Dev Log: First Playtest Stream

We streamed our first playtest of a combat session with 3-4 players yesterday, and predictably ran into some issues. Working hard now on fixing them!

Problems encountered during the test stream

My internet connection cut out completely for several seconds (no discord, no stream, players kicked from Foundry + Merlin) 3 or 4 times over the course of 2 hours. Unsure if this was actually caused by Merlin somehow or was just a poor connection. Either way, Merlin needs to deal with reconnection better. These crashes then caused a cascade of types of problems we hadn’t encountered before, when players were reconnecting, and Foundry was recognising their connection and logging them back in in a way that skipped some of Merlin’s initialisation code. These are all the problems that I think are explained by this:

• Chat on left side of screen when reconnecting
• On logging back in, players could no longer open their sheet via Merlin UI
• Remi rejoining after server crash could not login to Foundry. Had to connect through a browser.
• Alastor when reloading got the Foundry UI stuck on his whole screen. Half-fixed with debug hotkey, but Foundry UI was still messed up.
• Attack rolls from the character sheet sometimes wouldn’t show up in the Foundry log (this could also have been some other bug within Foundry, or due to very slow connection)

Foundry’s connection got very slow at times, meaning messages took like 10+ seconds to send and sheets were slow to open on clients, even if local framerate was fine. This is probably because my upload speed is not good enough to run both the Unreal and Foundry servers at once. Would be fixed by using a dedicated server for Foundry, which is what we’ll do next time.

Other weird Foundry issues which may or may not be fixed with the above two issues:

• Compendium got stuck open on my screen and wouldn’t close
• Journal entries get stuck on the screen for players
• Foundry UI debugger incredibly slow when framerate low. Not useful as an emergency way to fix UI issues.
• Could not cast blindness or change its number of prepared casts, for some reason. Probably a Foundry bug not Merlin as it persisted in another browser.
• Remi on rejoining Foundry suddenly didn’t have authority to view his sheet. Possibly it was just very slow to load?

These bugs were unrelated to Foundry:

• Crashed clients (not server) when I deleted an object
• Opening hierarchy tab causes a crash
• Strange loss of control of camera when I selected the knight at one point. Like I was being forced to rotate around a fixed point instead of moving freely. No idea what caused this.
• Left-click then stopped working completely, probably invisible UI was in the way
• Players would sometimes get ‘no creatures available’ when reconnecting, when they did have creatures available in the scene. Fixed by relogging. Happened at least twice.

Missing / needed features:

• Start combat from Merlin
• Measurement tools for players to plan their moves
• GM indicator of player connections, Merlin and Foundry
• Way for players to refresh/re-log in to Foundry in Merlin
• Way to manually or auto-save the scene in case of a crash
• Tools to resize + rotate objects (useful for improvising props)
• Tool that automatically, or more conveniently, sends me the crash log when a player crashes

Tools needed to improve framerate, which is vital for the Foundry UI not chugging:

• Video settings menu with a lot of options
• Some system for controlling lighting and postprocess presets per-map. Need to be able to turn a lot of stuff down for the potato PCs like mine.

Other minor issues:

• Slow to re-destroy wall on reconnect
• Sometimes can’t click the transform gizmo if other stuff gets in the way

Stream issues:

• Wrong resolution, bottom-right 1/3rd was cut off
• Voice drowned out by Foundry audio
• My mic still too quiet overall

Overall, it’s not that much work to fix all of this. We will be posting updates and tick things off from the above list on our discord server as we work our way through it.

-Robomoo