Video and Voice Chat Issues (Beta Only)

Hi rollers, Our goal with the new Roll20 WebRTC video and voice chat is to provide a chat system that works for our users as well as the former 3rd party option, OpenTok. With OpenTok we didn’t have control over the user experience and we felt we needed the freedom to address long standing user issues as well as provide new features important to the game experience, such as adjustable video positioning, whispering, and more. We parted ways with OpenTok because we were unable to come to an agreement where OpenTok could remain an alternative option and was financially viable for Roll20. The current internal default WebRTC option has been running stably for weeks with tens of thousands of users. While the majority of users have no issues creating peer to peer connections, there are still some players that the system doesn’t work for. We’re aware of those issues and are working on a solution in the form of the new Roll20 WebRTC Beta that is now a live option in your games. We are not currently taking any more feedback on the default WebRTC option and are instead focusing our efforts on the Beta. We would love to hear your feedback on how the Beta WebRTC is or isn’t working in your games. If you're planning on reporting a Beta issues, please review the  information we'll need from you and please confirm you are using the Roll20 WebRTC Beta with all questions and bug reports. Thank you for helping us through these early growing pains as we fine tune what we believe will be a powerful new tool in your gaming toolbox. Known Issues: Backend server stability resulting in some failed connections Using the reconnect button after changing broadcast settings doesn't take affect until other members of the chat also refresh.

If the "Beta" you are referring to is the "V2" version that I see in my game, then I'll repeat my experience (and many others) from last night: "I'll add to the chorus here...we tried a game tonight (5 players) with both V1 and V2. Both were abysmal. As others have stated, it was a supremely frustrating game of whack-a-mole for 30 minutes. Basically just varying combinations of people seeing/hearing some and not others. Utter mess." I'm all for fine-tuning, but that should be done prior to removing the working version.  Judging by the reports on the other forum, it doesn't look like this new chat is working well at all.  For $100 per year, OpenTok should be finanically viable.

We tried both the beta and the V1 system last night.  The V2 system would not work at all, none of us could see or hear anyone else.  With the V1 system, player 1,2 and 3 could see and hear each other, players 4 and 5 could see and hear each other only and and player 6 could not see or hear anyone.  We tried various things for over an hour and had to give up. 'Various things' included everyone switching from Chrome to FF and back again,  using the 'reconnect' button, everyone logging off and then logging in one at a time, rebooting our PCs.  Nothing could get the V2 system to work at all or the V1 system to work properly.

Massive problem (not a bug as such but will cost you users)... Not everyone can use WebRTC. I know its blocked in some of the UAE etc. I have a player who can no longer use the ingame video due to not being able to connect with us. VPNs are not able to connect and are now illegal in his country too. Please re-enable TOK.

Pord said: Massive problem (not a bug as such but will cost you users)... Not everyone can use WebRTC. I know its blocked in some of the UAE etc. I have a player who can no longer use the ingame video due to not being able to connect with us. VPNs are not able to connect and are now illegal in his country too. Please re-enable TOK. OpenTok uses WebRTC. Even if that weren't the case, OpenTok is not coming back for the reasons explained above. We also support Roll20 in Google Hangouts for integrated video and voice chat as an alternative to WebRTC.

Steve K. said: Pord said: Massive problem (not a bug as such but will cost you users)... Not everyone can use WebRTC. I know its blocked in some of the UAE etc. I have a player who can no longer use the ingame video due to not being able to connect with us. VPNs are not able to connect and are now illegal in his country too. Please re-enable TOK. OpenTok uses WebRTC. Even if that weren't the case, OpenTok is not coming back for the reasons explained above. We also support Roll20 in Google Hangouts for integrated video and voice chat as an alternative to WebRTC. Seems to not work in the UAE for some reason then. Same for hangouts. Does OpenTok use a different port or something to explain why he is unable to connect to the rest of us? 

