Thus far, we have completed 5 sessions of Pathfinder 2e, utilizing the Fantasy Grounds Unity virtual tabletop. In full defense of the application, it is considered pre-release, so I don’t really expect it to run smoothly. Most of the games (other than expected group technical learning) have been very successful – everyone has quickly adapted and learned the basic of the program.
However, the Unity version continues to be hampered by slow performance likely increased due to our large group sizes. At times, opening a item list, or referencing a spell can pause the windows for many seconds, and with the addition of dynamic vision and lighting, along with other map effects it moves even slower. Most of that though we were adapting too – it is frustrating, but workable.
Unfortunately with our Extinction Curse game yesterday, a much more serious problem developed – the application crashed and lost data several times during the session. After the fourth such event (each taking 15-20 minutes to recover, reset, and re-connect the players), we gave up for the night. Today, after some more troubleshooting, I continue to get database errors in the logs whenever I re-launch the campaign.
My only conclusion – in the interest of efficiency and speed – is that Unity is not quite yet ready for full campaign use. Again, this is not a fault of Fantasy Grounds – the publishers have been open about the pre-release status. Instead I was rather optimistic (and eager for dynamic vision), and seem to have pushed it past its abilities for now.
As a result, I have “downgraded” all of our campaign material back to Fantasy Grounds Classic. Fortunately, this was minimal effort, since the characters could be exported and re-imported without issue. Sadly, this means no dynamic vision for the time, but it should allow for a much more stable and responsive game session.
I will continue to monitor the development schedule for Unity, and hopefully we can upgrade back sometime this summer – if they keep to their release timeline.
