Get Vent!

I was severely disappointed when, a couple weeks ago, Hellgate London’s developer Flagship Studios released a patch that broke the Xfire support for me. Other than that the patch was great, but one of my favorite parts of the game was that Xfire was integrated allowing for in-game parties to quickly and easily move to voice communication rather than text via the chat. Voice is vastly superior because it’s easier and faster, so this feature alone really made the game for me.

For some reason (and this problem still isn’t fixed for me as of February 17th, 2008) I can get into an in-game party and use voice chat but as soon as I leave the area I’m in I get logged off of Xfire and booted out of the voice chat. This also seems to happen for the other party members. Pretty lame, particularly for a game that touts its integration with Xfire. The solution? Well, after asking around in the in-game chat to see if anyone else was experiencing the same thing everyone was oblivious. They did have some advice though – “Get Vent!”

At the time this sort of infuriated me. Nothing like asking how to fix something that’s broken and being told to get an entirely different app for the same purpose when the first one should work properly. Still, after waiting all this time about a month later I said I’m sick of this and decided to set up Vent. Vent, in case you don’t know, is online “shortification” of the word Ventrilo which is a voice communication application for PC and Linux. It’s really common but it’s mostly used for larger groups of gamers, for instance guilds in World of Warcraft or clans in CounterStrike tend to use Ventrilo. It’s referred to as a voice server, and as such it’s really appropriate for 10 or more users at a time. Therefore for my small groups of players (sometimes as few as 2) it seemed like it wasn’t really worth the trouble. Still, like I said, I really wanted to have something to enable voice.

So I went about setting it up. It was actually pretty easy, and once it’s installed it’s kind of slick. My main concern with installing Ventrilo (particularly the server) was that it would be a resource hog and use up a lot of RAM but it doesn’t. I think Ventrilo Server took about 900k? I’m rocking 3 gigabytes so that’s not very substantial. Anyways, the installation! All you really have to do is download and install the server, edit the .ini file that is included to add the name of the server, default channel, passwords for users and the admin, and so on and then tell the other users to point their Ventrilo client applications towards the server’s address and input the name/password and you’re good to go. When it worked after only a few minutes of troubleshooting I was shocked. I started out by testing the connection from client to server on my own computer by running the server and client application at the same time then connecting to the server via the client, and when that worked, I tested it out with a friend. That worked first try and it’s been gravy ever since.

Despite my initial misconceptions (I had used Ventrilo in the past, by the way) Ventrilo has some neat features. First off, you can have multiple channels which you can think of as different chatrooms. For instance if you had a large group of users playing different games you could set up a different channel for each game so that all of the users can be connected to the same server why also having discussions in different games without any confusion. There is also commonly an AFK channel so people can show when they’re away from their keyboard. Another cool thing is that you can show your current iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player song next to your name in the voice chat room. I kind of discovered this out of the blue, it wasn’t really a feature I had known about previously, but I thought it was neat. If you’ve used Adium with its iTunes away message which shows what’s currently playing you’ll know what I’m talking about. Why you would want to listen to tunes while trying to voicechat is beyond me but it’s there if you need it.

So that’s it, I “GOT VENT!” Now I just have to build a larger community or something so I can really put it to the test. Until next time…

Now Playing:
Ian Gillan – Eternity (Blue Dragon OST)
Stranglehold, Call of Duty 4, Hellgate: London