18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Topdecker

... and, over the span of years that they've been out, not a single person has told me about a memory or display problem.

---

I had a lot of problems in my last game. Most of my players were in Australia (I'm in Japan). Several of them told me their computer was old, their internet connection not so fast, etc. We regularly had problems. It took time for maps to load. Players often saw only a black rectangle. They had computer freezes waiting for maps to load. They had lag. Not all of my players had this. Those with newer computers and faster internet were fine. Maybe you're just lucky. For me, I was half-tempted to go old-school theater of the mind just to keep the game going.

As I said maps are now in the range of 4kx4k and are better quality. Those weigh in at about 2Mb -4Mb or so depending on a number of factors. 100Mb maps might well be fine on some machines with lightning internet speeds but I don’t see that becoming the standard.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Topdecker

That image size guideline seems extremely and probably needlessly restrictive - at least where it applies to maps. Other images, sure, because the resolution isn't needed. But maps, it's the game board, the beating heart of a VTT.

60x40 grids with 100px per grid seems roomy. Yes, 6000x4000px. I am guestimating that might take 72mb of memory - but let's be cautious and say it takes 100mb. So 1gb of video memory = 10 such images open. It's just math.

The 4gb RAM with 2gb of graphic memory minimal system requirement should be able to handle 10 such images, and still have plenty of memory for other things.

There is a point where you are trying to keep the system requirements low so more people can participate, but man, you're doing those customers with mid-range and better systems a real disservice.



That's where standards come in aka customer satisfaction -vs- another product. It should be 'We're sorry, we'd like to develop your product as a module for Fantasy Grounds, but the core images aren't up to our mapping quality standards. Do you have better images for maps?' Legibility of a map seems like a pretty low bar, but it is being missed.

FWIW, I've frequently taken the time to redraw the maps for FG material that I am using and then provide them as modules or individual files for other to use. The images in those modules are far, far larger than your current standards and, over the span of years that they've been out, not a single person has told me about a memory or display problem.

Anyhow, I am disappointed that going to Unity hasn't brought about much change in terms of image quality. It should be closer to an order of magnitude of improvement, not doubling what had previously been a very very conservative maximum for image sizes.

Here is another way to look at it. I get a FG module, look at the maps and sigh, rebuild them by hand, and send my 4000x3000 map out and have zero problems ever. Zero problems. From my limited perspective, it doesn't feel like you guys are pulling the wagon and the comments about technical limitations seem incorrect and flawed. Your products work with larger maps. Period. You just don't provide them.

Top

---

FGU has only just become the sole product supported for new modules. So, as Zacchaeus said, the new products are having higer resolution maps. Older products need to be updated individually, which is a lot of work (have you seen the size of the catalog?) for the devs (community and SW). As you said, you can make your own high res map for whatever adventure you are playing with no problems and eventually you won't have to.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

As I said maps are now in the range of 4kx4k and are better quality. Those weigh in at about 2Mb -4Mb or so depending on a number of factors. 100Mb maps might well be fine on some machines with lightning internet speeds but I don’t see that becoming the standard.

---

I can't imagine having speeds to download 100meg maps being considered "lighting" ;)

I get the need to have a "standard" size, I just hope that moving forward things change from being based on the lowest common denominator. I mean, I guess they have more data than I do but I cannot imagine the bulk of the user base is on low end systems on low end connectivity. It would make more sense if that is the case to have those users on old systems and limited connectivity build smaller images since they are not the most common user base for FGU.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Topdecker

That's where standards come in aka customer satisfaction -vs- another product. It should be 'We're sorry, we'd like to develop your product as a module for Fantasy Grounds, but the core images aren't up to our mapping quality standards. Do you have better images for maps?' Legibility of a map seems like a pretty low bar, but it is being missed.

---

"Sorry Wizards, we are no longer going to convert and sell your modules. Yes they are our #1 selling product etc, but they don't meet our new map quality standards."

