18 months on : FG vs. Roll20 vs Foundry

[Topdecker]

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.

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[Zacchaeus]

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.

[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.

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[LordEntrails]

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

[similarly]

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.

[HywelPhillips]

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

[Zacchaeus]

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.

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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.

[YAKO SOMEDAKY]

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.

[Topdecker]

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.

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[HywelPhillips]

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