Created on 2005-01-06
Title: Internet Multiplayer Voice Communications: Part I
By: Peter 'Fighterjock' Waddell
Date: July 20th, 1998 690
Flashback: Orig. Multipage Version
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In the real world, you wouldn't think about leaving the
ground in an aircraft if your radio wasn't working, much less
go on a combat mission. Yet here we are in the online
simulation world doing it all the time. Yes, we can peck
words out on the keyboard to our wingmen and teammates, but
this is at best a less-than-perfect solution to the basic
problem of team communications.
It was 1918 before the RFC (Royal Flying Corps) got its
first radios. They allowed the skipper to broadcast to the
rest of the wing, but their long antennae (trailed out the
back of the plane) had to be retrieved as soon as they
reached patrol altitude for fear of having it caught by a
propellor during a dogfight.
Of course, radios have come a long way since then and have
long been a basic component of aerial warfare. So where are
we today in the online simulations environment? Still
pecking on the keyboard whenever we're not heavily
committed to the fight. So really our methods of
communication today are comparable to those available back
in 1918. When things get really hot, you simply can't
afford to take your hands off the controls and start trying
to type a message to your buddy - No matter how bad you
might need his assistance!
Now, with the advent of the "Internet telephone" we no
longer have to suffer our fates quietly. For about the last
six months, various groups, squadrons, and individuals who
play multi-player sims on the Internet have been playing
around and trying to apply this new technology to their
respective environments.
My multiplayer sim of choice is Fighter Ace, where I belong
to a virtual squadron, Le Musketeer
Escadrille. We usually fly in an "arena" where there
are up to thirty planes in the air at the same time. This
can get pretty hectic at times and it's very hard to
maintain a good degree of SA (Situational Awareness).
Sometimes it can get extemely frustrating.
For instance, when you have two enemy aircraft on your
tail, you are diving for home and your wingman is nowhere
to be seen. You know he's there somewhere, but this is no
time to take your hands off the controls and type a
message. You're too busy jinking your aircraft and trying
to keep out of the enemy's stream of bullets. You're
thinking, "Where is that *&^%#@% wingman! I wish to
heck I had some way of getting his attention over here!"
This scenario is played out daily on the multiplayer flight
simulation servers all over the world. So when the Internet
telephones showed up, it seemed natural to do a little
experimenting with them for our virtual cockpits. As it
turned out, at just about the same time a net pilot named
Paul "Wazoo" Wasserman had had the same idea and was doing
some testing of his own.
He had found a little program called SpeakFreely that he
successfully used with his Longbow 2 squadron in multi
player. I mention this because a lot of the people who are
using voice comms at present are doing so because of the
excellent research he did and - in true netizen fashion -
shared with the rest of us in the from of an FAQ
he wrote.
Anyway, depending on what you are flying you CAN run voice
comms now. Right up front I must add there are a bunch of
provisos, and mostly that is what this article is about.
Hopefully I can help steer you around some of the pitfalls
you are likely to encounter if you are adventurous enough
to want to try "Vox Comms" in the first place.
Warning: This is probably not for the faint of
heart. It's very unlikely that you will damage any hardware
fooling around with this, but your system software (Win95)
could very easily get buggered up. So if you are not
comfortable with this eventuality, then either forget it or
have a professional do it.
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Type "A" personalities, please proceed directly to
the end of this document.
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There are, at present two ways I know of to do voice, and
they are both hardware solutions. One way is the two sound
card method, probably the least expensive but most time
consuming and potentially frustrating. The second way is
the one card PCI 3d card, this is defiantly my preferred
method, even though the two card scenario does have some
advantages over it.
The first thing you have to know is what your system is
capable of. For the two card method, you will need
an extra ISA or PCI card slot on the computer's
motherboard.
Those are the basic requirements. Once you have established
that you do have an extra slot or slots you will need the
appropriate card for it, PCI or ISA full duplex, if you
have both I'd recommend going with the PCI. Either can be
had for about $20 if you look around a bit. And you will
need a headset with boom microphone. If possible you will
want the noise canceling type, but this is not required and
I use a $10 headset with boom mic that seems to work just
fine as long as you tune your software correctly.
Something that I have learned through hands on experience,
is that whatever types of cards you have, you should
probably have at least one Sound Blaster brand card as they
seem to have more IRQs and DMA's available than most cheap
SB clones. And they are more flexible overall for these
settings. So rule of thumb is to have at least one good
card for your default or main sound card.
In addition, you will want to install it and have Windows
recognize it first. Only then will you want to put in the
other card. This is not a hard and fast rule though,
because if the cheap card has only one IRQ to use it may be
taken by the default card so you may have to put that one
in first instead.
Once you have managed to get the two cards recognized by
Win95, you will want to go to the control panel under the
System icon, in Device manager, and look for conflicts. You
will have at least one, there will be two game ports
(Joystick plugins) one will be automatically disabled by
Win 95 already but it is better to go in to Sound, Video
and Game Controllers and double click on whichever one has
the red "X" on it.
