D&D General Do you want a 3D vtt?

[tetrasodium]

Foundry = 150 5'sq.

50 is as low as FVTT can go. It won't let you go lower than that.

These are programs which operate with radically different art requirements & assumptions.

Since people are talking about the defaults in various VTTs, arkenforge is 256x256px/square

 

[Steel_Wind]

Since people are talking about the defaults in various VTTs, arkenforge is 256x256px/square

The problem with Arkenforge is that is hits the 3d graphics chip on a computer pretty hard just for fog of war effect on a 10x20 peasant's cottage in the middle of a grassy field!

I have a pretty beefy rig, but my 3d cards were getting long in the tooth. I planned to replace it in 2020... and then covid hit and the 3d chip supply dried up. I ended up getting an EVGA card directly from them queued on their waiting list (they will forever more have my goodwill for that), but I was damned fortunate to be able to do so at a reasonable cost. Most ppl were not. so lucky

The market still hasn't recovered from the video card shortage.

Anyway, in between replacing my card with a new 3070, I tried Arkenforge. My dual 390 cards in Crossfire mode were whirring like jet turbines after 5 seconds of loading a simple cottage!

There are a LOT of people who play on laptops; maybe it's most people now. That kind of 3d silicon requirement is difficult to mandate in this current market.

 

[tetrasodium]

The problem with Arkenforge is that is hits the 3d graphics chip on a computer pretty hard just for fog of war effect on a 10x20 peasant's cottage in the middle of a grassy field!

I have a pretty beefy rig, but my 3d cards were getting long in the tooth. I planned to replace it in 2020... and then covid hit and the 3d chip supply dried up. I ended up getting an EVGA card directly from them queued on their waiting list (they will forever more have my goodwill for that), but I was damned fortunate to be able to do so at a reasonable cost. Most ppl were not. so lucky

The market still hasn't recovered from the video card shortage.

Anyway, in between replacing my card with a new 3070, I tried Arkenforge. My dual 390 cards in Crossfire mode were whirring like jet turbines after 5 seconds of loading a simple cottage!

There are a LOT of people who play on laptops; maybe it's most people now. That kind of 3d silicon requirement is difficult to mandate in this current market.

It obsoletely can if you use a good number of light sources on top of FoW, but I ran it for a couple years with this potato
Dell Latitude e6410, i5-m520@2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, integrated intel HD video, Win 10 till I lucked into a great deal on this kinda beastly "gamer" laptop from an amazon sale about a year ago when the usb ports started going bad on my potato. That raises another reason why going to 3d might be rather questionable though.


That's strange that those cards had trouble though. It won't stop you from making a map that goes way overboard with lights or something though, was it one of the built in maps(which one) or one you built? Their discord is usually pretty friendly if you are having trouble.[/ispoiler]

 

[Hussar]

Foundry = 150 5'sq.

50 is as low as FVTT can go. It won't let you go lower than that.

These are programs which operate with radically different art requirements & assumptions.

My poor Internet connection would never survive image files that big. That makes the map backgrounds absolutely enormous. I thought 70 was actually pretty excessive. 150? Well, that makes my decision a lot easier.

 

[Zaukrie]

May I proselytize Foundry VTT?

I only posted that to answer the question. I use Foundry

 

[Azzy]

I only posted that to answer the question. I use Foundry

Never mind then.

 

[pogre]

I would want to try it for my online group. I would have to be sold to use it long term. I'm not adverse to significant prep time, but the payoff has to be there.

I am one of those guys that uses all the scenery and miniatures for my in-person game - Dwarven Forge, Hirst Arts, 3D Prints, etc. I would be down to have a luxury set-up for 3D online gaming.

However, I have a system for my in-person games. I can quickly get terrain and minis in place with very little interruption. I can certainly lay out an interesting scene with 3D terrain faster than I can draw on a Chessex Grid. I would need a similar speedy system to maintain the flow of an online 3D game for me to keep using it.

 

[MNblockhead]

Note, this generally isn't a computer performance issue, but, an Internet speed thing - not only yours but every one of your players as well. And it can be a real bear. As a rule of thumb, any image more than a couple of megabytes isn't going to fly very well. One solution is to slice up your giant map into individually smaller jpg's and then stitch them together when building the map in whatever VTT you're using. That tends to solve the hanging up problem.

This also gets really exacerbated when dealing with fog of war and sight lines.

Yep. This is one reason I use a hosting service to host my Foundry license rather than trying to serve the game from my laptop. Not only for the ease of set up, but I can chose where the geographic area in which the server is hosted. Even better, any files uploaded to my assets library will automatically, e.g. maps, are replicated in over 50 servers across the globe, so that the maps, tokens, music, etc. will always be loaded from the closest server to the player. So when you have players in different continents, they will always load their scenes with the highest bandwidth and lowest latency possible.

Roll20, I'm sure does something similar, because it has always been pretty good with international player groups (except for voice, every group I've played in using Roll20 end up using Discord for voice--but to be fair we use Discord for voice when I run games in Foundry as well). But Roll20 just couldn't handle the amount of data I wanted to put into it and the pricing wasn't (at least at the time) very good for storage hogs like myself. Foundry with Forge-VTT was just the best bang for my buck.

I actually really wanted to go with Fantasy Grounds, either classic or unity, as I'm only running 5e, with FG provides great support for. Also FG better support throwing up throwing up maps on the fly and using manual reveal for fog of war, which Foundry doesn't support. But it was impossible for me to host and often even participate in international games from the mid-east using Fantasy Ground. It may be better now, but I'm so invested into Foundry that it it wouldn't make much sense to switch.

 

[MNblockhead]

I voted no. Even online I'm using owlbear.rodeo instead of Roll20 or on of the other Systems to DM because the Prep Time for the VTT is minimal. The players have their character sheets at home and roll at home. All I need is a table to push tokens around as a DM and can put or a draw a Map in the background.
Even as a DM I don't print battle maps anymore. I did in the beginning with IG freaking maps. 4 A3 Pages for an encounter ...
But with limited time I concentrate on the ingame content not on the look at the table. Drawing it on a flipmat is way easier and faster.
Online, too.
All the visual also aids kill Imagination.

The players will not imagine the World anymore, they will watch a 3d rwndwring of it. And that kills immersion, because it will feel way more like a Video Game than an TTRPG.

And I'm not a grognard. I started playing D&D in 2018. Also I live in Germany were the Internet connection us usally not very good, so you till jave all the connection issues during a game, which would be even worse for a 3d Engine.

Yeah the Owlbear Rodeo approach makes a lot of sense for certain styles of games. I supported the Role kickstarter which had a similar philosophy as Owlbear Rodeo in terms of VTT minimalism. But Role's focus is being a TTRPG-focused video call service. They focused on excellent audio and video that also have very serviceable character sheet support, dice rolling, and basic battlemap support.

 

[MNblockhead]

The 3D VTT I would want isn't the one they would make.

I would want the map...terrain and other physical features...to be drawn abstractly in 2D, but with elevation changes, staircases and the like in 3D. So basically like a hand-drawn isometric map.

Then, on top of that, I'd love for the "minis" to be detailed 3D and animated.

I've seem people do this with Foundry but it is hardly user friendly, requiring a lot of mods and prep time. If made much simpler to set up, I agree, this would be perfect!