Voice Communication Programs
grepdashv
Lord of the Bugs Join Date: 2002-11-13 Member: 8487Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester
Lord of the Bugs Join Date: 2002-11-13 Member: 8487Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester
Comments
And CD is a much worse offender for higher latencies, packet loss, hitreg etc.
And CD is a much worse offender for higher latencies, packet loss, hitreg etc. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
That explains a lot :o
Except that I'm not currently having any such issues (only the occasional ROBOT VOICE). I was thinking more of Jazz and Bullet.
1) Not enough RAM. Ventrilo is a system res ****. I had to go buy another stick for it to run NS, IRC, and such simultaneously and stably.
2) Strange crash issue. My computer would simply crash. Sometimes I would hear loud static (white noise) from my headphones before my computer reset itself, sometimes it would just reset. I had a Creative Audigy Gamer sound card, AMD XP 1600+, ASUS A7V-266E, Windows XP SP1 (crashed more often using win2k pro), and latest drivers of everything. When I built my new computer this problem (and most others as well) went away.
My computer would also crash in a similar fashion when using TeamSpeak (by the way, TeamSpeak is a good alternative if Ventrilo is just slowing your comp up too much...I never ever got mouse lock with it running), so it was clearly not Ventrilo. I don't know of anyone else who has had this problem so I'm assuming it's pretty rare.
Right now I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, and when I talk everyone that can hear me can hear anything that comes out of my headphone speakers. It turns out that the output for TB Santa Cruz cards actually bleeds into the input channel, so that when you talk into your mic (even with headphones on) people can hear anything you're doing (i.e. they can hear you biting as a skulk, or listening to music, or whatever your computer is doing that plays sound). There's no reliable fix for this other than to simply get a new sound card, or use your onboard sound.
People who are experiencing mouse lock should, in addition to doing what LazyEye said, upgrade their CPUs or make sure that they can close as many in-the-background programs as they can before playing NS. Disable your virus scanner, close down WinAmp, and scan your computer for spyware. I'm not sure if defragging your hard drive helps but it might.
Unrelated to "performance tweaks," there is a cool feature of Ventrilo that not a lot of people know about. If you go to the "Bindings" menu (click the arrow), you can create key binds to do all sorts of neat things, my favorite being user-to-user transmission. It's like private messaging in IRC. You can find it under "Push-to-talk, Advanced" in the drop-down menu in the window that pops up.
Ventrilo.exe Mem Usage - 2,380k Not much of a hog to me
Setup -> Input device -> Experiment with it (I just changed it to what it wasn't before). It's perfect now.
Also my ingame voice is very bad when I have vent open. I have a very good soundblaster sound card so I am not real sure why this is. (I haven't played around with the settings at all.)
It's flawed, but still seems to be the program of choice. The best thing you can do for your vent I've found is to turn off all the "extras." No "USER HAS CONNECTED USER HAS JOINED THE CHANNEL" voice, no connection voice, no room changing voice, nothing. It really lowers the amount of taxation ventrillo will run on your computer.