So why haven't we gotten voice communications yet?

[Balgor]

Hello all,

I migrated from roll20 to here because of the many features fantasygrounds has and makes it much easier.

The only thing I do not like is no voice communications.

Have to open another software like discord or teamspeak.

While roll20 has voice and video. Which I know its a website but still.

They have voice coms which many of use to play Dungeons and Dragons.

[LordEntrails]

Welcome.

I haven't seen SmiteWorks answer this question in some months/years, but last time they replied with a simple statement that what they do is create a VTT. There are so many voice and video apps already that they could neve compete with dedicated voice/video apps. Just like a voice/video app can't really compete with a dedicated VTT. Also, lots of people already have their favorite voice/video apps, so they wouldn't end up using one provided by their VTT anyway.

Take your example of Roll 20's voice, it's commonly not used because it often doesn't work, doesn't work well enough, or can't do things that people want (like multiple channels, etc) that a dedicated voice app can do.

I think most people have moved to Discord, given how easy it is to use and it's pretty good feature list, and of course, being free and easy. But there are folks here that use TeamSpeak, Skype, Teams, and other voice apps as well. Pick your favorite, it's not hard to setup and use. Plus it always proved a backup for the group to connect with each other. For instance if FG is having problems for a player, then you have a way to communicate, or if your voice app is having problems, you can communicate via chat in FG.

[viviolay]

Honestly, I never used the r20 voice when playing with others. (FG is my fav vtt but some of my friends prefer r20 so I use both.) We all still use discord or a 3rd party program.
While it'd be cool if FGU could integrate that one day - I don't think it's a high priority feature within a VTT just based off seeing it (not) be used for a vtt that does have it. I think there's been a total of 1 time I've ever seen it used.

But of course, that's just my anecdotal experience.

[*Neuro*]

Would be nice to have if the audio would be 10 times better minimum compared to FREE discord. If not, I would stick with discord.

[Jiminimonka]

Hello all,

I migrated from roll20 to here because of the many features fantasygrounds has and makes it much easier.

The only thing I do not like is no voice communications.

Have to open another software like discord or teamspeak.

While roll20 has voice and video. Which I know its a website but still.

They have voice coms which many of use to play Dungeons and Dragons.

Because Discord does it better and its not necessary to put in FGU.

[Zacchaeus]

Indeed. As others said why re-invent the wheel. There are dozens of programs out there which do voice communication and spending resources to create another one makes no sense.

[spoofer]

Over the past two years Discord has improved from being frustrating to use to being an excellent program with many great features, in my opinion. Smiteworks could never compete with Discord. And it is free.

[HywelPhillips]

One of the reasons I used Roll20 when I ran my first session on a VTT last year at the start of lockdown was that it had the lowest barrier to entry, because it included voice and video.

It didn't work. That first session the friend of mine who did videoconferencing most regularly for work had to quickly set up a Skype group for us all to join. I've played 400+ hours on Roll20 since then with various groups.

NONE of them use Roll20 for voice comms. Every single one uses Discord. One or two use Discord for voice chat and Roll20 for video (I guess maybe to save screen space?) The video is very flaky. Discord is much more reliable in my experience

I switched to running my own games via FGU after just a few weeks because it is a much better VTT for my needs. We switched from Skype to Discord for those, too.

Granted, it is one more hurdle to put in the way of newcomers, which isn't ideal. But I don't think it is worth SmiteWorks trying to replicate a whole different product when there are much larger teams developing them (Skype, Zoom, Discord, etc.) and it's clearly not a trivial thing to implement. Especially not when Discord seems to be becoming the de facto standard for roleplayers anyway.


Cheers, Hywel.

[Nylanfs]

Yep, dev resources could be better spent elsewhere.

[Imagix]

I'm also of the opinion that FG shouldn't incorporate voice + video into the program. There are other tools already out there that fulfill that function. Zoom, Meet, Skype, Discord, just to name 4. Let those programs worry about codec negotiation, remixing the input streams, and all that jazz, and let FG worry about the tabletop.