Question about Hosting games.

[Bcallahan93]

So I've run two sessions so far in FGU, both times using a Private Cloud game. I have yet to set up Port Forwarding for a direct connection, and before I do I wanted to ask if it is worth the effort?

We experienced very little issue the first session, but the second session had a few connectivity issues with one of my players. Those being that they disconnected for no apparent reason, likely on their end but possibly the cloud's fault as it was Saturday afternoon, but I had to /kick them so they could reconnect.

Would a direct connection likely have fewer issues is my question assentially.

[LordEntrails]

I don't think it's known yet, since I'm not sure (from my reading of reports) if the user connectivity instability is due to the cloud brokering or not.

Note that port forwarding may not be required to use an IP address. It depends. You can try it with a player and see if they can connect pretty quickly. How much of a hassle port forwarding is depends on your network. It can be simple, or not :O

[Trenloe]

In theory using a direct connection is the most efficient - you're communicating directly, not having to broker all communications via a cloud server.

[Bcallahan93]

I don't think it's known yet, since I'm not sure (from my reading of reports) if the user connectivity instability is due to the cloud brokering or not.

Note that port forwarding may not be required to use an IP address. It depends. You can try it with a player and see if they can connect pretty quickly. How much of a hassle port forwarding is depends on your network. It can be simple, or not :O

It may also be possible that some of the issues were related to having too many tokens on the board. Outside of connectivity obviously, but I'm planning on checkin on my network later to see.

A simple question, I hope, I'd like to ask too is port forwarding inherently better than using the cloud service?

[Trenloe]

... is port forwarding inherently better than using the cloud service?

See my previous response for info on a direct connection.

Port Forwarding is more efficient, but it can have its issues. In some architectures it's not possible and you'll need to adjust if you use different computers/change IP address, etc.. If you know what you're doing and it is possible to get it working in your setup, and it's not a hassle to do so, then IMO it is more efficient and more reliable than using the cloud.

[Dr0W]

I also had problems connecting directly. And the reason it didn't work is unknown to me. I know how to port forward and have been doing that for years, but I actually had to set up a host address to make my player's FGU client to connect to my computer.

Posted a thread about it https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...ng-for-some-IP

So if you have the same problem, even after portforwarding, you should check my solution there.

[Imagix]

I suppose a related question is whether it could be added to have a user-run lobby server to broker the connections. If I've already got an AWS VM, it would be handy (and may reduce the load on FG's servers).