Update: The server move is done and it went well, thank you all your patience!
The Forge is getting a big upgrade of its servers, which should improve performance for your games and allow me to enhance everything much further. Scaling up, and geo distributing the games to provide the lowest latency possible.
What you need to know: On Monday April 27th, at 1 AM EST (2020-04-27T06:00:00Z) , scheduled maintenance will occur and you won’t be able to import/delete content from your game data, though it shouldn’t affect ongoing games. See below for more information and quirks to expect until it’s all done.
New users are automatically switched to the new servers, and this maintenance will not affect them.
Click here for more details
The move to the new servers will require a short adaptation period for everyone, so thanks for understanding. I’ve done my best so it has the minimum impact on your games, but there are some quirks you need to be aware of.
To help make that transition, I’ve bought a new domain name, forge-vtt.com (will become my primary domain name from now on) which points to the new servers. This helps because you will know where your game is located, and it will separate things as I transition your account from one server to the next with no interruptions to your games.
Here are the things you need to know :
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I will start the account migration on Monday April 27th at 1 AM EST (2020-04-27T06:00:00Z)
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This move will not affect your running games, so if you’re playing, you shouldn’t notice it. If you were playing or start your game before your data is done transferring, then the transfer will be delayed and I will wait for 1 hour after your game enters the ‘idle’ status (so 2 hours of inactivity) before moving accounts. This also means that you should avoid leaving your game logged in, and close your tabs that are open on Foundry’s
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The server change will primarily involve moving your game data folder from the current server to a much more powerful and efficient distributed storage cluster, which the new game servers will use. This means that while the move is happening and if your account hasn’t been transferred yet, you won’t be able to modify your game data folder directly. This implies that the importer will be disabled as well as the ‘Delete Game Content’ option. I will leave the export functionality available, and if you have a running game during the maintenance, it will still be able to work and modify its own world data.
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This will not affect your assets library, so you can still access it or upload to it, as usual.
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Because the domain name changes (from forgevtt.com to forge-vtt.com), after your data folder has been migrated, and you get redirected to the new site, you’d be asked to login again. There is no easy way to make your session cookies persistent between the two domains.
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When you start your game and it starts on a machine that was different from the last one you used (selected based on server load at the moment you launch the game), Foundry will ask you again to agree to the EULA again. I will be fixing this next week, along with adding support for those who pre-purchased FVTT and have a license but aren’t using Patreon. For now, it’s just a small quirk you need to know about.
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The forums are not using the new domain for their integration, so login/logout from the new url won’t affect your sign in within the forums (if you logout from forge-vtt.com, you will still be logged into the forums and on forgevtt.com). This will change once I’m done with the migration.
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Your data folder quota might be wrong if you have been moved to the new servers and you’re accessing the site from the old server. A warning will be displayed in that case to make you aware of it.
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Once everyone’s accounts have been migrated, the old domain forgevtt.com will automatically redirect to the new one and the quirks listed here won’t be relevant anymore.
For those of you in Europe, here is some more information for you
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There is a new server now located in Europe (Amsterdam) which works great and lowers the latencies for gamers in Europe. However, I will for now migrate everyone to the new servers in North America, but you will then be able to select your region from your account page.
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The European server runs under the url eu.forge-vtt.com and your games will become my-custom-name.eu.forge-vtt.com but you will still be able to access it through the previous urls, it will just automatically redirect to the .eu subdomain if your region has been set to Europe. I’m not yet entirely sure on how I can improve this without region based proxying which would add latency to the game, which is what I’m trying to avoid by bringing the servers closer to you.
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Changing your region and moving your account from North American to European servers will be instant as they are both using the same storage cluster and within the same secure VPN, so you don’t have to worry about any downtime or complications if you change your region later.
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The new European server will improve speeds for Europeans when it comes to how snappy Foundry itself is going to be, it is however using the storage cluster from the north american servers, so disk access is still going to be slow, making things not as fast as expected (a test from Europe showed 7 seconds to load vs 5 seconds loading the same game on north american servers). Improving that performance is possible but it’s going to take some time to finish setting it up. For now, the biggest issue with it is that it’s going to be slower to launch a world from the setup page (8 to 10 seconds instead of 1 second) or return to setup from a world and it will be slower to install/update modules and systems, but opening the game once the world has been selected, or interacting within Foundry VTT itself is going to be much faster for european users (at least twice as fast, hopefully in the 10 to 30 millisecond latency instead of 100-150 milliseconds).