Originally Posted by
HywelPhillips
I have been using Syrinscape in FGU for a couple of years. I upload music to their servers for my playlists (legally - I have a subscription to a huge music library because I am a film-maker by profession) and trigger a combination of atmospheric sounds and music directly inside FGU. I have been using MatteKurre's excellent extension to do this to date, which also automated a bunch of chat trigger stuff.
Who cares about bugbear noises? I do. I've programmed a whole bunch of triggers for common foes, and for a lot of my player's stuff too so when the shaman summons a nature spirit there's a sound effect, when the warlock Eldritch blasts there's a sound effect, when there's a critical hit or a fumble or a wolf makes a bite attack there's a sound effect. The Weird Science healing sound FX in my Deadlands game is different from the Life Cleric sound FX in my D&D game.
The new FGU functionality expands upon this extension's functionality, with the new "smart" self-assembling mood board in particular being a significant step up in ease of use for triggering complex sounds whilst GM'ing. I'll be moving my stuff over from the old extension to the new functionality in chunks, because the new FGU way of doings an improvement for me.
If all I wanted was a simple way of playing a track from my computer, it would probably be frustrating. But having discovered Syrinscape I REALLY don't want to let it go, and the FGU way of tying in to their functionality gives me personally a great deal of bang for the buck.
Would I like synchronised sound delivery to players with range-sensing ambient sounds a la Foundry in FGU? Sure.
Is what they've implemented thus far a waste of time? For me, emphatically not. I'll be using it every session.
Cheers, Hywel
P.S. As others have said, it's also a big win in terms of development team manpower and costs compared with what we would ideally have, which is a Syrinscape competitor level of sound control plus Foundry levels of interactivity on a player-by-player basis. I'm a big believer in the 80:20 rule - you can often get 80% of the effect of the perfect solution by implementing the most straightforward 20% of the functionality.
Syrinscape provided an API with all the relevant hooks in to able to implement this in a straightforward way. It's clear from discussions elsewhere that implementing a whole synchronised multiplayer sound delivery subsystem in Unity is NOT the quick win one might imagine. So while it looks to us as though "all I want is a playlist of tracks like Roll20" is the simplest thing to ask for, it was actually more cost effective to hook into the Syrinscape APIs and also work with the Syrinscape and FGU existing licencees to allow stuff like the LMOP, PHB and MM sounds.