*end silliness! Sort of* :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by celestian

I can't imagine having speeds to download 100meg maps being considered "lighting" ;)

---

Before we get going too hard on 100mb maps, we are talking about 6000x4000px maps (so maybe 8mb in file size) that expand out to maybe as much as 100mb of memory when in use (probably much less than that, but I just wanted a very conservative worst case example).

As for slow internet connections and slow loading maps, I did a lot of that as a GM. My upload speed was 60kbs on good days and my download speed was 300kbs. I tried to keep the map size down to around 1.2mb max and preloaded everything. But sometimes a player would need to reload the PHB or something and we'd just have to chat for a while. Yeah, I know the pain.

Top

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LordEntrails

"Sorry Wizards, we are no longer going to convert and sell your modules. Yes they are our #1 selling product etc, but they don't meet our new map quality standards."

*end silliness! Sort of* :)

---

I can go to DnD Beyond and get every SINGLE map in higher quality than is provided here. You don't want to go here because someone might ask you how this other company is getting so much better source materials while charging a similar price.

EDIT: I will back off this 'every SINGLE map' just a bit. At one point, the Sword Coast product was shipping with the full 32mb map (which, afaik, was causing zero problems). That was the full, best quality map and it was glorious.

EDIT AGAIN: I will back WAY off now because Storm King's Thunder has some really challenging mapping material. It appears that the really difficult pieces almost certainly were super-sourced.

Top

I have high-speed internet in Japan, so I'm regularly over 250mbps download and 175mbps upload. Average speed in Aus is around 50 mbps. I have a few 5000 x 5000 maps about 5mb for the jpg, but that's just a fraction of what's needed. Once you add tokens, los, dynamic lighting, water effects, etc., that's a LOT.

The source material will be the same. And as I have said you are getting better quality images now than previously. There have only been two WotC modules released so far only for Unity and the size and quality of the images in both of those are on par with what you are asking for.

What isn’t going to happen is revising anything that is still available and used in Classic.

My comments on quality of source material were more directed to some early modules (like 10 or more years ago) which was what I assumed you were also talking about.

Great review Hywell! I was curious about Foundry, but I will definitely be sticking with FGU now! Thanks!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

The source material will be the same. And as I have said you are getting better quality images now than previously. There have only been two WotC modules released so far only for Unity and the size and quality of the images in both of those are on par with what you are asking for.

---

Oh cool, which ones? I am guessing that it is some of the really recent stuff. I might give them a try. (D&D The Wild Beyond the Witchlight looks to be one - is the other an adventure league module?)

And yeah, the modules that I am using as examples are pretty old.

I am currently prepping to run Storm King's Thunder. The source maps - yeah, LordEntrails has a point with this one in particular.

Top

Actually Witchlight might be the only one so far released. I think the other one I did is next month.

I had all sorts of problems with SKT, mainly because the maps were all so big because of the scale. I always hate chopping maps up so sometimes the quality suffers to get it down to the sizes required.

You did good with SKT. On the difficult maps, the grid aligns nicely and you weren't given a lot to work with. Dealing with a 50' grid is no fun and cropping the map off of the larger image was a good call for a lot of reasons.

I did see one thing - not really a technical thing, but more of a conceptual thing - to bring up. There is at least one map where you put LOS terrain walls up all the way around the perimeter of trees on an overhead view. That's good if you are, you know, flying overhead, but not so great if you are on the ground and only have to deal with the trunk.

I was working with Empire of the Ghouls VTT maps by Kobold Press and encountered a similar situation:

https://i.imgur.com/tfzRREM.jpg

Anyhow, it is a LOT easier to just draw a random trunk than to slowly work around the outer edge. Time saver, less is more in this case.

Top

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Topdecker

I did see one thing - not really a technical thing, but more of a conceptual thing - to bring up. There is at least one map where you put LOS terrain walls up all the way around the perimeter of trees on an overhead view. That's good if you are, you know, flying overhead, but not so great if you are on the ground and only have to deal with the trunk.