Roll 20 Dev team: As you have read and replied to different posts made by other gamers, myself included, it is still not clear, at least for me, what happened last night; seems that the signaling server went down, but can you please elaborate why it went down and what will be done in the future to prevent issues like this? Also, I assume this communication issue would be consider as a massive issue by you, so can you please create some type of alert banner in the Roll20 web page or some kind of POP UP alerting so the gamers be informed that there is a major outage and dont be frustrated because we think that our PCs, browsers are not working? My case for example, we reboot our PCs, clean cache, start yelling at each other because we thought the issue was within our hands and control but eventually we knew that it wasn't the case. As a company who offers a service and some of us users pay for the service, you should consider to have more outage notifications and explanations so at least we can be informed and be prepared in case we would like to keep going with our game session. Also, I'm pretty sure the information I will request is somewhere in the docs, but can you please post the optimal requirements we need to use the new V2 communication service? Like for instance: Browser version, any plug in, any OS version, service pack, patch, etc. Thanks, Moises H.

The reason the signaling server kept going down last night is because we were using an outdated version of a dependency for the server. This issue would only show up if you had more than a couple of people connecting to the server at the same time, which is why we didn't catch it before it went live. We have update the required code and have crushed the longest uptime from last night, about 2 min, by almost 3 hours at the writing of this post. We also have about 50 people connected which is at least twice as we were failing to support at any one time last night. Probably the most frustrating part for most people is that it would start to work for a few seconds, then crash. The only thing that is worse than not having internet at all is having internet that goes out every couple of seconds. The only "additional" requirement for the chat is some additional bandwidth on top of what's needed to support the app itself. I don't have exact numbers, but you will need more for every additional person online in the game you are trying to connect to, which should be kind of obvious. The piece that someone might be lacking is the amount of upload bandwidth they have, which usually is much smaller compared to the download because most people don't use it nearly as much. Most personal ISPs offer it about 10 to 1, 10Mbps Down and 1Mbps up. But, with the chat you are also pushing data out to everyone else as well as pulling it in, so you need both. If this is an issue I suggest trying audio only mode to cut your upload to the bare minimum. If lack of bandwidth is an issue for you or one of your players, I suggest looking into 3rd party voice chat services. Because they work outside of the browser they can have access to more of the your computer's systems and can do more things like live data compression to keep the bandwidth usage to an absolute minimum. Some notable, free, voice chat options might be Skype, Discord, Curse, Mumble, Ventrilo or Teamspeak. (there's probably a ton more, these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head)

My group is struggling with this *right now.* Even with only 2 of us, we are constantly reloading the page, and turning broadcasting on & off. Whether we can talk to one another one minute to the next is a crapshoot. Video almost never works for any of us, unless it randomly does & random subsets of people can see one another.

My group is also going though this exact problem right now!! This is not a bug it is a non working system.

Every time 1 person enters the game session or if anyone changes any setting that forces them to reload their connection, it just randomly reconnects voice, or video, or neither, between every other player in the session. Tonight, it's usually "neither."  Voice & video are simply nonfunctional for my group.

Regarding the "Requirements" for internet speed.   if you're the DM and you have 6 players.. that would be 60D and 6up.  so if you the DM are "hosting" and had that speed,  would the players need that too?? or is the DM hosting and the players connecting to him/her? or how does it all work?

Video seems to be broken with both the default webRTC and the v2 Beta.&nbsp; Some players could see and hear another player, but no players could see and/or hear everybody.&nbsp; Seeing errors like the following in my console log. WebRTC iceFailed Error(anonymous function) @ app.js?1481236113:51 Full Console log is available here:&nbsp; <a href="https://1drv.ms/w/s!Assfh3JQU5wmgZJcO-iYscOW8fKEdQ" rel="nofollow">https://1drv.ms/w/s!Assfh3JQU5wmgZJcO-iYscOW8fKEdQ</a>

Well, good to know it's not just my group experiencing problems. Only a few of us can hear another few at once, never everyone to everyone.

My group is haveiing issues too

I like the description given in the other thread about "whack a mole" because that describes everything perfectly.

Seem like my group as issiues right now

My group is experiencing the same whack-a-mole issue right now. When I change the "chat tech", the group gets partitioned into two or more isolated groups that can see/hear only people within the group. We've been troubleshooting for an hour and can't get everyone together in the same chat.

