New Voip Solution, Facebook Connect 7 Meetup

[Outlander_Robert]

New VOIP patch Wed 9/16 early morning 8-10 AM CST, Dev Hangout Highsteppe Tavern 2 PM CST

As many (or all) of you know we have been fighting a losing battle with the in game voice chat for a while now. We have tried many different fixes over the course of the last year and a half to try and get rid of the lose of mic, sounds, etc. After our last attempt at a fix we decided that it was time to start over with a different solution. I was hesitant to inform the community about our efforts in case this attempt also missed it’s mark at a full solution. But, I am excited to announce that we have a new solution, that in our internal testing, has solved the issues that we had before, mainly the voice chat randomly cutting out for certain players, while others could communicate fully, forcing players to use discord during important playtime’s like raids, dungeons, etc. We did some community testing this weekend during the DPS testing (we will have more on this towards the end of the week), and got a lot of positive feedback and we feel it is ready to be rolled out to the whole community for large scale live testing.

An important note also is that this will allow all Quest players to communicate no matter how many players are in the zone. Currently quest players can not communicate with “Ghosts”, but with this new solution all players will be able to communicate freely no matter if “Ghosts” or not. We are hoping that with more testing, the community will begin to have confidence in the in game voice chat and start to shift away from needing to use discord in game to run endgame content. On top of this we have also updated some of the older drivers we were using because of the older VOIP solution, as well as switched the quest builds from 32 to 64 bit. While this doesn’t eliminate all of the crashes that some quest users experience during longer play sessions this should eliminate some of them.

We will be able to take advantage of the new VOIP on Wed 9/16, during our Developer meetup in game. As many of you know we normally would be on our way to California already for the upcoming Oculus Connect 7, but since the quarantine, it is all being held virtually this year. We thought this would be a great opportunity to hang out with the community and talk about any of the exciting news coming out of OC7 after the keynote, so we will be in game at 2PM CST, Wed 9/16 at the Highsteppe Tavern to talk with players, hang out, and is also a great opportunity to test out the new VOIP.

EDIT: Wanted to post where were at for the Explore the Realm, the community is up to 24,658,440 out of 36,000,000 after this weeks points, with a 6 X multiplier this week the community is within range to unlock the Island early!!!

[Game_Master]

The patch is live, give it a try!

We are aware of some weirdness with voice indicators sometimes where zoning may have certain people’s indicators not display, so we’re looking into that, but it shouldn’t affect the voices themselves.

If you have any other issues, let us know and what circumstances you were in when it happened.

[Jake_E]

All 3 server boost bombs are now active for the day!

[Zalobro]

there is an issue with mic peaking and surround sounds where players voices coming from the wrong place of where they are standing, like the sound coming from beside me when the player is in front of me

[Richleth]

Where was the surround sound issue; was it just in overworld or was it a dungeon

[Zalobro]

it was in the overworld pretty much right outside the player house

[Richleth]

Odd, ill have to hop in and see what you mean when I get home.

[Jinxx_W]

Does this patch have any game balance changes?

[Game_Master]

Not yet - we’ll have an update to post about the DPS rebalancing pretty soon to share with you.

[Game_Master]

Hopping in game for the meet and greet, should be a few members of the dev team if you’d like to say hi. We’ll be at the tavern!

[Game_Master]

Thank you everyone for coming, it was nice to chat with you all and stress test the new VOIP system - which we’ll be working on and making some adjustments to it to adjust for the loud volumes and some inconsistencies with muting occasionally having issues.

Definitely let us know your feedback on how it feels as we go.

[Metris_Marshmallow]

I read this somewhere already but the patch broke controller vibration up to the point I had to turn it off completely (using Rift Original currently).

Controller is now vibrating strongly on almost every click in the game, which is not only annoying but also consuming way too much battery. Before the patch I had it set to a low strength and it only was giving me feedback on fishing and when locking a tool to your hand, which was very helpful. No longer possible after patch, even lowest setting gives almost constant-strong-vibration.

[Game_Master]

Noted, we’ll take a look - essentially, we were able to update the Oculus drivers to a more recent version after we swapped out the VOIP system, so some things that weren’t working are now but it’s probably too much.