Forums » Suggestions
VO's built in voice chat is great when it works... Unfortunately that's not very often. Channels leak all the time and on some platforms (Mac OS X 10.9+) it doesn't work at all.
Why not replace it with Mumble? It's BSD licensed, has client code for tons of platforms, and it works very well.
Why not replace it with Mumble? It's BSD licensed, has client code for tons of platforms, and it works very well.
+1 for Mumble
Mumble is great
Hmm. Noted. There would be considerable development time required to switch over to something like this. That said, I would really like to have something where we're integrating actual source code, and can fix issues as needed.
Mumble 5ever
Yeah, it definitely seems like a lot of work, but the payoff could be a feature that works well enough for players to use it. Working VC might be an important feature for people coming from Steam, where a lot of games have it built in.
We still don't really know why the current voice chat "leaks". Changing to Mumble might not actually fix that particular issue, as that could be something on our side (some channel ID that wraps around and gets re-used internally by the game server). But, overall, it would be nice to have a solution where we can change anything as needed.
Mobile device players would like VC I'm sure since it's hard to do anything else while trying to communicate via text. Mumble already works on mobile devices.
We've had voice chat on Android for years. It uses a lot more bandwidth than the game, though, so we don't enable it by default.
Anyway, there are good reasons to consider something like this, but it's a big block of contiguous time, not a small tweak, and the priority is not as high as graphics and gameplay content already in the pipe.
Anyway, there are good reasons to consider something like this, but it's a big block of contiguous time, not a small tweak, and the priority is not as high as graphics and gameplay content already in the pipe.
BUMP cause fuck the current vc
I'll second that BUMP
This would seriously go a long ways to improve player retention. It would streamline the process of a vet giving actual useful information, instead of having to condense wording down because of the limited number of characters that you can type at once.
100% worth a month or so of development time in my opinion.
This would seriously go a long ways to improve player retention. It would streamline the process of a vet giving actual useful information, instead of having to condense wording down because of the limited number of characters that you can type at once.
100% worth a month or so of development time in my opinion.
Mumble allows more opportunity for relaying via scripts. Anyone that uses this crap is setting themselves up to be spied on by those that write said plugins and frantically masturbate to the sound of your voice.
In a game that already has trust issues up the yin yang surrounding alts, this seems like BS.
-1 to Mumble. +1 to a functioning VC though.
In a game that already has trust issues up the yin yang surrounding alts, this seems like BS.
-1 to Mumble. +1 to a functioning VC though.
Um, do you know something I don't, Ore? Because I don't see how using Mumble would have any impact on the possibility of relaying voice chat via plugins. The devs would have to intentionally expose that functionality to the plugin api, and why would they do that? I mean, I can think of hypothetical reasons (being able to make custom audio filters or synthesize audio would be neat), but I can't imagine that plugins written in Lua run fast enough to do real-time audio processing. So there's no point in exposing that functionality. They might expose things like volume control or the ability to pan the audio, since that can be done by just passing parameters to the sound system, but those sorts of control don't provide the ability to relay audio.
I'm all for Mumble. The VC currently in VO is crap and has never worked correctly anyway.
No in fact I know even less than that which I assume is the point of your smarmy post. I said my piece and expressed my concerns about Mumble. We could have these enlightening conversations about scripting without all the holier-than-thou attitude.
+1 to functioning VC
+1 to functioning VC
Sorry Dirty, but I must play the devil's advocate here. I'm not a programmer, so maybe everything I'm saying is wrong, but here goes:
As Mumble currently stands now amongst the player base: yes, it is open to exploitation. Players run their own mumble servers and services, which is of course ripe for data-mining and what-have-you, but really nothing super special. Then again, it's your choice to connect to these third party services. If people or guilds want to collect my IP address so they can masturbate to my voice, it was my decision to associate and connect to another person's PC/server. I know exactly who I'm getting into bed with.
If what I assume would happen is correct, Mumble would be implemented in such a way into VO that the only configurable options would possibly be volume control, mic gain and maybe some other minor variables such as panning. Internal codec and connection info would all be handled on Guild Software's side and outside the sandbox available to the player base. So in essence, your data carried to and from the server over and audio connection should be secure.
+1 to either/or.
