I was playing around a bit with Mumble today, so I thought: "why not?".
For the time being, I'll be hosting a public mumble server over at the scrapyard. Use it for your guild meetings, runs, non-intimite conversations.
Please note: I provide this service for free, using spare resources. Please don't use it to stream music and don't ask me to act as kindergarden teacher.
I don't really see how installing mumble or raidcall (and messing with servers) is any better than installing steam, just saying.
Steam is really resource heavy and isn't really well made, since Steam isn't based around voice chatting. I often voice chat with my guild when we play competitive GLD and before, we've gone between Skype and Steam. Tons of issues all over the place with that. No one is ever silent so there's a lot of noise, some people (coughretocough) get way too heavy bandwidth usage because of that, many of us have really weak PCs which makes the hundreds of MBs used by Steam/Skype very problematic, and so on.
RaidCall is really neat because it's lightweight, free, and fit for big groups. As for mumble, I've never used it so I can't say how it is preformance wise, but I like Spiral Spy's initiative. While in-game voice chat is available to those with Steam clients, it's seldom used as intended in random groups. For those who do want to use it in non-random runs, it's often a bad alternative.
Steam works just fine for me, and it has a lot of great games so its win-win for me. And none of my friends have teamspeak/raidcall/mumble/whatever. Heck, what's wrong with skype?
The people that make "a lot of noise" has nothing to do with steam. It's because they have horrible mics, noisy rooms, or don't enable push to talk.
As for "Random groups", steam is the only option. Otherwise you'd have to make sure everyone has whatever installed, ask for usernames, set up a chat, etc etc etc.
If they could just allow non-steam users to have voice chat, it would be so much better and help improve teamwork. Or at least the CHANCE of teamwork. Who wants to stand there and get killed every time they need to communicate?
If I had my way, there would be separate servers/parties for people who have voice chat disabled. Kind of like the language-specific "party with any" checkbox (Which I uncheck, because I only know my own language)
@Batabii
I dunno about you, but Skype connections are mediocre at best for me, as are Steam voice chats, though Raidcall works fine, as does Google Hangouts and mumble and whatever.
Steam works just fine for me, and it has a lot of great games so its win-win for me. And none of my friends have teamspeak/raidcall/mumble/whatever. Heck, what's wrong with skype?
Steam is really resource heavy and isn't really well made, since Steam isn't based around voice chatting. I often voice chat with my guild when we play competitive GLD and before, we've gone between Skype and Steam. Tons of issues all over the place with that. No one is ever silent so there's a lot of noise, some people (coughretocough) get way too heavy bandwidth usage because of that, many of us have really weak PCs which makes the hundreds of MBs used by Steam/Skype very problematic, and so on.
The people that make "a lot of noise" has nothing to do with steam. It's because they have horrible mics, noisy rooms, or don't enable push to talk.
I had no idea push to talk is even available in Skype/non-in-game Steam voice chat.
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To get us back on topic, I'm interested in asking ms Spy herself, how's activity been so far?
Ah, nice!
If I may give a suggestion, you could accept donations toward hosting costs, in case, ya know. Just suggesting. :)
Also, I don't know anywhere else to send you a message, so I'll just say here: Thanks for the updates on Spiral Spy! If it weren't for your tool, my sprites would be much harder to draw. I don't pull images directly from SS, but I do need to look at things in all their various poses. (Something that is impossible in a bird's eye view.)
"The people that make "a lot of noise" has nothing to do with steam. It's because they have horrible mics, noisy rooms, or don't enable push to talk." -Batabii
http://en-us.sennheiser.com/pc-363d-surround-sound-gaming-headset
I am here whenever I'm online! Thanks for hosting this. Someone come chat!
Edit: It won't let me make new channels for some reason. Maybe it's just my ignorance with mumble though
This is cool beans! Another thing I can recommend for people who want a proper voice chat service for SK is RaidCall, which doesn't require any server hosting payments.