View Full Version : Am i the only one interested in mumble....
One of the standard applications for in-game voice communication seems to be ventrilo http://www.ventrilo.com/ (at least for the cs:s masses). Despite a promise of a linux client, Flagship Industries will not be delivering any time soon (see http://www.petitiononline.com/vent4Lin/petition.html for more info).
Personally, I think the linux client is a lost cause (most people are making do with wine + ventrilo http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=2169) or the teamspeak linux client. Both of these are proprietary binaries though...
insert Mumble here http://mumble.sourceforge.net/ :D
Mumble has been progressing reasonably well of late http://mumble.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/mumble/trunk/debian/?sortby=rev&view=log (although not at the breakneck speed of PTS). Overlays work with most games, positional sound support has been implemented for battlefield 2 and WoW, it offers cross platform support and it is licensed under GPL...
Hardy seems to have picked up Mumble in its repositories too - Main and PPA (coinciding with Ubuntu defaulting to Pulse Audio). Perhaps it's time open source developers started integrating positional voice chat through mumble... openarena, nexuiz and warsow spring to my mind. I'm not sure how simple/difficult this integration would be but it would be the best way to further mumble development/adoption/awareness.
A brief overview of Mumble on Phoronix would help too :)
Has anyone else been thinking along these lines?
Thetargos
04-30-2008, 02:13 PM
It is indeed refreshing to see this. Last time I checked out Mumble it was fairly early on, and upon the failure to put out a Linux client compatible with ALSA (for TeamSpeak) or a Linux client at all (speaking about Ventrilo), the Linux gaming community does deserve to have an up-to-date VoIP program for our gaming fix. Personally TS has worked really well for me, but being it only OSS and ts lack of ALSA (and dmix) support has caused that only people with hardware mixing sound chips can use it effectively. Now with PA things will be much different, as it matures (PA still doesn't play very nice with capture). It's been a while since I last checked out Muble, I must confess (about a year ago?) but from the sound of it, it has been making real strides. Will have to check it out soon.
Thanks for the heads up.
xav1r
05-01-2008, 12:24 AM
Good to know about a free software alternative to teamspeak. :)
resurrecting this thread with an interesting post courtesy of icculus, i.e. VoIP support for ioquake3... http://lists.ioquake.org/pipermail/ioquake3-ioquake.org/2008-May/002722.html
Thetargos
05-31-2008, 06:43 PM
My only concern about Mumble is the current state of affairs with Pulse Audio and software mixing, especially input. This a critical feature to have in PA before it could be really useful. As it is right now, and being most sound chips on the market single stream DSPs, PA is a very welcome feature by offering its software mixing capability plus many other features (merging together more than two sound cards, and per-application volume settings, etc). Its capture support still is flaky (and I have not been able to get it working on any computer running with it). Without software mixing using VoIP apps is difficult or even useless, especially if you have to choose whether the game or the VoIP app will have sound... yes I'm looking at you TeamSpeak! (and what is the point of having a VoIP app, if you don't actually hear your friends?). I'm sure that being Mumble native ALSA it is susceptible to work with dmix, however I have not tried it. Very few things work with dmix (in my experience) even if they have native ALSA support.
Aradreth
06-01-2008, 10:05 AM
My only concern about Mumble is the current state of affairs with Pulse Audio and software mixing, especially input. This a critical feature to have in PA before it could be really useful. As it is right now, and being most sound chips on the market single stream DSPs, PA is a very welcome feature by offering its software mixing capability plus many other features (merging together more than two sound cards, and per-application volume settings, etc). Its capture support still is flaky (and I have not been able to get it working on any computer running with it). Without software mixing using VoIP apps is difficult or even useless, especially if you have to choose whether the game or the VoIP app will have sound... yes I'm looking at you TeamSpeak! (and what is the point of having a VoIP app, if you don't actually hear your friends?). I'm sure that being Mumble native ALSA it is susceptible to work with dmix, however I have not tried it. Very few things work with dmix (in my experience) even if they have native ALSA support.
Pulseaudio is still under heavy development and I'm sure they will bring the input up to standard as soon as they can. With games I'm more annoyed about the fact many still use OSS and refuse to start unless they can grab the sound output. That and openal's lack of pulseaudio support.
Svartalf
06-01-2008, 10:08 AM
Pulseaudio is still under heavy development and I'm sure they will bring the input up to standard as soon as they can. With games I'm more annoyed about the fact many still use OSS and refuse to start unless they can grab the sound output. That and openal's lack of pulseaudio support.
The first sort of works okay under PA's OSS emulation. The second can be easily sorted out by making OpenAL think it's talking to OSS or ALSA depending on what else the title's doing.
