18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry

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Originally Posted by Jiminimonka

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.

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That is still a workaround solution to a problem that shouldn't have to exist at all. I just want to pre-load something, and not be paranoid about me not forgetting to put all the images to unidentified, and making sure that it has LOS on (Which isn't a thing in FGC by the way).

I know how to "solve" these, I know my way around Fantasy Grounds.

I'm just pointing the fact where it concerns low connectivity issues that Foundry still has the upper hand with pre-loads working as intended and we've had a pre-load that shares content with players in FG for years and that should have never been like that in first place.

When I say "In software A we have this, and in software B we have a problem with that", and people say "but you can mitigate problem in B by jumping around every time it happens", it doesn't make the problem in B disappear. It's still there, and has been there for years. What I wish is that the problem is gone.

I don't get this thing about preloading images. As far as I can see FGC and FGU work the same way - the only difference being that in FGU there's no 'preload' button.

In FGC players can still open images and see everything that's been preloaded when they join the game. As far as I remember it was always the case and if it were a map then you would make sure that it had the mask on it so they couldn't see anything. In FGU you switch on lighting to achieve the same thing. All they'll see is a black image.

Yup, in FGC it is not different than FGU; the only difference was that FGC's preload button didn't open the image automatically on connected clients (as if drag&dropping into the chat (without chat message)); besides that it completely works like a typical sharing, we discussed that several times here on the forums. So, the players can also see preloaded images in the image tab in FGC (I know it because one player found that accidentally out and got spoiler-ed; since then I started to put global masks on all images in FGC) :)

Though this does not negate your problem; just pointing out that FGC did not prevent the accidental spoiler either :)

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Originally Posted by Dr0W

That is still a workaround solution to a problem that shouldn't have to exist at all. I just want to pre-load something, and not be paranoid about me not forgetting to put all the images to unidentified, and making sure that it has LOS on (Which isn't a thing in FGC by the way).

I know how to "solve" these, I know my way around Fantasy Grounds.

I'm just pointing the fact where it concerns low connectivity issues that Foundry still has the upper hand with pre-loads working as intended and we've had a pre-load that shares content with players in FG for years and that should have never been like that in first place.

When I say "In software A we have this, and in software B we have a problem with that", and people say "but you can mitigate problem in B by jumping around every time it happens", it doesn't make the problem in B disappear. It's still there, and has been there for years. What I wish is that the problem is gone.

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So what do you suggest Fantasy Grounds does with images so that this "problem is gone" ?

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Originally Posted by Jiminimonka

So what do you suggest Fantasy Grounds does with images so that this "problem is gone" ?

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Dr0w suggest an intermediary solution: A preload button which loads the image into the cache of the clients (when they join or are already joined), but not listing these images in the image list until one finally shares them for the actual play :)

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Originally Posted by Kelrugem

Dr0w suggest an intermediary solution: A preload button which loads the image into the cache of the clients (when they join or are already joined), but not listing these images in the image list until one finally shares them for the actual play :)

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Sounds like a perfect solution, is it on the Idea Informer?

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Originally Posted by Jiminimonka

So what do you suggest Fantasy Grounds does with images so that this "problem is gone" ?

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To make it work how it worked before.

When you pre-loaded an Image, it didn't show on the players list and they never had access to the item. It would show an icon to the gm (similar to a web, if I can recall correctly) to indicate that a player had completely pre-loaded that image.
But the image would only be actually shared when the GM clicked to Share.

That's how it has worked once, and then it got changed. And when it got changed, I remember that there was a reason: There was a glitch or something, so to prevent that bug from happening they simply made the pre-load button to work as a share that doesn't automatically open the image. And that's how it has worked ever since.

EDIT:

But here's the point of me bringing this up: It was just when considering comparing both platforms. Originally it was said that FG worked better for low bandwidth games, and I just wanted to recall that we've had this "problem" for years now and it never got a solution. I'm positive that people don't even care about it anymore because honestly most of the people have great connections today and couldn't care less.

But I've been using FG since I had a 56kb connection. I had, at some point in my life, to prepare and adventure, join as a player, generate the cache for that player, upload that file on some rapidshare or 4shared, and make each player download that cache so I didn't have to upload 20mb of files during game play. I had to use those options constantly and it has affected me throughout the years, specially when it stopped working the way it did.

But nowadays I don't really care. Nowadays a "bad connection" is usually one that can download a low-res map for FG, and even if it isn't we can wait for 30 seconds and we're done. However I do use pre-loading constantly when running games on Foundry, because there I load a shitton of maps, sounds, effects. I just wanted to mention my experience regarding both platforms since people were talking about exactly this.

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Originally Posted by Dr0W

To make it work how it worked before.

When you pre-loaded an Image, it didn't show on the players list and they never had access to the item. It would show an icon to the gm (similar to a web, if I can recall correctly) to indicate that a player had completely pre-loaded that image.
But the image would only be actually shared when the GM clicked to Share.

That's how it has worked once, and then it got changed. And when it got changed, I remember that there was a reason: There was a glitch or something, so to prevent that bug from happening they simply made the pre-load button to work as a share that doesn't automatically open the image. And that's how it has worked ever since.

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I recall that you once mentioned that in another thread; sounds good if that comes back :) Probably got changed before my time

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Originally Posted by Topdecker

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

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Regardless of any verbal agreements, DDB only has permission from WotC to share on its own site and platform, and has no license to allow sharing beyond that, so sharing of ddb data on foundry constitutes a violation ddb tos and ddb's licensing agreement with wotc. Unless and until such licensing is amended, those "scraping" tools will remain of dubious legality. ddb has already said multiple times that it does not condone that usage and has been taking steps to close the loopholes. This is neither the fault of ddb nor of foundry's developers, and I really don't fault the people who made the tools, since that's just what users do. Just don't be surprised if in the future they close the gap. In which case, foundry should pursue proper licensing agreements on its own.

Out of curiosity, out of Foundry & FG which would be the better choice in building a new rule set? I'm well aware it will be a very long process to learn & build.

I've been doing most of the testing inside of Roll20 with sheets built inside Google Sheets, but I'd prefer to switch to a different VTT that's set up a fair bit better. Especially to be able to switch to one with much better combat automation, would greatly help and make the process much smoother.

From what I gather, it's easier to learn Lua than it is to learn JS. But with references, they should both be fairly straightforward.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.