which makes another hang for some minutes so I tab out and do something else. Then tab back to FGU and copy the item to a new group. Do that over and over all day then when finished close out the item and NPC modules. The new groups with the NPC's and items will load much faster.

2. Unload any modules you dont need, really, get rid of almost everything. Hopefully you spent the previous day coping the NPC's, items, etc. so you wont need them during the game. If you do leave one loaded and accidentally hit the NPC or Item button be prepared to call a pee break for at least 5 minutes while everybody's computer is hung.

3. LAN connect.

4. Beginning of session try to select anything you think might take time to load. Once its loaded, its cashed in ram and reloads much faster. I'm running 4e so I select all my players character sheets then the Powers tab as that usually hangs the computer for some minutes.