I’ve only played one game using Vassal, a few years ago, and that was via PBEM, which was pretty easy. I’m now ready to take a deeper dive and play Live.
I understand that there are at least two, perhaps more, applications for helping to play Live, Zoom and Discord. I am totally unfamiliar with both, but my potential opponent is familiar with the former.
What’s the recommendation on which to use when playing with Vassal?
Also and for what it’s worth, I used to have a Skype account a few years ago, although I never used it for anything, but I understand that platform fell out of favor after Microsoft bought it, hahaha. It was easy to set up though, as I remember.
It’s really just whatever means of communication you and your fellow gamer(s) can agree on. Discord gained popularity amongst boardgamers during the pandemic just as Zoom did more generally. Discord is more potentially more useful for gaming and (iirc) Zoom has a timeout limit on free accounts so that might be an issue for you.
Most of my live gaming is done using Discord but I also use Skype, Whatsap, rarely, others and sometimes just the chat window that Vassal provides.
Agreed. Decide if you only need audio communications, or video and audio, then go from there. Skype, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet…there are many choices in this space.
Only you know what kind of internet connection you have and what data cap might apply, but I do a lot of video meetings for work–in my opinion the impact on data consumption is negligible in the grand scheme of things. I think that concern is overstated. You can usually reduce video quality that you send/receive if it’s really that touch and go. If you do any kind of streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, et al), those are going to chew through much, much more data than videoconferencing while gaming.
We had no problem using Zoom this evening for 40 minutes. We didn’t actually play.
My opponent has used Zoom before and he said the 40 minute limit is no big deal, as you can just re-start Zoom.
One more question. I’ve got the Win 32-bit version of Vassal installed on my old Win 7 computer, and modules are working fine, but my opponent is running Win10 Pro 64-bit, so what version of Vassal should he be installing, the x86 or ARM?
It’s highly likely that all he needs to do is visit the homepage, whereupon the page will make a best guess for him based on his browser (this is pretty darn accurate).
Thanks, btw, for fixing that anti-virus issue some of us 32-bit users were having about a year ago, where we had to make Vassal an “exception” in our anti-virus checks to allow it to work.
I’ve developed a strong preference for discord. It’s free, no limit, you can create your own private server for your local club/group. You can use discord for a lot of other gaming social media stuff as many of your local game stores and other game companies have a strong presence on discord. For example, I can see alot of action going on with my two local game stores … what people are planning on attending on what day, kibitzing on local topics. You can find opponents on the BGG ‘Opponents wanted’ thread as well.
