Fantasy Grounds Unity - Players experiance crash if Fog of War is active.

[MeepTheChangeling]

I was running a game today via Ultimate, with my players using Demo copies, and with the Pathfinder core rules, DM's guide, beastarity 1, and Advanced players guides loaded. My system has 23 gigs of ram, an FGU was using only 1.3. We were using the prior build to the live version, to try and resolve this issue before we found the "fix". My players kept having their clients crash in this exact way:

Their client would lag greatly preforming most any action. Eventually, they would crash, but NOT disconnect form the server. I would have to kick them so they could rejoin.

This was competently eliminated, lag and all, by turning off fog of war on the maps we used. I originally was using map files that were too big, but I shrank them to sub 2000 x 2000 px and then they loaded properly, but the crashed still happened... eventually. ESPECIALLY if there was a good deal of things to block line of site.

Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong? I can provide more info if needed.

[pindercarl]

The two factors that affect LOS performance are complexity of LOS and number of tokens on the map. To help build some performance metrics, do you know how many tokens were on the map? Thanks.

Edited to add: did FGU crash, i.e. close, or lock up? Thanks, again.

[MeepTheChangeling]

There were maybe 25 tokens tops on one map, with perhaps 18 on the other map we used. As far as the crashing went, all I have to go off of is player's descriptions as my GMs hosting copy never crashed. They said their entire client would crash, as in just "poof" gone, but they would remain connected to the host copy on my end, resulting in them being unable to reconnect until I kicked their active login. This happened to the same 2 players consistently, with one in NYC and one in Florida. Our third player, Also in NYC, didn't seem to have the issue. BUT he wasn't a part of the combat on the second map due to splitting the party.

[Game Hamster]

Had the same thing happen in a 5e game today. 8 players... 16 tokens. Crashes occurred when multiple players started moving their tokens. I turned of LOS/FOW and no one crashed after that. Maybe 4 to 5 of my players crashed, and we are all pretty local. Hosted Server, not Cloud. Were you hosting your own server, or playing cloud?

[MeepTheChangeling]

> Were you hosting your own server, or playing cloud?
If I knew how to host myself on Unity, I likely would. I don't like relying on cloud services. That's just begging to be punched in the tits with downtime thus preventing you from doing what you wanted to do.

[amanwing]

> Were you hosting your own server, or playing cloud?
If I knew how to host myself on Unity, I likely would. I don't like relying on cloud services. That's just begging to be punched in the tits with downtime thus preventing you from doing what you wanted to do.

I think you always host the server. All you can do is make it available via cloud or LAN.

[MeepTheChangeling]

I'm a network tech. Here's how the process of making it avalible through the cloud works.

I hit the host button and imeadiently my computer opens a connection to my router, and tells my router to connect to another machine and give it this information, and my router tells my ISP to forward that information on as needed. That other machine is a cloud service server. That information is the way for players to find my game, and the way for data to move between our machines. For the handshake/connection process at least, maybe more. I do not know in this case.

If I were hosting, then the network used for play would consist of my computer, the computers my players are on, all of our routers, and all of our ISPs. Best case scenario, this means that 3 devices per person must operate perfectly for the game to work. It's more likely to be 12+ per person because data bounces form machine to machine in ISPs in the real world. For the sake of argument, let's forget that your ISP is multiple machines and they do NOT directly connect to the ISP hosting network with the data you want but bounce between each other such that for me in order to get a packet of data to google it goes through 33 networks (yes really. run a trace route sometime. It's cool.)

When I do the "cloud join" the network used for connecting players suddenly jumps in size by several orders of magnitude. Suddenly we're depending on the "3" devices per player, and the something like 10 devices for whatever server farm the connection info uses, AND on the dozen or so more devices PER PLAYER that are needed to link their networks to the cloud server. All of this, in the bese case scenario, adds a TON of lag by introducing so many unneeded hops in the routing, and in the worst case, well, the stability of a system decrees in proportion to its complexity.

TLDR; Since port fording is easy, I'd really rather just host the damn thing myself so I can use minimal networking resources, have the lowest latency, and not have to worry if some guy in Montana just accidentally disconnected a cable with his foot, which means suddenly our Elf vanishes from the game because now internet can no longer go to a part of the world none of our players are in but is critical for "the cloud" to work.

[amanwing]

I wonder how all those online multi-player games work. The network quality for those online shooters must be way higher than fantasygrounds. And they work most of the time without players dropping out.

[MeepTheChangeling]

Typically they purchase many servers from server farms all across the world and you connect to the closest server to you in terms of routing hops. (this is why in france you may connect to a server in Germany)That's not something a small company can do. I wouldn't be surprised if all of FG's players are connecting through a single server in New Zealand or some other place with REALLY inexpensive hosting. This is not a dig/bash on the FG crew, it's just my jaded IT nature to assume the worst when it comes to networking. You cant' spend many years in a field where you occasionally have to tell customers their system cannot boot because a power strip will not work if plugged into itself without loosing part of your soul. (Yes that happened. More than once. Not always with very old people... Yes I usually had to go to the customer's location to diagnose that issue...)

[shadeskull]

Same or similar problem for us yesterday. Played on cloud with 4 tokens and exploring the Dwarven Excavation dungeon with LOS turned on. By mistake I missed completing the wall behind the far right secret door which caused players to see large north and south areas. Some tokens were on top of each other too. Thinking that the way the regular wall is connected to the secret door can have something to do with it since I sometimes do this quick and overlap the areas instead of connecting them with the dots. Will turn off LOS next game and use mask instead to see if it helps.