Aradreth
06-01-2008, 10:20 AM
The first sort of works okay under PA's OSS emulation. The second can be easily sorted out by making OpenAL think it's talking to OSS or ALSA depending on what else the title's doing.
Ah I didn't know about PA's OSS emulation thanks for pointing that one out I'll give it a go at some point. OpenaAl on the other hand I've battled with trying to get it to use SDL which can use PA but OpenAl just throws up errors (it is compiled with SDL support).
Thetargos
06-01-2008, 10:51 AM
If ALSA is so cumbersome to work directly with, why not use some sort of HAL (SDL making use of OpenAL or PA directly)?
Now, I know OpenAL itself is undergoing heavy development as well, especially with its new Sampling Implementation (or whatever its called), which is more efficient and what not. IIRC one of the ultimate goals of PA is to serve as a sort of HAL for sound devices so developers code for it instead of the underlying "bare metal" API (OSS/ALSA) and ensure compatibility, however to achieve this, PA has to first become the defacto standard Sound backend for Linux (as X is for graphics, yes I know I must seem like a scratched record by now), to really work this way.
Mumble is indeed a great alternative to TS and Ventrilo and since the latest release (1.4) they also reworked the PTT (push to talk) progress to work without xevie. (afaik xevie is bugged in Hardy for some reason).
I'm also running my own Murmur Server for quite some time now.
Aradreth
06-03-2008, 07:37 PM
The first sort of works okay under PA's OSS emulation. The second can be easily sorted out by making OpenAL think it's talking to OSS or ALSA depending on what else the title's doing.
I tried PA's OSS emulation today and it's not really a viable solution as I got a lot of popping/crackling noise with it. Hopefully it'll improve and become a viable solution soon enough.
If ALSA is so cumbersome to work directly with, why not use some sort of HAL (SDL making use of OpenAL or PA directly)?
Now, I know OpenAL itself is undergoing heavy development as well, especially with its new Sampling Implementation (or whatever its called), which is more efficient and what not. IIRC one of the ultimate goals of PA is to serve as a sort of HAL for sound devices so developers code for it instead of the underlying "bare metal" API (OSS/ALSA) and ensure compatibility, however to achieve this, PA has to first become the defacto standard Sound backend for Linux (as X is for graphics, yes I know I must seem like a scratched record by now), to really work this way.
PA is slowly becoming the defacto standard because with both Fedora and Ubuntu using it PA has a fair percentage of the Linux user base. So given some more time I think more distro's will follow suit and start using it.
interesting - changelog for mumble 1.1.4 says os x support has been introduced and positional audio on all audio backends, in addition to a bump upto qt 4.4 and improved pulseaudio support.
you might want to check out this old link detailing whats coming up with pulseaudio 0.9.11...
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pulse-glitch-free.html
Its a post by a pa dev that details the traditional sound playback model n a glitch-free model, along with the changes to pa so that it adopts a glitch free model.
also read the comments, definitely an interesting read.
bluetooth support under pa is also a gsoc project this year http://code.google.com/soc/2008/bluez/appinfo.html?csaid=2218999748B418AE
along with the openal sampling work, I think this year might be one of the more interesting wrt linux audio.
Thetargos
06-04-2008, 02:23 PM
Any one know how well does Mumble and dmix work together?, so I can disable PulseAudio while playing a game with Mumble as the VoIP app. I'd like to give it a try, I have already setup the server and am able to connect with the client, but have not tested it with other applications running on this ATi Azalia card on my laptop (on my desktop, since I've got a Live! card, that is not an issue, and I'm worried about this non hwmixing capable and how dmix might work (or not) with Mumble.
Aradreth
06-04-2008, 04:27 PM
you might want to check out this old link detailing whats coming up with pulseaudio 0.9.11...
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pulse-glitch-free.html
Its a post by a pa dev that details the traditional sound playback model n a glitch-free model, along with the changes to pa so that it adopts a glitch free model.
also read the comments, definitely an interesting read.
I hadn't seen that yet, very interesting. Thanks for the heads up.
Erik_N
06-04-2008, 04:31 PM
I would love to have an application like mumble on linux. TeamSpeak3 seems to take forever and no idea what the status is for Ventrilo. One big issue for me is that QT is required for the server and I don't want to install X on the server for just one application :( Any idea if they plan to remove the QT dependency for the server?
Thetargos
06-04-2008, 07:47 PM
There's a statically linked server binary which is what I'm using, works very well...
Svartalf
06-04-2008, 09:13 PM
There's a statically linked server binary which is what I'm using, works very well...
