Voice chat and FG

[DedmeetDM]

Hey all,

Just wondering how well voice chat works for FG. I am looking for something to speed up gameplay, and give it more of the face-to-face feel. Do any of you use voice in your games? Do you have to have broadband to use it?

Thanks,

DedmeetDM

[Dachannien]

FG doesn't include voice chat by itself, but my players and I use Teamspeak to good effect. You can fiddle with the codecs to try to reduce the bit rate if a player on dial-up is having problems, and it's probably a good idea to make sure whoever's hosting the server is on broadband.

[Sir Bayard]

We actually had a pretty long discussion on this not too long ago in the Commons.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6288

[DedmeetDM]

Thanks for the link Sir Bayard. Reading the discussion now.

[Aescleal]

Hi DedmeetDM,
Like many others on these forums, I love having voice chat while running FGII. I still hope it someday makes it into the game as a built-in feature. But using Ventrilo works great for our needs.
We use it mostly for Out-of-character chat anyways. And for that, it's perfect.
Most roleplaying takes place in text chat. We didn't plan it that way, it's something that just happened to be natural for players.
And voice typically gets used for the laughs and giggles.
I like to do the DM naration in voice as well, and any extra descriptions that may help set mood.

You don't have to be a broadband user to enjoy voice chat. I just wouldn't recommend hosting the voice server from dialup. And you'll definitely want to pick the right codec if you have any dialup players in your campaign. A high end codec can really punish those with slow connections.

Cheers,
Aescleal

[TarynWinterblade]

You don't have to be a broadband user to enjoy voice chat. I just wouldn't recommend hosting the voice server from dialup. And you'll definitely want to pick the right codec if you have any dialup players in your campaign. A high end codec can really punish those with slow connections.

There are also quite a few sites that provide voice chat accounts (though for something like FG, a free server is probably the way to go). (When I used to run a raiding guild for WoW, our Vent server was provided through cgservers.com)

As for choosing the right codec... that one's tough. I know that we spent probably a day going back and forth with the server's customer support cycling through all the codecs to find that perfect blend of quality and speed (it helped that one of our officers was a dialup user, so he got a large amount of say in which codecs worked :D)

iirc, our final decision was a Speex 16 KHz, 16 bit, set at 5 Qlty (VoiceCodec 3, VoiceFormat 16). It works for both Windows and Mac (not that we have FG for macs right now... or ever?) and does fairly well for dialup users, provided you don't have 5+ people talking at once.

[Doswelk]

Hey all,

Just wondering how well voice chat works for FG. I am looking for something to speed up gameplay, and give it more of the face-to-face feel. Do any of you use voice in your games? Do you have to have broadband to use it?

Thanks,

DedmeetDM

We use SKYPE to great affect, however we may be adding one more player that will push above the SKYPE 5 people conference call limit...

So may go back to Gizmo Project

[Agamon]

The free version of Skype allows 9 people in a conference now. I can't see why anyone would use anything else anymore (unless your group is ungodly big).

[Doswelk]

The free version of Skype allows 9 people in a conference now. I can't see why anyone would use anything else anymore (unless your group is ungodly big).

That's good to know thanks....