---

This is something I've struggled with as a cartographer & DM for years. And I don't have a good rule of thumb. I've been in forests where the tree branches come all the way down to ground level, so it makes sense that the terrain features is the full diameter of the tree image. And I've been in other forests where the branches end ten or twenty feet off the ground, and only the trunks obscure vision and where the terrain should be drawn as you suggest.

I've come to the approach where either I just assume the tree to be the type that matches existing LOS, or if I add the LOS myself, then I try to think of the encounter and try to think what type of tree would be more fun.

And glad you didn't take my previous comment too seriously. It was tongue in cheek and admittedly uninformed :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LordEntrails

This is something I've struggled with as a cartographer & DM for years. And I don't have a good rule of thumb. I've been in forests where the tree branches come all the way down to ground level, so it makes sense that the terrain features is the full diameter of the tree image. And I've been in other forests where the branches end ten or twenty feet off the ground, and only the trunks obscure vision and where the terrain should be drawn as you suggest.

I've come to the approach where either I just assume the tree to be the type that matches existing LOS, or if I add the LOS myself, then I try to think of the encounter and try to think what type of tree would be more fun.

And glad you didn't take my previous comment too seriously. It was tongue in cheek and admittedly uninformed :)

---

Wow. I didn't even think of that. SKT would probably mean coniferous trees (evergreen, etc.) with conical shapes and branches all the way to the ground, where something like LMoP, might be deciduous broadleaf, with high branches.

I've posted a suggestion on the idea informer to include both low-res and high-res versions of assets, in particular maps, for commercial modules. For example a forge module with the high-res versions, key available when you purchase the adventure from the store so the low-res people don't need to ever clog up their downloads and hard drives with comparatively huge files they will never use.

I think the needs of the minimum-bandwidth old computer groups and the multiple 4K+ 30" monitor high bandwidth crowd are sufficiently different that it is worth providing both. I certainly have to scour the internet or make my own higher-res maps for a lot of commercial content, which is frustrating knowing that there must be a high-res version of the original available somewhere, certainly for all of the recent WOTC stuff.

I understand the historical context - this is not a complaint to Zacchaeus! But going forward while there will always be groups with low-spec machines and slow internet, there's also going to be an increasing number of us in the high-res camp, too. So given that the higher-res versions usually do exist somewhere (eg for the print product) it would be awesome to just get them in FG in full res with LOS etc already done.

https://fgapp.idea.informer.com/proj/fgapp?ia=137527

Cheers, Hywel

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Topdecker

You did good with SKT. On the difficult maps, the grid aligns nicely and you weren't given a lot to work with. Dealing with a 50' grid is no fun and cropping the map off of the larger image was a good call for a lot of reasons.

I did see one thing - not really a technical thing, but more of a conceptual thing - to bring up. There is at least one map where you put LOS terrain walls up all the way around the perimeter of trees on an overhead view. That's good if you are, you know, flying overhead, but not so great if you are on the ground and only have to deal with the trunk.

I was working with Empire of the Ghouls VTT maps by Kobold Press and encountered a similar situation:

Anyhow, it is a LOT easier to just draw a random trunk than to slowly work around the outer edge. Time saver, less is more in this case.

Top

---

The debate about trees blocking LoS is an interesting one and came up early in Alpha or Beta I think. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer really. The pine trees in my garden don't have branches all down to the ground but the Silver Birches do. Additionally there's a fair covering of ferns, saplings and gorse which grow to about 6 or 7 feet. So when I look from the house I can't see the bottom of the garden, not because the trees are blocking my view but the undergrowth is. Similarly in the forest where I walk the dog the ground cover is pretty dense in the summer and autumn but not so much in the winter and spring. So whilst trees themselves may not necessarily block the LOS (apart from the trunk) a lot of other foresty stuff might. There is also the possibility that the 'trees' are actually bushes or other vegetation. It may not always be clear what was in the cartographers mind when they were drawing the map. So I always assume that vegetation blocks LoS and draw that in on the basis that the DM can always switch it off - which takes less time that me not drawing the LoS and the DM having to do it.