If it comes up without X11, then this is fine- otherwise, that would be an issue. It needs to be something that runs headless for it to be ultimately useful as a VoIP solution for gaming. Ever wondered why they'd do the server and not the client for a game on Linux? It's because Linux runs just fine headless and can be pooled up into farms of servers easily and cheaply.
Svartalf
06-04-2008, 09:18 PM
Heh... Looking at the whole lot, they used Qt for network stack support as well as UI, and the UI appears to be decoupled from the rest like I mentioned. The statically linked binary ought to work just fine, then.
Thetargos
06-04-2008, 10:37 PM
If it comes up without X11, then this is fine- otherwise, that would be an issue. It needs to be something that runs headless for it to be ultimately useful as a VoIP solution for gaming. Ever wondered why they'd do the server and not the client for a game on Linux? It's because Linux runs just fine headless and can be pooled up into farms of servers easily and cheaply.
I've got it running headless on my CentOS home server (though I have X installed on the server as it also functions as a spare system for "guests")
Malikith
06-05-2008, 09:11 AM
Oh hey speaking of Mumble I noticed this on the ioquake3 news page:
Lets examine two quick points:
* Hardcore gamers like choices.
* Hardcore gamers like VOIP.
Based on these theories, ioquake3 is adding VOIP support for the next release. This internal support is going to bring along with it support for (entirely optional) Mumble positional VOIP audio. More nerd-speak after the break, the short and quick of it is, however:
We’re going to have VOIP for mods/new games, and baseq3. This is a pretty radical departure from the initial goal of not changing anything in baseq3, and is probably the single largest (obvious) end-user benefit for using ioquake3.
The fact of the matter is that if you want to blame someone for allowing it to be included, you can blame me (Zachary, lead omnipresent overseer of ioquake and related entities). If, however, this makes you happy and you want to praise somebody, give either big ups OR big props to Ryan Gordon (lead intergalactic space nerd) and Ludwig (Herr Angst).
Please, do not spoil them with both ups AND props.
More info @:
http://ioquake3.org/2008/05/30/voip-support-in-svn/
Oh hey speaking of Mumble I noticed this on the ioquake3 news page:
More info @:
http://ioquake3.org/2008/05/30/voip-support-in-svn/
wow I came across the mailing list post earlier but I didn't know icculus was using mumble... good stuff!
now all we need is a wesnoth plugin ;)
Actually, im hoping tremulous n nexuiz follow suite - it sounds like the best way to further expose mumble to the world [openarena will probably be the first game to exploit the mumble ioquake3 code]
Malikith
06-05-2008, 11:01 AM
wow I came across the mailing list post earlier but I didn't know icculus was using mumble... good stuff!
now all we need is a wesnoth plugin ;)
Actually, im hoping tremulous n nexuiz follow suite - it sounds like the best way to further expose mumble to the world [openarena will probably be the first game to exploit the mumble ioquake3 code]
Open Arena.. Hahaha, I won't get into that one, but yeah, I hope Tremulous or Nexuiz get it done. Or even better Urban Terror, that would be a great one to use it, but so would Tremulous too.
Svartalf
06-05-2008, 12:39 PM
Open Arena.. Hahaha, I won't get into that one, but yeah, I hope Tremulous or Nexuiz get it done. Or even better Urban Terror, that would be a great one to use it, but so would Tremulous too.
Heh... I'm thinking WoP, myself (since I'm addicted to that silly game...).
However, since it's in the engine, I'd think it wouldn't be much of anything, as long as the games in question take up the latest ioquake3 engine updates, to add this to ANY of those titles. Makes it kind of interesting all of a sudden, doesn't it?
Aradreth
06-07-2008, 12:54 AM
wow I came across the mailing list post earlier but I didn't know icculus was using mumble... good stuff!
now all we need is a wesnoth plugin ;)
Actually, im hoping tremulous n nexuiz follow suite - it sounds like the best way to further expose mumble to the world [openarena will probably be the first game to exploit the mumble ioquake3 code]
I always wondered why FOSS multiplayer games didn't have mumbles positional audio but a couple of commercial games did... Ah well here to hoping nexuiz gets it implemented.
Heh... I'm thinking WoP, myself (since I'm addicted to that silly game...).
I could get into WoP but I take my hat of to who ever did the level designs, they are amazing!
Open Arena.. Hahaha, I won't get into that one, but yeah, I hope Tremulous or Nexuiz get it done. Or even better Urban Terror, that would be a great one to use it, but so would Tremulous too.
well openarena is based on ioquake3 which is what icculus has commted code for....
Malikith
06-07-2008, 03:17 AM
Heh... I'm thinking WoP, myself (since I'm addicted to that silly game...).
