using different VOIP software

[Salar]

hi all,
I'm gearing myself up for adding voice to FG and am currently trawling the interweb looking for suitable VOIP software solutions. Skype, Mirc and teamspeak seem to be mentioned quite frequently on this forum so it'll probably be one of those. My question is (techno-****wit-mode activated) will there be connectivity issues surrounding a group using different VOIP software? How have people found the issue of using voice with FG and can you recommend a good (free :D ) package?
John

[richvalle]

Everyone will have to use the same voip software to talk to each other (as far as I know).

Skype works great but you can only have up to 5 connected at one time for free. Each person downloads the software and creates an account. Then one person starts up a conferance call and invites everyone to join it.

TS works ok. We notice a lot more lag with it then with Skype. I think its free to a point? We have one person that runs a TS server that he setup. Again everyone downloads the TS software and then uses it to log into that server. I think he paid for the TS server side software. Client side is free.

There is also Yahoo Chat. I used it once or twice and it seemed ok.

rv

[Salar]

cheers rv. the mission's on

[heruca]

You'll find links here to 6 different VOIP apps, all cross-platform and (I believe) all 100% free.
https://www.battlegroundsgames.com/links.html

Scroll down a bit to see them.

[Griogre]

TS works ok. We notice a lot more lag with it then with Skype. I think its free to a point? We have one person that runs a TS server that he setup. Again everyone downloads the TS software and then uses it to log into that server. I think he paid for the TS server side software. Client side is free.

Teamspeak is free. Paying for a hosting server is not, but you don't have to do that. You can setup your own server if you like. Many TS servers seem to default to a lower quality, lower bandwith codex, most of the newer products automatically set a high quality, high bandwith codex suitable only with broadband bandwith.

I use TS in the game I run because I have a player who is occasionally on dialup. I have also played on Ventrillo which has some nice features. I have also used Yahoo Messager, but had problems with four or more players, thought the lastest version sounded very good, but for some reason one of my players coundn't connect to voice chat.

[acmer]

There used to be a program called Roger Wilco. Haven't seen anyone use it lately.

TS is very nice, because you can split up the group. You can't really split up in FG itself, but with TS you can create "channels". When a player joins a channel, he can't hear what the others are saying elsewhere. As far as I know, there's no limit on channels. Joining and exiting channels can be set up with hotkeys, which makes it quite fast. Of course, you can also "whisper" with TS when two players join the same channel.

[sunbeam60]

We went through pretty much all of them in our early trials and found Skype beat them all in call quality, call lag and ease of setup.

True, you can only have 5 people (unless you're running a certain breed of Intel processors, then you can have 10 - an utterly bogus requirement that cost Skype a lot of credit, but probably gained it a healthy infusion of cash from Intel), but I find 5 people to be the optimal group size anyway (1 DM, 4 players).

Anyways, if your group is 5 or less, then save yourself the trouble and just install Skype. My 0.02

[Bumamgar]

Our group uses Ventrillo.

I run their free Linux software on my Linux server and we all connect to that. Generally at least one of our 5 players has some sort of sound issue every session, but after investigation it's always something to do with either hardware (oh, my mic wasn't plugged in) or windows (Oh, I've got that device muted in the control panel). None of the problems are ever with Ventrillo itself.

Frankly, voice chat is a great boon to playing FG. I highly recommend it.

[Azrael Nightstar]

Skype is a great program, very good voice quality, but as mentioned has a 5-participant limit, and is a bandwidth hog. If you have anyone on a slower connection it's probably not a great idea, and isn't viable at all if anyone's on dialup.

Ventrilo is a nice program with some cool features and good quality. Using it for free requires someone to set up the hosting software, but this isn't that difficult.

Teamspeak has free public servers with passwordable channels, easy to do and you can jump right in. However, the quality's not very good, so I'd suggest something else if possible.

