In light of the sudden interest in Diablo 2 here on the Qt3 boards, i’m wondering about getting some voicecom stuff up and running so we can hear DrCrypt and Quatoria bicker in real time over audio. That’s like half the enjoyment of playing with Qt3ers right there.
The questions go like this:
Which program seems to handle things the best, with regards to bandwidth and quality?
Is it even remotely possible to support a maximum of 8 players while playing D2 myself on a dinky 128k up connection? With understandable audio?
I’ve caught wind that Roger Wilco has client to client bandwidth distribution. If this is so, does it work well? Would it be a better way to go?
We used Teamspeak with planetside – it worked rather well, including the time Jason McMaster’s son started singing to me while I was defending a tower.
I use Teamspeak, and it seems that a lot of the “clans” that do a lot of multiplayer that Teamspeak is the software of choice. I used to use RW, it worked fine also, but Teamspeak (at the time) had a little bit better clarity.
my friends and i use teamspeak. several of us had trouble getting roger wilco to work, and gamevoice limits the number of freeware clients that can connect to a server.
voice quality is very good on teamspeak and bandwidth utilization is minimal. one thing we typically do is split the hosting responsibilities between two people, ie one person hosts teamspeak and the other hosts the game.
the only thing that i don’t like about teamspeak is the server configuration utility. it is web-based, and isn’t nearly easy to use as the gamevoice server config util.
What bee said. I have a GameVoice and find it to be a much better solution (especially the voice-activiation, which is pretty borked on TS in my experience), but it’s tough to make everyone go out and buy a $40 product. I usually end up using TS because everybody has it (or can easily get it). Server load is very small–I host a 6-8 person D2 game and a simultaneous TS server all the time with no problems, and I only have 128 up. Just make sure people set TS to push-to-talk (just map it to an extra mouse button or something).
i personally have had weird problems with the voice activation in teamspeak. it was creating some goofy feedback loop, even though i was using headphones. all the rest of my group uses voice activation in teamspeak, though, and it works great for them.
headphones. very important point. don’t even bother trying to use one of these apps if all your players don’t have headphones. the echoing is extremely annoying.
Another vote for Teamspeak. My group uses it mainly for co-op Raven Shield. We used to use RW but TS is more flexible and has better voice quality, IMO.