Also we may have strayed well off topic of Hywel's excellent thread.

I've been playing at Fantasy Grounds for a long time and I'm used to its UI, but it's a fact that it scared me for a long time and will continue to do so with newbies.
As for Unity I notice a certain slowness in it, compared to the same campaign, in the same Ruleset with the same extensions.
As for the audiovisual resources, I say that it is fantastic to have the audio on the platform, to have the audio muffled by walls, to have sound only in one region, to have the possibility of placing music and sound effects directly on the platform, thus having a constant quality (that's features present in Foundry that I believe might exist in the FGU).
Now, continuing what I said but quoting visual resources that may exist in the FGU, for example, the clock and the time table that activates effects such as rain and wind and that makes the day gradually change to night, which makes items and effects run out, the various functions of LoS, especially the directional one (both sides, just the inside, just the outside), as the vision and lighting can change the vision of a character or monster to 180º instead of 360º ie do so that they only see what's in front of them, regarding lighting, the ability to change the colors of the light and rotate it to create a scene where there is a ship alarm or even the light of a vehicle in the scene, plus the possibility to control the beam of light from 360º to say 60º and thus simulate a flashlight, I believe that what I'm quoting and that already exist in Foundry can and will exist in FGU and more I believe and know that the Smite team works constantly for the performance of the FGU improve more and more and even the Foundry being faster and more attractive in terms of resources and visually I stand firm and strong in the FGU because I still believe in the team and its potential and not to forget and finish this text I say the possibility to operate PDFs directly on the platform would be wonderful and would greatly streamline the possibility of companies becoming interested in the platform and would facilitate the relationship between Smite and "publishers", it has been a few years since I saw the GURPS demonstration for SJGames and in it the SJGames team loved the experience and authorized full automation, but as for the modules she did not authorize and mentioned the possibility of having their content on the platform but through PDFs, at the time this was not possible because it was still FGC, but now this is possible and will be good for both companies.
Example: You want to play Kids on Bikes, the Smite team offers Ruleset, but you want to have the content to create your adventures buy the PDF from Renegade Studios.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zacchaeus

Also we may have strayed well off topic of Hywel's excellent thread.

---

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

Just had an email from Astral saying that their development has gone on hold, with their founder deciding to retire.

As they put it in the email: "even with the growth that Astral has experienced, it has not attracted an audience large enough to be a thriving business". They say they hundreds of thousands of players (although how many are active is another question - I tried it but it never had enough features above and beyond the other options to make me run a live game in it).

OneBookShelf/DriveThruRPG are keeping it going and maintaining it, but the marketplace is closing and they are dropping prices on subscriptions.


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.

My guess is that content and ease of use is going to be more important than graphics in the next wave of VTT wars, now everybody is more or less up to the basic minimum graphical standard set by Roll20. Indeed, I think it is going to be hard to maintain a VTT as a business if you don't do something pretty special. FG's ace card remains its GM development environment and automation. Roll20 has the lowest-common-denominator and market dominance allied with their find-a-game. Foundry's got the code junkies excited and demonstrably does make it easy for people to develop for.

I very much hope Doug's wheeler-dealer business acumen can make sure FG stays in with the big publishers! The nightmare scenario is D&D 6E and Hasbro deciding not to hand out the licences to ANYONE else because they are launching their own VTT. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen.

Cheers, Hywel

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.

Quote:

---

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.

---

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 :)

Quote:

---

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.

---

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

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jiminimonka

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

---

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 :)

Quote:

---

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 :)

---

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

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jiminimonka

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

---

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.

Quote:

---

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.

---

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

Quote:

---

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

---

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.