That concludes the ones I have experience with :)

[Alarian]

I've had experience with Teamspeak, Ventrillo, Skype, Gizmo and yahoo's voice client. When Playing WOW, our guild uses Vent(rillo) and for the most part it works fine. It's more like talking on a walkee talkee where you have to press a button to talk, and you absolutley can't talk if someone else does but it works fine and I've had no problems using it. Our gaming group uses Gizmo. Voice quality is phone quality and while multiple people still can't talk at the same time, if two people do it isn't the sound catastrophy that Vent is. The only trick we found with using Gizmo is you can't use the free conference room feature they have on the tab. That was a complete nightmare and we were never able to successfully all connect at once. I'm not even sure why it's there to be honest because you can just create a conference room yourself and use that. You basically get a unique phone number that everyone calls and it puts you all into the same 'chat room'. We've been 95% happy with it.

Alarian.

[Salar]

Cheers for the great advice & personal recomendations. We're a group of 7 with varying broadband speeds. One of our bods is a techy type who's come up with a solution whereby he's going to look at using his (10Mb BB) PC as a server for us. Basically we're all going to run a VOIP programme he's got through his PC. Now this is all good & well but doesn't help should we want to join other games (which I do). Therefore I think I'll go for one of the above mentioned software solutions. They all seem to have something against them (lag, only 5 players, bandwidth hog...) but you've certainly helped move me in the right direction. Many thanks.
John

[Moebius]

Hi Im completely new to FG (and absolutely old in D&D roleplaying) I just thiscovered this wonderful program and wanted to contribute. Maybe what I am proposing here is already done, maybe not, I just wanted to do something useful for FG.


I have a dedicated server with good connection and I runTS2 (Teamspeak 2) among other programs there. I have created a server to be ised in games, it has capacity for 36 people playing 4 different games. I can put more capacity in if i see that people uses it.


The link for downloading it is:

https://www.goteamspeak.com/index.php?page=downloads

The connection settings are:

IP: 193.146.56.253:8769
Usr: (any user can do just putyour character name here)
Pass: fantasygrounds

The server is 90% uptime and located in Spain.

[DarkStar]

Hey, I and my group are considering a play by TeamSpeak 2, but there are a few issues which bother us and since there are a lot of people playing RPG with VOIP, I thought that I could as well ask here.

The main issue is when I give my players some lengthy description and then ask what they do and suddenly four persons start speaking altogether. They usually will stop at this point (I think it's a common instinct when you talk on the phone), but then they will start again - one will say he goes left, the other will seek a medic, yet another will yell something to a passing woman, etc. And no one knows what's going on, least the Game Master.

How do you solve this? I can of course announce to my players that they should talk in the order of their Initiative but this seems artificial.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.

[sunbeam60]

Well, technically your issue is one of lag. Faster round-trip time, and you've got less of those stacatto conversations.

If the lag gets bad I usually do ask players (in screen order) what they want to do, but it rarely gets to that point, to be frank. I hate to sound like a broken record, but we truly found that Skype offered a much less laggy conversation that Teamspeak did.

Perhaps give it a try?

[DarkStar]

No, I'm not talking about lags. I'm concerned about people talking at the same time, like when people start talking simultaneously - you can't listen to such conversation when those people stand next to you and with VOIP it's even worse!

[richvalle]

We tend to have that issue as well but more with Team Speak then with Skype. TS has a few second dealy between someone speaking and everyone hearing it. Skype does not.

We use Skype when we are going to have less then 5 people playing and TS for more.

When such cases come up everyone stops and someone says 'Go ahead Bob' or whatever. Then things continue per normal.

rv

[sunbeam60]

No, I'm not talking about lags. I'm concerned about people talking at the same time, like when people start talking simultaneously - you can't listen to such conversation when those people stand next to you and with VOIP it's even worse!
Ah, apologies for misunderstanding your question, or not explaining myself well enough.

Research (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1494355) shows that even small delays in VoIP conversations increase the rate of errors and misunderstandings, however, and it was this issue I was unsuccessfully trying to highlight. I didn't mean that your problems were solely related to lag, merely that lag has a tendency to increase the frequency and severity of these conversation mistakes.

I suggested using a different VoIP client since some of your issues might be resolved. For everything else, there's Master, eh, for everything else we just use screen-order and let the DM question players intentions.

