banimod / etpro / ettv forums

I was wondering if anyone in the ET pro mod department has seriously considered adding a built in voice com?

I hope they considered it and then said "wait, let's not turn ET into CS".

deej wrote:I hope they considered it and then said "wait, let's not turn ET into CS".

if this is sarcasm.. its not obvious enough.

i dont see anything wrong in that question, and i sure hope that noone used that lame argument. "wait, let's not turn ET into CS" .. that is just too low..

There have been previous discussions on this forum.

Myself, I don't see the point. There are good VOIP programs available, that in general are quite a bit better than the voicecoms integrated into games.

"But omg then everyone on pubs could be on voice" you might say. Well, listening to random children on pubs scream into their mics isn't a high priority feature for me.

Seeing who is talking is nice, but it doesn't take that long to figure out your clanmates voices.

Another option is that some of the voice programs provide SDKs to let people integrate them with other programs. This was also discussed at some point.

of course it has been brought up before, it was either a licensing issue or datastream issue (or both)

squadjot wrote:if this is sarcasm.. its not obvious enough.

I blame the language barrier then, because I was in fact being sarcastic.

As ReyalP said, external comms programs do the yob good enough IMO.

I got the sarcasm though

It's been considered, and rejected for several reasons:
1) It would require engine hacks for mixing the sound properly - For something sanely maintainable, we would have to open the sound card twice instead.
2) The only popular conferencing software with an SDK available for even two of the platforms we support is TeamSpeak; most win32 users seem to prefer Ventrilo.
3) TeamSpeak (Including the SDK) is Delphi.
4) The TeamSpeak SDK comes as a shared library, which we can not link staticly with the cgame, which means it is not under control from sv_pure, thus opening another door to hacks.

Sure, we can also wait for the two years delayed Teamspeak 3's release... (yeah this is completely off-topic but I couldn't refrain myself, sorry for that).
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whats the problem with teamspeak 2 ?

zinx wrote: ...
3) TeamSpeak (Including the SDK) is Delphi.
4) The TeamSpeak SDK comes as a shared library, which we can not link staticly with the cgame, which means it is not under control from sv_pure, thus opening another door to hacks.
...

Except that and the lack of ALSA support for linux, Teamspeak 2 is perfectly fine but maybe nerds we do abuse by asking something better.
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The reason i bring this up is what i feel it adds to the game. Yes, you have your 10 year old emo's playing new kids on the black and ranting, but you also have a tool that truely makes ET a multi dimentional team game.

I know we are not supose to bring up CS, but i feel i have to here. I think a big part of CS's success (leagues/lans) is a direct result of the comunity building feature voice enables. yea text chat is nice and all but when im in the middle of playing its not feasable. The absence of voice interactions makes it harder for clans and teams to form on the fly. As a direct result there is a laack of conections and dependencys the voice com creats. with out the conetion and a more meaningful reason to play people become board with the game and stop playing before they come to realize its full potential, as all of you here have.

anyways just my 2 cents

PS> im sure if you guys try hard enough and bring up valid points this could be done. I feel it would be the most meaningful contribution the ET pro team or SD could make to this game

IfReborn wrote: PS> im sure if you guys try hard enough and bring up valid points this could be done. I feel it would be the most meaningful contribution the ET pro team or SD could make to this game

SD isn't going to do jack with ET (the fact that they didn't do anything significant on 2.60 release should make that abundantly clear). They are deep into working on their next game (which is reported to have integrated voice coms).

For the ETPro team try to implement it (assuming no new client engine release) raises significant technical problems, as described by zinx. Some (but not all) of this would change if there was a good open-source voice com library released under a usable license. It would still be a lot of work

Myself, I don't even buy the claim that built in voice is a big factor in the current popularity of CS. I certainly wouldn't expect it to make any big difference in the number of people playing ET.

i already have to disable vsays when pubbing just so i can hear footsteps, etc. imagine if there were random voices which you couldn't even attempt to grow accustomed to and try to tune out?

this would just be YADF - yet another disabled feature

Let's analyse the pros and cons.
I hope you'll read it through and realize why people have responded you in a negative fashion.

Pros:

• This will help clans that can't afford a voicechat server. (in my clan for example, people already spend on the gameserver, and voicechat servers are simply too expensive for the little bandwidth/cpu time they offer)
• Noob friendly.

Cons :

• Making voicechats isn't as simple as you think - you need to know about audio compression and how to handle the pipeline.
  There are already programs out there made by experts of this field,
  They are built of very complex yet effecient architecture, and the devs also make money from it - it's hard to compete with their results.
• Good codecs require prior licensing, and even gnu licensed ones require a lot of tweaking and fitting into the voice module because you'll get no decent support from the devs.
• Computing, mixing and recieving/sending signals takes resources from the servers, this will likely introduce more lags and spiking,
  Also, if the bandwidth hit is big, server providers will likely be charging slightly more for etpro servers.
• The etpro devs are giving their sparetime to perfect a competition mod by tweaking the game, this is simply beyond the scope of this package.
• There are already voice programs like ventrilo and teamspeak, they have been used for years now, and i haven't heard anyone complaining about using them along with ET/Rtcw.