player modules not loading (D&D 5E FGC ultimate)

[jrpettit]

When everyone says have your table open early or start early, what are we talking about? half-hour, hours? I had another game tonight and one of three players could see the map after three hours.

[LordEntrails]

When everyone says have your table open early or start early, what are we talking about? half-hour, hours? I had another game tonight and one of three players could see the map after three hours.

It depends. When I start a new campaign of my Undermountain I have a few dozen maps marked to preload and several books. I ask player to log in during the week before at random times. Intending that no more than 1 or 2 are logged in at any time. Maybe they are logged in for an hour or two, we don't time it. and it's more of a 'background' or leave it over night thing.

But a regular campaign or one that is up and running and I may only have one map marked for pre-load the books are already all loaded, I ask folks to log in 5-10 minutes early.

It is going to depend upon your upload speed, how many players you have, their download speeds, and how much content you are sharing.

[jrpettit]

It depends. When I start a new campaign of my Undermountain I have a few dozen maps marked to preload and several books. I ask player to log in during the week before at random times. Intending that no more than 1 or 2 are logged in at any time. Maybe they are logged in for an hour or two, we don't time it. and it's more of a 'background' or leave it over night thing.

But a regular campaign or one that is up and running and I may only have one map marked for pre-load the books are already all loaded, I ask folks to log in 5-10 minutes early.

It is going to depend upon your upload speed, how many players you have, their download speeds, and how much content you are sharing.

Thanks. I will plan on having new players work with me to plan on logging on early to get the PHB and XGE and a couple of map preloads the week before the game. This has been the only disappointing part of using FG. I do like the peer-to-peer approach so we are not dependent on a centralized server but it sure would be nice if there was an indicator of how much time/size the download has left.

[tkinzer]

I'm a first time user (hosting) last night and we couldn't ever get our game to really work, same problem, loading forever. We could sometimes get one player in the game but not two. Based on what I'm seeing for the user experience of others here, uploading at other times to avoid long load times, I'm strongly considering asking for my money back and looking for another solution.

If everything is uploading from the host computer, then is your upload speed important? Mine is only 5 Mbps.

[jrpettit]

I'm a first time user (hosting) last night and we couldn't ever get our game to really work, same problem, loading forever. We could sometimes get one player in the game but not two. Based on what I'm seeing for the user experience of others here, uploading at other times to avoid long load times, I'm strongly considering asking for my money back and looking for another solution.

If everything is uploading from the host computer, then is your upload speed important? Mine is only 5 Mbps.

My upload is only 5mbps also, but files are relatively small <1mb up to <10mb, so these should only take minutes. I would guess it has to do with the peer-to-peer protocol possibly? Not my expertise. I wonder if Unity is any better?

I have another new game next week (#3 in the last week) that I'm hosting. My plan is to try and get players to connect this weekend for a data dump.

Has anyone done any testing on this data transfer?

[tkinzer]

FWIW I was using Unity.

[jrpettit]

I'm still not having any luck preloading. I had a character try to load PHB for 3 hours and it still didn't show up. He could see a map when I shared it. I'm having them create characters in DnD Beyond and then I'll convert. I don't think they will need the modules if I put everything on their character sheet. So long as the maps show, the combat tracker and party tracker, I think we'll be okay. My speedtest.net shows 30mb download and 5mb upload.

Can anyone confirm that once the character sheet is built, the players do not need the PHB?
Is there any way to monitor the download of modules?

[LordEntrails]

If players don't have the modules they will be unable to follow links from their character sheets for things like abilities and spells. But, they can use all the actions and abilities etc.

No way to monitor download of modules.

[jrpettit]

If players don't have the modules they will be unable to follow links from their character sheets for things like abilities and spells. But, they can use all the actions and abilities etc.

No way to monitor download of modules.

Thanks for the response. All characters have access to DnD Beyond or real books so they can look them up. I'm hoping at least the maps download so they can at least see what's going on.

[Trenloe]

Is there any way to monitor the download of modules?

The player can open the <FG app data>\cache\<Campaign name> directory and check the size of <module name>.dat file, or sometimes <module name>.tmp (which will rename to .dat once the module is fully downloaded). This will increase in size as the data is downloaded. So you can see if data is actually being downloaded - an increasing in size .dat or .tmp file.