Google Hangouts - Your Experience

I've been reading that those who launch Roll20 through Google Hangouts have had much better success with eliminating lag issues, video and voice issues. Let's get a good sized number of user experience replies to see if this is actually the case. Do you use Hangouts? Does it really perform much better?

I've done a couple sessions in Roll20 using a separate voice client, and a couple sessions in google hangouts with voice and video. The sessions in roll20 have gone just fine, no lag issues. I absolutely hate tokbox (people are quiet even at max volume, talk felt sluggish, not good). The sessions in google go okay for voice and chat, but the game input seems laggy (people will announce the result of their dice rolls, but I won't see them show up until 5-10 seconds pass. Everyone in the hangout also noticed a slow lag creep and ended up restarting the session a couple hours in to counteract it. From my experiences, I recommend playing in roll20 and using a separate voice/video client.

Chas' experience mirrors those of many folks. The Voice/Vid in Hangouts is better than TokBox but the game itself tends to have more lag and it seems to get worse over time. We are looking into alternatives to TokBox (WebRTC being the primary goal) but at this point it is the only free solution for what we need to do.

I've had nothing but problems with tokbox to the point that it actually takes our crew longer to get the system up and running stable-ish for everyone than the gaming that follows. Puts a big damper on the fun factor. So gauging the quality of others' experiences came up.

TokBox has a 2 to 3 second delay when I use it (based in UK). Hangouts is fine.

We tried Hangouts tonight, and there was a markedly better experience. Occasional lag did build up over time, but reloading resolved it, and only the plug-in, not the browser window, needed reloading. Loading and re-loading were quicker, and everything in general was more responsive. I found that a large part of the lag just disappeared.

Tokbox we gave up on- lags, volume issues, drops, overall mess. We then tried Hangouts, and while the voice was ok, Roll20 lags were legendary. We have been using Roll20 for map, type chat, and dice for 2 months now, with Skype as the video/voice, and it has worked great!! We stretch from California to Connecticut, with 8 of us total.

Yep - because of the lag in Roll20+tokBox, and the horrible lag in the Roll20 APP in G+ Hangouts - we now use pure roll20 without tokBox and then a seperate G+ Hangout for A/V - that works great

I think that Roll20 eventually will leave Tokbox behind for a better substitute. The G+ Hangout interface eats considerable parts of the screen without any need for Roll20 purposes and it's too distracting.

They just re-did G+ hangout UI... it takes up quite a bit less now.

Good. I'll check it out.

We played D&D 4th Edition on the public server today from 3pm est to 7pm est and had almost no lag issues at all until the very, very end and we went through two combat encounters plus a small skill challenge with a magic circle. One player had voice issues, but it turned out to be a broken/breaking wire in his headphones, not anything related to Roll20 or gplus.

To our group there's no comparison. Were it not the case that Tokbox is free we would all be demanding refunds. It is laggy, indistinct, poor quality, etc. Google Hangouts is crystal clear and totally lag free. The downsides with the Google Hangout solution are twofold: 1. You lose some on-screen real estate to Google bars at the top and bottom of your screen. 2. There is a horrendous memory leak in there somewhere in the interaction between Roll20 and the Hangout. My players are all well trained to hit F5 every 30 mins without fail, which seems to work for us. I haven't tried the idea of running two browser sessions, one with a native Roll20 session and one with a Google Hangout. I will though, that's a great idea and sounds like it will solve both 1 & 2 above.

We started a campaign yesterday using this idea. Had two separate windows, one with our Gplus hangout and the other with rolld20. worked for a while but then rolls stopped showing up, didnt match the die roll, and disconnects. Next time we will try the 30 min refresh and see how it goes.

I was led to believe there were some system issues last night - and the dice issues were almost global for a window of time.

My group all did the hangout + normal session method for our last game, and it worked so well that I'm going to stop attempting anything else. Reading up, though, it sounds as if folks are opening the session twice, once normally and once in the hangout. Is there some reason to not just use a vanilla hangout and bypass the extra loading (and memory leak) that Roll20 adds?