As Mumble currently stands now amongst the player base: yes, it is open to exploitation. Players run their own mumble servers and services, which is of course ripe for data-mining and what-have-you, but really nothing super special. Then again, it's your choice to connect to these third party services. If people or guilds want to collect my IP address so they can masturbate to my voice, it was my decision to associate and connect to another person's PC/server. I know exactly who I'm getting into bed with.
If what I assume would happen is correct, Mumble would be implemented in such a way into VO that the only configurable options would possibly be volume control, mic gain and maybe some other minor variables such as panning. Internal codec and connection info would all be handled on Guild Software's side and outside the sandbox available to the player base. So in essence, your data carried to and from the server over and audio connection should be secure.
+1 to either/or.
It would be a better expenditure of resources to identify why current voice chat leaks. Previous conjecture has suggested reuse of channels which seems a likely cause. The question is, what do we need to provide GS to help them troubleshoot why voice chat leaks so often?
I apologize if I came across as smarmy. It wasn't intentional and I should have written that more carefully. My question was meant literally, not as a way to make you look ignorant; I wanted to know how you came to the conclusion that Mumble allows more opportunity for relaying via scripts.
It does. But as you pointed out, it depends on what APIs GS allows.
I looked into mumble a month or two ago, and it appear(ed) during my limited research that it isn't really in a state for a customized integration like we have. It's very much a standalone app, and we would have to figure out how to hack it up to be integrated.
In theory, I'm all for implementing a nice voice-chat integration-wrapper around it, and open-sourcing it or something, but the "month of development time" may not be far off the mark. Maybe shorter than that, but.. non-trivial testing and debugging across all our different platforms, due to varied OS issues.
I know the current VC implementation is not ideal, and has issues, but it does still work somewhat, right? At least, it keeps showing up on our bandwidth graph, so I assume someone is doing something with it.
I would like to update VC, but compared to like.. an iPhone release, and other things that may drastically improve our income, it's hard for me to prioritize. I'm not sold on how much it will "improve player retention".. you're talking about a pretty hard-core group of people who ever even try voice chat. But, it's super useful, and I would like it to be on all platforms (and something where we have source-code control).
If we did hack up mumble to be integrated into the game, I would not be concerned about people.. exploiting.. or cheating.. or whatever it is that's a concern there.
Fixing existing voice chat:
If people can submit a Support Ticket whenever it starts to leak or do weird channel crap, that would be appreciated. Ie, as soon as possible after the actual occurrence, so we can try and correlate the timing, during debugging. It seems like, if we restart everything (including the voice chat server), it works fine for like a week or so. And then maybe starts to decline.. such that we've considered just resetting the thing every week, but we'd rather actually fix the issue.
Whether we have Mumble or whatever else, we still need to make sure the channel-ID thing isn't a bug in the actual game, so, it's best that we resolve that first.
In theory, I'm all for implementing a nice voice-chat integration-wrapper around it, and open-sourcing it or something, but the "month of development time" may not be far off the mark. Maybe shorter than that, but.. non-trivial testing and debugging across all our different platforms, due to varied OS issues.
I know the current VC implementation is not ideal, and has issues, but it does still work somewhat, right? At least, it keeps showing up on our bandwidth graph, so I assume someone is doing something with it.
I would like to update VC, but compared to like.. an iPhone release, and other things that may drastically improve our income, it's hard for me to prioritize. I'm not sold on how much it will "improve player retention".. you're talking about a pretty hard-core group of people who ever even try voice chat. But, it's super useful, and I would like it to be on all platforms (and something where we have source-code control).
If we did hack up mumble to be integrated into the game, I would not be concerned about people.. exploiting.. or cheating.. or whatever it is that's a concern there.
Fixing existing voice chat:
If people can submit a Support Ticket whenever it starts to leak or do weird channel crap, that would be appreciated. Ie, as soon as possible after the actual occurrence, so we can try and correlate the timing, during debugging. It seems like, if we restart everything (including the voice chat server), it works fine for like a week or so. And then maybe starts to decline.. such that we've considered just resetting the thing every week, but we'd rather actually fix the issue.
Whether we have Mumble or whatever else, we still need to make sure the channel-ID thing isn't a bug in the actual game, so, it's best that we resolve that first.