Voice Chat - TCP/UDP ports?
 

What ports are used? I need to know what ports to forward.

For voice chat Graal uses the normal UDP stuff that it also uses for sending player positions etc.
So it depends on your Graal configuration, by default it takes a random port assigned by the OS when binding the UDP port. You can also specifiy a fixed port in the Graal options, probably the best choice when you need to tunnel it through a proxy or firewall.

So if you have the box checked that tells Graal *not* to use UDP, voice chat will not work?

Correct

:confused:

So that's why I can't hear voice chat stuff. I had to disable UDP or I couldn't see people moving.

thats the exact same thing i had to do :rolleyes:

It's weird. I have no idea why it happens on our computers but not others.

For those of you who have routers and/or firewalls, you can still use UDP packets. Check the box that allows such, and check the box that tells Graal to use the same udp port every time. Then in your router/firewall setting, forward that port to your graal computer's IP. As soon as I did that, I was able to hear voice chats...note that I still can not send them though (dunno why).

I have a firewall and it works fine for me. Also, we should make it so the mic is only enabled when you press maybe v or something because I have a headset mic and it's always on.

That's already implemented. Look in the sound options.

Thanks Kai, didn't realize that ;)

Here is what it says in newfeatures2002.txt which you find in your Graal folder:

- to enable the new voice chatting feature open the Graal options
and enable the microphone ('Audio' options)
to test the output speak into the microphone and
see the output level on the bar on the right side of the option
window;

there is also a rectangle which is red or green depending on
the voice level, that rectangle shows if the game has interpreted
the voice level as high enough to be sent to the other players;
it should only be green when you speak so its not sending data
all the time; by moving the slider you can change the voice
activation level, move it up when it's too often green, move it
down when you can't hear yourself anymore;

you can also activate the mircophone by hand if you don't want to
have it automatically send the voice when you speak; for that select
'Key' as the activation method and click on the rectangle right to
it if you want to change the key that activates the voice

in the game you automatically hear other people speaking when they are
close to you (16 tiles=256 pixels), set the voice volume to 0 in the
option window if you don't want to hear other people; you can mute
single players by right-clicking on a player in the player list and
selecting 'Mute', or in the game by right-clicking on the players
and enable the 'Mute check box in their profile

Graal automatically chooses the best voice encoding codec depending
on how many people are hearing you; if there are 1 or 2 people then
it uses GSM (mobile phone quality, 13 kbit), when there are 3-5 people
then LPC (4.8 kbit), when there are more than 5 people then it uses
LPC-10 (2.4 kbit). The quality of the voice depends on your microphone,
it should have something to filter wind, otherwise the lower quality
codecs have problems and make you sound like you are singing; in the
options window you can choose a different testing codecs to hear if your
microphone still works good with lower quality codecs

ocool

No matter what I do, and with what options are on and off, and with Galen's help, Graal runs at about 3 frames per second.

I'm think this is a problem with the new exe, because it didn't go this slow before it was released.

Any suggestions?

I had that problem, too. And I was wondering why I couldn't hear people... Thanks for the help Galen, though I haven't tried it yet. I hope it works.

For those of you who can hear voices but are unable to send, check your Windows recording options. I had mine set to record form Line-in. After I chenged it to Mic it worked in Graal :)

I use the mic thing to be a sort of Graal Radio. I stay in a level and play my music for others to listen, but if there are too many people, they tell me that the sound get's jumpy and not good. Is there some way to fix that?

D**n,I downloaded the new graal and when I open it,it says:
The applicationfailed to initialize properly(oxc0000005).
Click OK to terminate Application.I don't think it works with
Windows XP.Can anyone help me?

Not really. It's a smaller compression system, so its bound to get worse.

Yes when there are many players near then it uses a codec that takes less bandwidth (300 bytes per second for each listener) which is still good quality when it is plain human voice (and the microphone is good). For good quality music transmission it would probably be better to do internet radio (and put an npc in a graal level which plays the url :)

The latest Graal version (v2.14 revision4) that was uploaded yesterday should fix all voice chat crashing problems, got no error report of that version yet.

hehe, it works fine now