Current Playability?

[damned]

When is the ETA for the official release of Unity, guys?

When there is an official release date everyone will know it.

[Noonien]

We had several sessions so far, around 15 hours of playtime in total.
Yesterday we had a 5 hour session with 4 players + GM .
The only issues where:
- Sometime a player could not see a shared map, he relogged and it was ok
- Players could not choose the language for the chat, but they where able to understand the languages that they should be able to
- One player got disconnected 2 times, relogging was possible without problem
- Some shared modules were not loadable for some players, relogging and trying again solved the problem

All in all: We had lots of fun, the minor issues were fixed in mins, no fun stopper

[pollux]

There are some good reports from people who are having fun with FGU games here, but as someone who watches the forums a lot, I feel it's also important to note that there are some frustrated folks right now.

• There are many reports of various networking troubles. Either difficulty connecting, or difficulty sharing materials once connected, or game pauses that are likely due to networking issues. The most recent build aims to address this stuff, and I'm a day or two behind on forum posts so I'm not sure how initial reports are. This situation may be much improved and hopefully it will improve very quickly (on a timescale of days) as the devs are giving it their full attention already.
• There are many reports of game pauses that are quite long and quite irritating. Some of these may be networking related, but some are confirmed with no clients connected as well. Performance issues are not top of the stack right now, but some folks are reporting that the pauses are problematic enough to impact game enjoyment.

As already mentioned here, some folks are enjoying FGU and using it successfully RIGHT NOW, but these seem to be the dominant sharp edges that effect even popular rulesets like D&D 5e right now.

[Copernicus219]

@pollux I don't think the game pauses/freezes have anything to do with networking since they happen to me even if I am working on my campaign alone. I have a lot of rulebooks that I have open. My guess is all the images that go along with the text data for these modules is most likely the problem as I have 4 bestiarys and like 6 or more other rulebooks for Pathfinder. As well as maps and tokens, etc. Since they haven't addressed performance optimization, that is the most likely where the problem lies in regards to game freezing.Also, I didn't have issues with freezes in FGC.

[JTM3469]

After the new build on 04-04 FGU and the Pathfinder 2 rule set my group was able to log in, download the core rules book and other books I shared. The logging in issues and the maps rendering issues that I was having before the push did not show up. The game went smoothly as a beta game does.

[pollux]

@pollux I don't think the game pauses/freezes have anything to do with networking since they happen to me even if I am working on my campaign alone.

It's certain that some pauses are unrelated to networking as you say. I believe (but certain would be too strong a word) that some pauses also propagate as such:

• Some lua ruleset code makes a synchonrous call that requires network communication between FGU host and FGU client. Maybe just a dice roll, it doesn't necessarily have to involve a lot of data transfer.
• A networking problem (that hopefully is solved via the latest build) causes that transfer to take a long time. It doesn't take a long time because there's a lot of data to move, it takes a long time because some packet got dropped along the way and some long timeout gets triggered or some other inefficient or dead-end code path is initiated that just takes a long time to resolve for reasons unrelated to CPU/etc performance or raw bandwidth available.
• Because we're in ruleset lua code, everything is single threaded. The ruleset ALSO can't process on-click style script hooks. So now the UI, or parts of the UI appear to be frozen while the hardware is doing nothing or close to it... just waiting on a timeout caused by a broken network transfer.

I'm speculating a lot here and reading between the lines, but I believe that the above scenario is possible. Most of the clear reports I've seen about CPU-related pauses resolve in a double-digit number of seconds at worst... usually 10-20s in bad cases and I think the results of those cases are often cached in ram after (like long NPC lists in the NPC window or whatever). A multi-minute pause on a client FEELS likely to be network related to me. Though again, I engaging in informed speculation, I don't have a deep understanding what causes any given pause and there are likely many different reasons in play.

[qdwag]

Having any images open drives my CPU (MAC) to full throttle. I’ve got a pretty beefy MacBook Pro so it handles it fine with occasional stutters. It does get super hot though.

As soon as I close any images, the machine goes back to low to around 30-50% usage.

You might want to restrict the number of images you have open in FGU at any one time.