18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by HywelPhillips

It's sad, but not surprising. The lack of 5E core books can't possibly have done them any good, and they didn't have Foundry's hacker to scrape from D&D Beyond.

---

Scraping data from D&D Beyond... I've been somewhat in the thick of this. The are two devs that did this, though one has sort of fallen behind the other. From what I could gather, at least one of these fellows was in contact with D&D Beyond and had learned enough to know what their data policies were. As for hacking, that assumes an unlawful use of the service and it's data. The way this stuff was set-up was to almost guarantee a subscription to D&D Beyond (i.e. legal access) and so I think it very likely that Foundry users added a nice boost to earnings there.

While we're on this... D&D Beyond allows you to share all of your books with like a dozen other people that participating in your campaigns. So actually running a campaign with scraped data isn't giving the players anything different from what they almost certainly already had access to see.

I would be more concerned about the DnD Beyond crew coming to play with a VTT entry than WotC. They already have very, very key portions of the puzzle digitized and easily accessible on a proven platform. If they go, their approach will be to leverage what is already there (i.e. discord, a linked rollbot, and so on) and probably to just have a new subscription tier. There are a lot of small pieces already there and they do high quality work. If they are really thinking about it, their smart move would be to license a limited version of Foundry or perhaps create a paid addon for Foundry that gets a direct pipeline to all of that lovely data they've made so accessible.

Top

Aside: I'm old, I use hacker in the old-fashioned sense of "a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means", as Wikipedia has it. So I don't necessarily mean that the scraping is illegal. Just unintended.

Indeed I'm not sure what the legal situation with the D&D Beyond data scraping is. The mere fact that you can share via Foundry without the scope of checking that D&D Beyond's campaign share player limit is respected shows that it is not likely to be using the service as intended. I'm pretty sure WOTC/Hasbro will be less than delighted about it. I would be, if it were my products.

The problem for D&D Beyond is that they are 100% dependent on the whims of Hasbro. I'd be eyeing the licence terms pretty nervously if I were them, not least because of the aforementioned scraping to Foundry. I don't think a Hasbro exec is going to look kindly on one of the digital platform licencees being so insecure that they have enabled a whole platform's worth of what will in their eyes surely be piracy, whatever the actual legal situation. Or indeed whatever the actual practicalities of preventing the scraping given that D&D Beyond serves everything as web pages, something that I doubt the hypothetical Hasbro executive is going to understand. They're just going to see that they're not getting any money from people using WOTC products on Foundry, no matter than the people doing it already have D&D Beyond purchases. Colour me cynical on that, anyway.

You're absolutely right that a D&D Beyond VTT will be a major development if they can keep WOTC on board and if they can deliver something on a par with Roll20 in terms of functionality. They have the best D&D charactermancer bar none, and it already functions with VTTs (Foundry and Roll20 via the Beyond20 extension). I wonder how they will handle third party D&D content like Kobold Press etc.?

Interesting times!

Cheers, Hywel

I had 330kbs download rates with those conditions I mentioned - but something like 50kbs up because it was DSL. FWIW, I thought that I had 1/3 of a 1mb connection.

I ran my first FGU session last night with my new internet solution - Starlink. 3 or 4 seconds is all anyone had to wait for an image. I've got like 25mb up and 80mb down, so it was very pleasant for everyone.

Top

In fact, as Primo said we are having our high experiences in terms of playing RPG with VTTs and we can play for Foundry using the Internet 3G yes 3G because 4G, 4.5G and 5G are a lie here and what hinders the most is the screen size, as to what TopDecker compared I agree with it and I say for myself now that I can't compare the Roll20 as I've never used it, I've already started on Fantasy Grounds and dedicated my pennies to it, I play on Foundry too and I can say we have more resources and performance compared to what we have in the FGU, especially performance I know that programming languages ​​are different and this influences performance a lot, I know that one day we will have what we see in the other, but the question comes many that I know migrated from platform, many that I know they were divided until they migrated from platform, some were gained by the audio-visual features, but what attracted them the most was the performance and "silly" things like being able to have the time changed through a scroll of ta beautiful and with the result for example activating a rain effect, having a lighting going off with the passage of time without having to worry about it having an item count that decreases the quantity in the inventory and this passage of time makes the day transitions into night and we still have breaks, shifts, hours, days, months, the effects are starting to apply and if we apply an 8 hour Magic Armor effect and the DM takes a long rest the armor effect if it goes away, as I said, it's silly things that attract a GM, streamline players' lives and still speaking for me, what keeps me going is the hope of a better vision, of better lighting (not that it isn't good, it is good yes) but it needs to give more options for people as I say in several topics the control of light ray and vision and rotation for light, as for the occluders they need to add the steering capacity, because there we have the ability to allow us to see on one side but not on the other (great feature for elevations) and we see but are not seen, a map with LoS and lighting and several players with different views flows, while the same in FG becomes impractical, this referring to a campaign created without extensions, but then I heard once that this happens because the FG with the platform change has achieved and will achieve things that we couldn't before and I agree with that and I heard once that the fault of the FGU's "slow" performance is that even with these features, we're not running it with multi-thread yet and that would bring big changes, but what matters is that in my case even seeing and quoting in several posts some repeated things will keep me in the FGU, because I know the effort of the entire team in delivering quality to us and that changes are slow, even living in an immediatist era.
I end the huge text apologizing for the huge text, but I can't summarize my thoughts and I apologize for the insistence on LoS and lighting, but this is something nice to see as soon as possible.

