Spring RTS Engine

For one thing TS doesn't work very well on linux. At least last time I checked about 2 months ago.

The other thing would be attracting new players. Imagine you're not accustomed to using TS (or an alternative) and just discovered Spring. You wouldn't have to install a client, much less worry about connecting to a server , setting up channels and distributing players in them. Just plug in your headset, join a game and talk to to your team.

Licho wrote:You cannot have 1 server per ally team, because there is no guarantee anyone in that team can host it.

You're right. Forgot about people leaving games and such. Then you would have to assign a new voice server, which probably would be too much of a hassle.

This thread belongs in the feature requests forum

Well, could switch to Mumble (opensource Teamspeak) instead of TeamSpeak.

Or, for the hardcore approach, Mumble could be rolled into Spring.

If it's up to me I say no to integrating voice chat in Spring.

I may say yes if certain other things are improved, but it just isn't smart to add it currently, in my opinion.

I say no. do not add it.

Reason A- What about chatting AFTER the game is closed? what about before? you can't with a game run chat, period.

Reason B- if its stuck in the lobby, the lobby goes down occasionally for short 5 second blips, I dunno why, but if you have to alt-tab and re-log the lobby to chat again, its going to crash, de-sync adn ruin the game, not to mention the random chatter that would fill up main, and the issues with setting up team chat parameters etc... and if it goes down, getting back into the same chat channel...

Reason C- if you have multiple chat proggies running at once, you get a megaphone voice resonance, it sounds ruidiclious, and volume control is terrible... not to mention if one guy talks vis spring, one via teamspeak, and 1 via mumble... just, sounds like fail, feedback, echoing, all that crap... and I've had things like this happen, its no fun.

long story short,

KEEP CHAT SEPERATE.

Masure wrote:I don't understand why you want to complexify Spring with talking features when dedicated software exist.

I use TS with my mates while playing spring and we create an unregistered channel for each ally playing. You can create it with a password if you re paranoid.

Hosting a spring dedicated TS server should be enough for players to be in touch while playing.

Because it gives infinitely more control over the features and automation of the system to the players/game hosts.

You wouldn't have to piss around for ages with getting all your teammates in the same room, or making sure everyone has TS installed, or giving out TS server info, you just load the game, and BOOM, all your allies are in the right gameroom with you, weather or not they have team speak installed. Of course really playing clans will likely still use vent/TS/TT/whatever, that's fine, but spring integration would mean right a way you can just talk with everyone on your team with no hassle.

We'd probably have as cheap a VOIP implementation as we could possibly manage, and always give slow game hosts the option of having it turned off, but it would be nice to have even the basic VOIP ability within spring teamgames, and spec chat.

ingame voip is great but from experience (BF2 and onward) its doesn't get used much in a public scene... only clans/gaming groups really use it and generally those are the groups that already have TS/TT/Vent while its a neat concept i don't think that it would see that much to warrant inclusion/dev time.

yay my 25 kbps upstream is gona get pwnt!

this is not workable, look at a CSS server and how much bandwidth it uses, that is ok because its on a dedicated box with a huge connection, home users just wont cut it.

And from a user design perspective: Users tend to get accustomed to less-than-best way of doing things. Once a proper implementation is done, people will then say "OMGWTF how did i live without this before". Its party laziness, part fear of the unknown.

Voicechats for spring games are very very rare right now because of the effort required to coordinate a server, connections, who's using it who's not, etc. If its integrated, it will become a 'holy shit this rocks im using it all the time' feature.

I host TS servers off my shit little home ADSL line all the time. It works fine. Voice consumes very little bandwidth if the protocol isn't retarded.

The concern will be more "will it work at once with the spring server". If thats the case, maybe instead of having game server and comm server be the same server, in the lobby, another player or spec could 'opt-in' to be the voice host.

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/ -- open-source teamspeak. Use as standalone or incorporate into Spring.