Kristin C. said: Also, as an aside. For those who are having trouble, I would also recommend trying having your group conference over&nbsp; <a href="https://appear.in/" rel="nofollow">https://appear.in/</a> . They have one of the most solid WebRTC builds we've seen thus far. If your group can hold a video/voice conference on that platform, then there's work we can still do to improve our service to match. If you have problems also with appear.in, then there might be very little we can do to resolve our built-in video conferencing feature for your needs. We had one that used to work.... openTok... I will try... However this gives another issue... either needing another screen or making browser smaller to make it so I can see them and the roll20 game

Mike C. said: Video seems to be broken with both the default webRTC and the v2 Beta.&nbsp; Some players could see and hear another player, but no players could see and/or hear everybody.&nbsp; Seeing errors like the following in my console log. WebRTC iceFailed Error(anonymous function) @ app.js?1481236113:51 Full Console log is available here:&nbsp; <a href="https://1drv.ms/w/s!Assfh3JQU5wmgZJcO-iYscOW8fKEdQ" rel="nofollow">https://1drv.ms/w/s!Assfh3JQU5wmgZJcO-iYscOW8fKEdQ</a> I'm getting the exact same issue. Flicking between the two video/voice choices (beta and non-beta) is like flicking between two filters that changes who can see who. Another issue I have, and so does another player, is that the video view is distorted (even on different browsers). The other player has a black bar running down the side of his video window (an issue I saw on the beta a few weeks ago for myself), but I now have a squashed narrow view for my webcam. Also, even on the highest video quality, the video quality looks poorer and definitely not HD (I have 40/10mbps). Had to switch to Hangouts, which was messy to set up first time and the webcam views are too small. Seriously considering pulling my group from Roll20 and going to another virtual tabletop after these issues and the problems with running on Chrome. I don't pay for a poor experience where I have to waste an hour each week trying to troubleshoot issues that didn't exist the week before.

Had a session right now for about 5 hours. Players an me had all the described issues. Not hearing all players, webcam feed not working etc After reloading it is working for some time and then some one drops out again. This is really nerve wracking. Sorry that I'm not that specific but over here it is now 2am and I'm really tired.

Seems I must add the same complaints. Even right now, for the last hour, we've been trying to get our players into a cohesive chat view. We currently stand at 3 of 5 who can see each other and none of them are the GM even. Maybe while working on this feature we should have retained the use of openTok until the new year...

JUST A HEADS UP! we're going to be using the Appear.in website for the cams and audio tonight with my other group i'm in....mind you there is only going to be 3 of us playing but i will give you a heads up after the session what it looks like and if there's any troubles with that one. &nbsp;

I'm unable to get all of my players to connect to the same session :( I must say it's extremely frustrating especially given our limited time. &nbsp;I've tried both the BETA and normal options

can't get chat to work at all in our game

Running with Appear.in website with 3 people connected to it. &nbsp;it was successful and it worked great! &nbsp;No issues or glitches on our end. Tomorrow i will be playing with my other D&D group and i will see what happens with more players on that situation! &nbsp; &nbsp; CHEERS TO ALL THE DEVS working hard on the chat system! &nbsp;thank you for all your hard work. &nbsp;please dont give up on it so easily. &nbsp;&lt;3 we need this chat system up and going for sure! &lt;3&nbsp;

Our group moved over to Teamspeak and we will probably use the Appear.in from now on. Thank you for finding that.

Video/voice chat was completely unusable in our session last night. &nbsp;Trying again tonight (and will try to remember to grab the console log) but given half my group is really not computer savvy, trying to coordinate a different third-party service is probably not going to go over well. &nbsp;We won't play again until after the new year so hopefully all these issues are worked out by then. &nbsp;

We are experiencing this issue now. No one can communicate with each other. Submitting Log

Time to go Skype. This is unplayable in it's current state.

We are playing as a party of four and we can't see each other on our cameras. After refreshing either one person sees none and others see each other either we can see each other in pairs of two. Its unable to be used in any way.

Mics not working past two people in the party after logging in. &nbsp;So game cancelled today for us too. &nbsp;Hope this will be settled by the next weeks live game.

Yup had to use Discord today.

I have trouble believing a majority of people didn't have issues. In the 2 games i'm in that don't use mumble, we had to switch to Skype/Discord. Peer to Peer connections are random at best. We kept relogging to attempt to get better results, but were never able to get everybody able to hear everybody else at the same time.

We tested with Google Hangouts today and that will work for us until the internal video conferencing is fixed.

