Recommended number of users?

Hello everyone,

to this day I’m wondering if there is a soft-lock limitation on how many concurrent users a session can feature. We are a group of 8 people. 1 Gamemaster (myself) and 7 players, playing for almost one year now. Only 7 of the 8 players use the camera.

We often encounter glitched video broadcasting. We only use video broadcasting and disabled audio to save resources. We often use TeamSpeak or Discord for voice.

Is it a Forge or an FVTT or even a problem of our group that cameras often do need to be reloaded. We have black “video screens” for some users and reloading the page sometimes fixes it, makes it worse or some users turn black while others are visible.

We did a lot of troubleshooting, turning on hardware acceleration, checking the internet connection, upgrading hardware, disabling all modules, loading a new world, and so on.

We never had a game in which everyone could see everybody else and as the adventure goes on, many screens freeze, we need to reload and troubleshoot since nonverbal communication is such an amazing thing. A nod or thumbs up replaces hearing 8 people say: Yes, we want to take the right path.

Back to my question: Is this our fault? Is it an FVTT or maybe a Forge problem? Are people out there experiencing the same issues?

We’ve had it throughout the year and we tried so much. I would really appreciate any help on this topic. FVTT + Forge is the greatest thing out there. We just need a working video interface for everyone <3

Kind regards

Hi.
There would be a sort of limitation, and that’s mostly going to be imposed by the bandwidth and CPU usage required to encode/decode everyone’s streams.
You can see my explanation of how Audio/Video works here :

But basically, with 7 players, you have about 42 connections between all of you, and they are direct connections, so it’s not going through the Forge (unless in rare situations where connectivity is impossible).

Add to that, the fact that core has some bugs related to how A/V works that could cause the issues you’ve described and we’ve been unable to figure out how to fix them as it depends on a library used.

One suggestion would be to try installed and enabling the jitsirtc module, which would make it use the Jitsi servers for Audio/Video which works differently and would improve quality, especially for large groups as it has a lesser cpu/bandwidth requirement.
I know that many people have reported that the module makes it more stable but others have reported latency issues, especially if they are further away from the jitsi servers.
I hope that helps.

We have black “video screens” for some users and reloading the page sometimes fixes it, makes it worse or some users turn black while others are visible.

We’ve had the same issue. 8 people. 2 don’t have cameras (yet). We’ve tried both default FVTT and Jitsi. We’ve had to resort to Discord for voice, which is kind of a benefit because we can still talk if someone has to refresh their screen.

Any thoughts or suggestions to get a constant video stream would be great.