Mumble has a lot of hurdles to jump through. It doesn't seem to be very efficient or intuitive. If I recall, the EESF tried to use it before but settled on TeamTalk for superior voice quality control and higher efficiency.

It could be probably integrated into spring in very lazy way - leaving mumble server isolated from spring and letting it run on own specific port.

Host could then control whether he/she wants to enable mumble (if he has enough bandwidth to handle it) and spring would only control such things as showing icons when someone talks or putting people into separate spectator's channel once they die.

In similar way, clients could disable mumble in spring options to save bandwidth.

Neddie, you wont see any mumble interface! You wont even know its using mumble..

All you will get is extra key to press in spring for talking..

I know, I know. I think we could do that with TeamTalk as well - or have it voice-detect activate. We could load a front-end via Lua as well.

Integrating Mumble has other advantages. The Spring netcode, for instance, could degrade the Mumble quality when the host is under lag.

Voice chat options could also be features set through the user interface - for instance we could set whether spectators can talk to live players on a per game basis. And if we were really bold, we could even optionally allow recording of voice like we do chat.

Recording voice chat as standard part of replays is win. Now you can "hear the cries of their women" (in the background)...

I strongly advise against voice auto-activation by default. Many players won't have their audio correctly setup and could produce really nasty feedback, which might go totally unnoticed by an unexperienced player (you dont hear what you are transmitting). With an activation button you can avoid a lot of problems.

j5mello wrote:ingame voip is great but from experience (BF2 and onward) its doesn't get used much in a public scene... only clans/gaming groups really use it and generally those are the groups that already have TS/TT/Vent while its a neat concept i don't think that it would see that much to warrant inclusion/dev time.

Try commanding a game in NS without a mic, 90% of the time you'll be instaejected.

It MASSIVELY depends on the game. Pretty much every FPS game has VOIP implemented, while the vast majority of them really don't give the players any reason to talk to each other. Generally speaking, other players don't need to know where you are and what you are doing 99% of the time in FPS games. NS is different in that respect, and that's why it's VOIP features are considered a requirement dependent on what role you choose to play in the game.

I think we do pretty good in spring with our pointers and ally chat, that being said, it's really really rare you see some real high level stratigizing in team games. It's a huge chore to even get an ally to rush with you at the same time in most games. VOIP in spring would be a MONUMENTAL improvement in terms of what people could achieve strategically in in team games.

(don't worry if you don't know what NS is, the point is that in my exhaustive experience, it's highly dependent on the game weather public VOIP is useful. NS is just an example case.)

The reason voice chat is in FPS is because typing a message in an FPS game leaves you 100% vulnerable while doing so. Although in a 1v1 on a small map its fair to say you have no time to type, but you also dont have allies to type to.

I've never in my spring career had a team game that was balls-to-the-wall intense enough that typing messages and putting pointers wasn't efficient.

Ishach speaks tehtruths

but also, swift is right, and it repeats what i said - that putting voicechat in may actually make team games that much more fun and efficient


and of course i sure would love, as a spec, to talk to other specs about the retardery or awesome-ry going on in the 1v1 below.

Ishach wrote:The reason voice chat is in FPS is because typing a message in an FPS game leaves you 100% vulnerable while doing so. Although in a 1v1 on a small map its fair to say you have no time to type, but you also dont have allies to type to.

I've never in my spring career had a team game that was balls-to-the-wall intense enough that typing messages and putting pointers wasn't efficient.

How many times per a team game to you tutor an ally while still managing your own econ? How many times do you call shots for an ally's micromanagement? How often do you even coordinate an attack? It doesn't happen much, more because while sure, I have time to type the message, my ally may/may not have time to read it, and generally people know in spring, there's maby a 50% chance any given request/order you give to an ally is even noticed.

The reason for VOIP being useful in spring is different from it being useful/useless in FPS games, but it's still completely valid. You try to ignore a persistent dude voice spamming you to rush your units in for a coordinated attack.