However, since it's in the engine, I'd think it wouldn't be much of anything, as long as the games in question take up the latest ioquake3 engine updates, to add this to ANY of those titles. Makes it kind of interesting all of a sudden, doesn't it?
Yeah there are a ton of games out there that could benefit from the updates for sure. I can't wait until they all start adopting it.
I love mumble, and donated a bunch of moneys the next day after I first used it for the first time. Good stuff! :)
charmayne
06-15-2008, 02:01 AM
I heard that game with my friend and it's a cool game. . I'll try to play with that. . :)
sorry to bump such an ancient thread but i noticed that mumble has hit 1.1.8 (ment to be the last release of the 1.1 series), looks like COD2,4,5 and WOLF:ET got positional audio support in 1.1.7.
Bit of a shame phoronix doesnt give it more coverage. The 1.2.x to-do includes Multichannel echo cancellation.
In other positional audio related news, ventinux (to be renamed as Spux to avoid copyright infringment of anything *nix and ventrilo), a ventrilo linux client that is being developed should have an accesible svn repository soon...
RealNC
03-24-2009, 01:06 PM
I tried switching to Mumble about a week or so ago from our Ventrilo (2.1.x) server. But I must say it sucks :P Not the client, but the server. It's a nightmare to set up. The server design and administration is so brain damaged, I won't even go into explaining it.
Ventrilo server can be set up very easily.
Thetargos
03-26-2009, 01:06 AM
I do not care much for positional (voice) audio in games and that kind of stuff, I personally use TeamSpeak myself. Sure not as fancy, but it sure is EASY to setup :D
Edit
By the way I did not have much trouble with setting up right Mumble, but I guess you can argue it can be difficult (i.e, no GUI config utility)
yotambien
03-26-2009, 04:59 AM
I don't know how difficult Mumble is to set up since it is the geekest of our lot who owns the server and put all the pieces together. On the client side, with OpenArena, it simply rocks.
RealNC
03-26-2009, 05:52 AM
To configure Murmur (Mumble's server) you need to use some weird scripts to start a d-bus session and then issue d-bus commands to send d-bus messages. It's a mess. A simple config file would have sufficed.
curaga
03-28-2009, 06:55 AM
Plus, for the last 3-4 versions, each version of mumble has started with crashing alsa for me. Half of the time I needed to upgrade my alsa libs (yet no other app had no issues with it), and the other half was the blame of mumble.
charred
04-05-2009, 06:43 AM
To configure Murmur (Mumble's server) you need to use some weird scripts to start a d-bus session and then issue d-bus commands to send d-bus messages. It's a mess. A simple config file would have sufficed.
No, you don't have to do all that, and a simple config file DOES suffice. I've been running my murmur server for games with my friends for over 6 months now and it's incredibly easy to set up. It's good to have a simple step-by-step guide for people just to run a server if some people don't know how anyway. Just run these in the command line, no need for root privileges (in fact you certainly should not run from root):
wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mumble/murmur-static_x86-1.1.8.tar.lzma //or closer mirror, find it on sourceforge page
lzma -dv murmur-static_x86-1.1.8.tar.lzma
tar -xvf murmur-static_x86-1.1.8.tar
cd murmur-static_x86-1.1.8/
vim murmur.ini //edit config file to your liking, I like vim but nano is easier if you're not familiar with it
./murmur.x86 -readsupw //enter admin password
./murmur.x86
You can now log in using nick SuperUser and your admin password to change settings, add channels and kick/ban people etc.
RealNC
04-05-2009, 06:06 PM
But how do I configure user accounts and admin accounts?
charred
04-05-2009, 06:29 PM
But how do I configure user accounts and admin accounts?
Just log in as SuperUser in Mumble, right-click root and edit ACL. You can add channels/assign admin accounts etc. It's just been a group of max 10 friends for me so I've never really needed to do too much except add members admin and add a few channels. But I've been able to do everything I've needed to from there. Hope this helps :)
RealNC
04-05-2009, 06:41 PM
Thanks, I'll give another try. Anything to retire the aging Ventrilo 2.1 :P
DeepDayze
04-05-2009, 07:13 PM
Is there a howto in getting mumble client to work with ventrilo?
RealNC
04-05-2009, 07:28 PM
Not sure I understand the question. Mumble is not Ventrilo... If you want to connect to a Ventrilo server using Mumble, that's not possible.
RealNC
04-07-2009, 01:17 PM
Just log in as SuperUser in Mumble, right-click root and edit ACL. You can add channels/assign admin accounts etc. It's just been a group of max 10 friends for me so I've never really needed to do too much except add members admin and add a few channels. But I've been able to do everything I've needed to from there. Hope this helps :)
OK, I've tried it but can't figure out how. How do I create user accounts and their passwords?
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