Both Web Player and Online Player clients are connected

Support
#1

How does one make the above error message on the syrinscape GM interface go away?

I try to always use the Online Player (app) but it seems impossible to use reliably because it is absolutely inevitable that eventually the GM web interface for controlling audio starts playing audio from inside the browser even though it is also feeding to the Online Player (app) on my machine, and once that happens the error message in the title of this thread pops up and there is no way to get the GM control interface to stop playing audio through the browser. Logging out of syrinscape and logging back in doesn’t clear it…rebooting my browser doesn’t clear it…rebooting my machine doesn’t clear it. It’s annoyingly frustrating and has gotten me close to the point of just giving up on syrinscape cause I’m wasting too much time constantly dealing with this problem.

#2

So…maybe i’ve figured out my problem. It appears you have a “master” interface that is the one you have to use for the online player to work properly, but there is no link to this anywhere in the menus bars at the top of the site. Instead, every link there that takes you to the GM control takes you to a web page that is visually identical to the master page in every way, but connects to the audio stream through the web player interface and breaks the online player.

So, syrinscape has two web pages that are exactly identical to each other in appearance so they are indistinguishable to the user. One of these is easy to get to and is the one the “play now” button will take you to, but which will break the online player if you go to it. Then the other is well hidden and near impossible to find, but that is the one you must go to in order to use the online player properly.

Is that correct?

#3

Heya @klintus.fang,

Yes! Sorry for the confusion! We are working on trying to make things a bit clearer. Glad you worked it out! :pizza:

There ARE, indeed, two distinct ways of running remote games for Syrinscape:

  1. the older Online Player, linked on the Homepage via the Online Control Panel (there’s a link in there to open the Master Interface). This is the one you use if you and your players are using the Online Player app.
  2. the newer Web Player, what most people are using now.

Reasons to use the Online Player instead of the Web Player:

  1. some players are playing back sound on iOS
  2. you or some players experiencing poor audio performance on the Web Player due to devices that can’t handle building the sound in the browser.

Out of interest: Why are YOU not using the Web Player? :female_detective:

Any thoughts about how to offer links to the older legacy Master Interface for people who still need to use the older thing for the moment? We are currently going in circles debating that! :smiley:

Mainly: thanks for your support as a sub! I hope you might be able to change your forum user description at some point! :sleepy:

#4

The web player has a lot of choppy audio static on some machines. Also, for a new user whose joined only after both methods were available, it isn’t clear from any of the documentation what is and isn’t the recommended method for using syrinscape.

#5

I updated my forum user description too. :wink: Just blank for now.

My other issues: my players already have enough to manage. I want to use syrinscape, and am using syrinscape, but if I ask my players to run the audio themselves from inside a browser instance using the web player or through the app, its just another thing I have to ask them to coordinate every session in addition to the VTT we are using and the discord app I’m having them use for audio/video chat. I’ve a few players for whom adding another website and/or app to the list of stuff they have to remember to do every session would be no issue, but with a large group of players who all have varying levels of computer saviness, and varying quality of computer hardware, if I were to ask that of all of them, it would just lead to the result we don’t use syrinscape, to be honest.

As a result, the only way I can see it viable to use syrinscape is to pipe it into the discord audio channel from my machine using a dummy discord account. As you probably know…that’s doable, but not simple. I have it working, but I have difficulty getting it to work well when using the web player as I don’t want to pipe all my browser audio into discord, i only want the syrinscape output to go there. Aside from the issue I was having where I couldn’t figure out that there were two visually identical versions of the GM control panel, that each produced different results in terms of how they interacted with the app, that’s been working fine.

Ideally…syrinscape would have some more direct native way of integrating into a discord audio stream, but I wouldn’t expect such a thing to be a priority for you.

As for recommendations for dealing with the error message…it might be useful that when the message complaining that the user is using both the web player and the app pops up from the GM control panel…maybe detect that the only user of the web player is the GM control panel to which that message is being printed, and put a different message up in that case suggesting that if the GM is trying to use the online player (app) that he go to the online player’s GM control panel rather than the web player’s GM control panel.

1 Like
#6

What VTT are you using, @klintus.fang ? One of the things we are working towards is having Syrinscape sit invisibly inside VTT pages so that Players don’t have to open that one extra TAB. The way we have build the Web Player is to make that relatively trivial for VTT devs to get done (eg everything is served by us and they just need a code block). This is something you might advocate for among your own VTT community if that’s not something they are getting done already (or to encourage them to get that done more quickly).

#7

Mainly: THANK YOU for taking the time to give detailed feedback. Keep it coming.

And yes, although your particular slant on how things go may not always be the top of the priority list as far as we can judge the needs and wants of the community as a WHOLE, advocating for what YOU want is never going to be a waste of time.

We literally discuss threads like this one when we gather around our (virtual) water cooler!

#8

Thanks. The VTT we are using is Fantasy Ground Unity. If the audio from syrinscape could just pipe into that so FGU just played it, that would be awesome. I’d certainly use that in place of multiple discord accounts and virtual audio patch cables to connect the output of one app to the mic input of the second discord account.