Statboy . said: I have trouble believing a majority of people didn't have issues. Not to get too off topic from the bug reports for the Beta version, my group has used the original Roll20 WebRTC since it was put into testing with little issue. At most we had to refresh twice in a game session. Now whether there weren't enough people testing the feature, that's another thing entirely. Unfortunately it seems that with most things on the Dev server or beta features, a lot of Pros aren't testing them, so roll20's testbed is smaller than they need, and the devs only find out issues when they push to Live and the general player base find more issues simply because they have a wider variety of systems and setups. I get the impression from everything said previously by the devs that it simply was not feasible for them to keep the contract with OpenTok open due to escalation of costs (likely due to the increase in roll20's popularity), plus the recent Soundcloud changes requiring their dev time to be eaten up by the need to replace the audio features quickly probably meant they had less time to get a replacement ready for OpenTok than they may have wanted to. Hopefully the devs are able to work more on this before the holidays, as I'm sure they want to. I plan on testing the Beta with my players this Wednesday so fingers crossed there has been more progress by then.

I did not get console logs, unfortunately, but last night my group experienced the same problem many have described. Some players could not see other players' video or audio. It was seemingly random and the combinations of who could not see whom would change whenever we pressed the Reconnect button on the Settings tab. Eventually, after many, many uses of the Reconnect button, we got everyone able to see and hear everyone else and left it alone and were fine. But the fact that it's so random and every player experienced a different combination of the same problem might mean there's a problem on Roll20's end, maybe a bandwidth issue? I'm not sure.

Please revert back to your former ROCK solid voice. &nbsp;This voice needs to be tweaked up the ying-yang and usually we cant play some nights cause of issues.

What he said *looks up*

David B. said: Please revert back to your former ROCK solid voice. &nbsp;This voice needs to be tweaked up the ying-yang and usually we cant play some nights cause of issues. Lambert J. said: What he said *looks up* "With OpenTok we didn’t have control over the user experience and we felt we needed the freedom to address long standing user issues as well as provide new features important to the game experience, such as adjustable video positioning, whispering, and more.&nbsp; We parted ways with OpenTok because we were unable to come to an agreement where OpenTok could remain an alternative option and was financially viable for Roll20. " (From the first post in this topic)

I think there should be a vote. Clearly so many people have issues and this being forced onto us which isn't working. Else we will end up losing people in the roll 20 community and it will die off. Didn't look good for their partners such as WOTC.&nbsp;

Experiencing this issue now in our game. &nbsp;Players are able to video/voice with some but not all players. &nbsp;Refreshing won't help. &nbsp;Same results. Just switched to hang outs so we can game.&nbsp;

Beta is working for us. We switched over when we could not get the regular working tonight (only a few people could see each other) But for me the beta is only working on firefox 50. (Windows 8.1) One player is in the middle of nowhere, N.C., and isn't having problems with the Beta like normal. It's set on medium bandwidth.

Just want to add to the chorus here... my group of 5 tried to play tonight and after 20 minutes or so spent trying different browsers, refreshing caches and deleting cookies, turning webcams on and off, trying both "V1 and V2" we finally gave up. Fortunately our Discord server was just fine for voice so we were able to play but nobody could ever see more than one other person at a time. It seemed to be completely random who it decided would be able to see each other. Even when it did work it would often freeze 30 seconds later and I think at best someone was able to see 2 other players for about a minute.

Spent an hour of our weekly 3 hour session just trying to get the damn thing working, and still failed, given up we used VoIP w/o Video (huge loss for RP part). We tried reloading page and reconnecting in any possible combination. One player could only connect to me. He tried two different systems and Firefox & Chrome on both. He even tried different internet connection with no luck. Every time someone connected or disconnected my Chrome tab froze for a good few seconds. Every time when the player with the most trouble just tried to reconnect - my Chrome tab froze as well. Once it was unresponsive for five minutes, could not even close it and did not propose the "kill bad tab" pop-up. It's a real shame we have to go thru this technical hell for video chat, but It's one of the most important aspects for an role playing game.

Will Roll20 be addressing this today? &nbsp;I would hate to loose more time and another session. &nbsp;We have been experiencing so many problems for months but at least we had voice, now that this is gone what reason do any of us have left to stay?

I would like to add my voice to overall displeasurment of new changes with audio and voice. Spent nearly an hour trying to make it work, then just disabled it and started Skype conf.