[Snikle]

We use Skype when we are going to have less then 5 people playing and TS for more.

When such cases come up everyone stops and someone says 'Go ahead Bob' or whatever. Then things continue per normal.

Question for you, when you have 5 playing, do any of you mute your mics when you are not talking? Or do you all leave the mics open all the time?

[DarkStar]

We tried to talk on TS2 in 4 and I must say I prefer text game, as it is in Fantasy Grounds... Reason is very simple - I think that a text game is more climatic, whilst talking on TS2 sounds like a bad amateur movie :P No one is really an actor, but people will also restrain themselves from hardcore roleplaying, saying "I try to dodge it's blow" like "A cup of tea, please". I thought that VOIP + FG was as close as one can get to the traditional tabletop game, but it's not the same.

Are there any alternatives? I thought about using VOIP just for a few aspects of the game, like OOC or GM narratives, whilst leaving in charcter dialogues and actions to FG itself. Is anyone of you playing like this?

[joshuha]

Are there any alternatives? I thought about using VOIP just for a few aspects of the game, like OOC or GM narratives, whilst leaving in charcter dialogues and actions to FG itself. Is anyone of you playing like this?

Yes I use this model and believe it works great for the reasons you mention. Using text for in character chat seems to let my players get into the role better.

However, I still use voice for all the OCC stuff like the jokes, off-hand comments, and most importantly meta questions. This speeds up combat immensely. With just plain text you get players who sometimes hesistate to roll and I can yell at them over TS to roll already. Also things like, how far away are they, am I allowed to use this spell, etc. can be handled much quicker over TS than typing.

It also makes your chat log look much cleaner since most of the OOC stuff never makes it into the permanent log.

[richvalle]

Question for you, when you have 5 playing, do any of you mute your mics when you are not talking? Or do you all leave the mics open all the time?

I leave mine open all the time. I think most others do as well but not 100% sure. One guy might mute his.

I do like TS's 'push to talk' better then Skypes 'on or off' method.

[richvalle]

Are there any alternatives? I thought about using VOIP just for a few aspects of the game, like OOC or GM narratives, whilst leaving in charcter dialogues and actions to FG itself. Is anyone of you playing like this?

I started our game like this but it quickly moved to using the mic all the time. While typing things in character is fun and does have an immersion aspect to it, I found it was just too slow.

Just like you can get overlap from a few seconds lag via voice you can get more overlap from the many seconds it takes for each person to type in their questions or answers. Plus one guy was a slow typer and easily frustrated... not a good combo. :)

But... I think it helps that, mostly, we are all friends before this game and outside the game. Playing with total strangers might be easier using your method.

rv

[mr_h]

We actually were going to use voice comms for OOC chatter, and type up all 'In Character' stuff in the game, but after a session or two, we found it to be more of a hassle then it was worth. So now we're almost 100% voice.
We do type in things once in a while, however, just for clarification along with teh voice comms.
And macros, we do use dice rolling macros :)

[Griogre]

Darkstar, I use voice differently in two of my games. In one game it is almost all voice pretty much except for die rolls. In the game with all voice there is that problem with everyone talking and then stopping and then starting. I think that occurs more often than it does "face to face" because you can't read body language. Like richvalle I've found overtime it has become less of a problem and when it happens now I will just ask each character what they are doing.

In my other game I use voice for naration/combat and have the players type all "in character" chat and let them use voice for OOC and rules questions or situation clarifications. I prefer this format because I get the speed in combat, exploration and resolving game mechanics while at the same time I think typing in character gives a better "role playing" experience and makes the log better.

[DarkStar]

In my other game I use voice for naration/combat and have the players type all "in character" chat and let them use voice for OOC and rules questions or situation clarifications. I prefer this format because I get the speed in combat, exploration and resolving game mechanics while at the same time I think typing in character gives a better "role playing" experience and makes the log better.

That's what we did yesterday and it looks fine so far. We roleplay in Fantasy Grounds and use TS2 for OOC and questions for Game Master. Occasionally, I will narrate a bit, when there is a lot to tell the players and I don't want to loose time typing it all in.