This will bring up the Properties dialog box and you should
check the small window where it says, "Disable in this
hardware profile", the other box will be checked by
default, you can leave it or not, doesn't really matter
unless you have more than one hardware profile.
Control panel | System | Device manager | Sound, Video, and
Game Controllers is where you will do most of your trouble
shooting if you need to.
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Once you have the conflicts worked out here, do a
restart. Next, you will want to go to Control Panel |
Multimedia Properties | Audio and you should have two
sound input and output devices and maybe more. Ignore
any other than the drivers for the specific cards
that you are using and set playback to one of the
cards and record to the other. Tip - Usually you
will want to use any card that provides a microphone
boost or dB gain in the software for Microphone
input. It can come in handy sometimes.
Once that's all setup correctly, you have to
configure your software. The software that a lot of
people use is a little public domain application
called
SpeakFreely. Source code in "C" is also available
there should you care to do any hacking or
customization to the software.
The nice thing about SpeakFreely is: #1 - It's free,
and #2 - It's very small so it doesn't take up much
of your system resources to run it. Voice quality is
sometimes less than spectacular but is usually
livable nonetheless.
Next, RTFM! A polite translation being, "Read the
frigging manual!" But since I know you won't and
you've got this far in the article I'll try to fill
you in.
The single most important thing you must know about
is the Speakfre.ini file (in your system directory).
It's a good idea to put a shortcut to it on your
desktop so you can edit it until you get it working
correctly. The file is a configuration settings file
for the various options that can be set in SF. Now
open the file and look for the [Workarounds] heading.
The top 3 lines of the section should look like this:
[Workarounds]
AudioInputDeviceID=0
AudioOutputDeviceID=0
If not, you can copy and paste the above right into
it. These are the settings that allow you to specify
your input (mic) and output (speaker or headphone)
devices.
The "0"s can be changed to accomplish a number of
things, the default 0, 0 setting will set you up with
one card only (normally), whatever happens to be the
default card under Win 95. But since you want to have
one card for voice communication independent
of your game sounds you need to set the "0"s to
something else. There are only these possible
combinations of settings: 0-0, 0-1, 1-0, 1-1. Just go
by trial and error until you get it right. Important
- for any .ini file changes to take effect you have
to restart the program each time you make a change.
But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. The first
thing you want to do when your cards are installed
and you can open up SF is to get on the net and try
to communicate with one of the echo servers that is
set up for the purpose of allowing you to test this
software. The addresses of the servers are:
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echo.fourmilab.ch
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Switzerland (Switzerland)
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corona.itre.ncsu.edu
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United States (North Carolina)
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rpcp.mit.edu
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United States (Massachusetts)
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(You can also test from your local machine by
going to Help | Local Loopback.)
At this point you might as well setup some of the
some of the options in the program that seem to work
well. First is the VOX feature (Hands off full duplex
mode). Go to Connection | New and type or paste in
one of the echo server addresses (local loop back
offline) then click your mouse on the small window
that comes up, to transmit a test message to the
server. You should hear it echoed back to you within
about ten seconds.
(Any error messages at this point will likely mean
that your workarounds setting are not correct, this
is easily fixed by trial and error, the one variable
here is in the Multimedia settings if you try all the
settings and still can't get voice to your headphones
you may have to reverse the order of Input and output
devices in the multimedia control panel)
Next, you will want to test VOX (auto voice
activation) on the microphone. First select Options |
8-bit Audio. Then Options | Voice Activation |
Monitor, another small window with a green bar should
pop up. If the green bar isn't there select the other
window with the mouse and touch the space bar once
and you should see a message saying "Transmitting" in
this window.
To test this you must be online. If you hear your
voice echoed back when you speak into the mike, then
you're ready. The only thing left to do is to set the
VOX activation level, this is the level that the
program will kick in and start transmitting your
voice on the net. Usually you want to set the small
red marker about 1/8" to 1/4" higher than the green
bar, so it only transmits when there is sufficient
volume to do so (ie. your voice as picked up by the
microphone).
So there you have it. Now you should have voice
communications capability over the Internet just like
a telephone with SpeakFreely. Of course SpeakFreely
is not the only program that will do this. I simply
picked it because it is small, free, and easily
available.
As far as I know, almost any of the other Internet
phones available will work. The ones I tested
included, MS
Netmeeting 2.1, Voxphone and Intel
Internet Phone. However some games are
incompatible with some Internet phones, so again it's
trial and error.
Here a few combinations that are known to work quite
well:
FA-18 Korea and Netmeeting or SF.
Longbow 2 and SF.
Ver. 1 of Fighter Ace worked marginally well with
SF.
Warbirds h2h SF or NM 2.1.
MSFS 98 works with SF.
Flying Circus and SF.
(Note - RBII on TEN does NOT seem to want to work but
may on an IPX emulator network like Kali or
Kahn.)
Hopefully this list will expand as I hear from others
who are using sims not listed here.
Tally Ho,
Peter "Fighterjock"
Waddell
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