Yako2020, some of the LOS blockers in Foundry that are directional do allow you to simulate height differences, but they are far from perfect and take quite a bit of effort to setup. I rigged 2 maps that had a lot of height changes (Wave Echo Cave being one of them) and it works fairly well, but the time it took to achieve the effect -vs- any sort of wow-factor was not quite worth it. It is an ok feature, but it's not accurate (no lighting fall off, for example, and the edge of your vision should in many cases move with the token rather than having an arbitrary cut-off point) and simply allows you to sort of simulate height changes.

I personally give the edge on LOS tools to FGU. Yes, they don't have some of the more esoteric directional walls, but in terms of use, FGU allows me to rig a map in perhaps 1/2 the time. Foundry is really horrible about double/triple/quadruple clicks and doesn't always leave a node where I wanted a node. FGU almost never has a double click problem and drops nodes pretty close to where I want them - I was marveling at how much better it felt.

Top

@Yako: Don't apologize for this huge text. But even Jacques Mayol would have died, out of breath, reading this unique sentence aloud, with only one period at the end ! ;)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Topdecker

We did, apologies. But we also uncovered a comparison that may have been neglected.

Which app does a better job for low speed connections? I can't address roll20, but I did try Foundry using the same files that were in an FG classic campaign. It was a one-shot that I ran in FG classic and then tried it with friends in Foundry. I did it because I wanted a solid comparison at the time.

Foundry was unusable for me on slow but reliable internet. It managed to very roughly get through maybe 2 scenes of 5 and then became unresponsive on a map with a lot of lighting sources. This was back in the .4x days of Foundry and it may have improved, but the same one-shot came off fairly flawlessly in Fantasy Grounds classic. (Technical uncertainty here... Foundry may compose scenes and stream 'live' changes. It certainly appears to stream audio. Anyhow, I think that it creates and wants to maintain live data connections that are needed/wanted regardless of the need to transfer a file such as a map. These aren't very large streams, but when you're hard pressed for bandwidth every little bit matters.)

The ability to pre-load scenes combined with the buffering and re-try attempts of Fantasy Grounds was a clear and easy winner for low bandwidth usage. I also wonder if FG does a better job of handing out the data to clients, ensuring that full packets get moved before allowing another user to start the transfer of a packet, and so on. Data packet size and management of available bandwidth are really important when it is limited in availability. For instance, smaller packets are better if errors are occurring (re-transmitting is more efficient with less data) and I don't know if FG just starts smaller or if it senses and adjusts downward, but which ever one it is, it is well suited for poor conditions.

Top

---

I've ran multiple games on both platforms with players with good and bad connectivity.

It all depends solely on how you run your games and which content you use. If you use many high resolution maps on FG, you'll have problems exactly the same way you'd have in Foundry. There's no hidden mystery here: Players are uploaded whatever the GM make them download.

However you are more likely to use more bandwidth in Foundry because of the following reasons:
- You are able to upload more types of Media. You can add sounds, videos, gifs, etc. Since you have more tools, you will probably want to use them.
- You have better performance, meaning that its easier as a GM to grab maps and tokens with absurdly high resolutions. The GM doesn't feel it, but anyone with bad internet will have trouble to download it all. When using FG, specially if we're talking about FG Classic, the moment you use something above the recommended the GM will feel stuttering and even crashes.

If you try to run the same campaign, with exactly the same maps and tokens in FG and Foundry, bandwidth usage is the same and it wouldn't make any sense if it weren't. Foundry does have an Edge here: You can actually upload media to a different place, out of the server machine, to alleviate upload usage if the GM has a bad upload speed, but the same can't be done in FG.

So, I don't agree that saying that FG is better or worse than Foundry for good or bad connectivity, since it's all related to how you use a software.

As a comparison, it would be like saying that a car that goes up to 60km/h consumes less fuel per hour than a car that can go up to 120km/h. The faster car an always slow down an consume less per hour if it needs to, but the slower car can't go faster even if he wants to. Being slower is not a good quality for the slower one, we need to pump those numbers up so it can reach the faster car, not the other way around.

Edit: More points to add about pre-loading scenes on Foundry vs FG.

- You can't pre-load images on FGU without sharing them with players. As soon as you pre-load images, it shows up in their images tab possibly leading to spoilers. I've used FG for over a decade, it WASN'T like that before, but it got changed at some point and it's like that ever since. I've got some problems with some players finding out by accident about some images I had pre-loaded, it really broke the mood and spoiled the surprise. I've never pre-loaded again.

- Foundry does have pre-loading capabilities for scenes, music and other stuff. On that matter, I have 0 problems with my bad connectivity players. It's just a matter of pre-loading 5 minutes prior to moving into a new scene.

Pre-loading work nicely with FGU. just apply FOW and unindentify on every images. It worked perfectly for me on my ancient adsl (now i have super fast connectivity).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Egheal

Pre-loading work nicely with FGU. just apply FOW and unindentify on every images. It worked perfectly for me on my ancient adsl (now i have super fast connectivity).

---

A workaround solution for a problem that shouldn't be there in first place.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dr0W

A workaround solution for a problem that shouldn't be there in first place.

---

You can turn on LOS on maps and then even if the players can see the maps they cant see the maps.. until the GM puts their tokens on it.