Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Midnight on January 03, 2003, 10:59:28 PM
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I am so tired of VOX dropping out during play. The only way to fix it is quit out of AH entirely and come back in.
That is NOT possible during TODs and is really becoming a big problem in my opinion.
HTC knows it's broke, we all know it's broke. So, HTC, please either fix it right, or give us the option to disable it and use Roger Wilco or TeamSpeak again.
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VOX worked fine for my Squad in tonights TOD.
YMMV I guess.
Jordi
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It's been working a lot better for me the last several weeks. Probably haven't lost twice in that time. Prior to that it was once or twice a night.
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Is this arena specific?
I haven't lost vox in the MA in so long I can't remember. Using a SB live with the DX Sound accleration cut back to 3/4.
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I have never lost VOX. However I sure wish that squad vox had priority over range vox, and the ability to squelch range would make me happy:)
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You know, we all know there are people out there who don't experience this problem, but it does happen. It has been reported many times, it has been told what hardware is used many times.
There is a bug, and it happens to some more than others.
One of my squadmates looses his entire vox regularly, sometimes a couple times an hour.
Another, looses ability to transmit, but can still hear us talking.
My vox, and another squadmate's, regularly looses the +20dB boost which needs to be manually reset. (even though the +20dB boost says it's still on, I have to uncheck, then recheck it to get my VOX transmit volume so people can hear me.
This last VOX problem happened when a squadmate was transmitting and was shot down (pilot killed). The VOX window indicated he was still transmitting well after he had stopped. His name stayed on the VOX indicator until he logged out, but VOX never came back.
Bottom line is, if HTC is not going to fix it properly, then we need to be able to turn it off and use something else. We've tried to use TeamSpeak and Roger Wilco, but AH VOX interferes with both of them.
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I used to have chronic problems with my vox cutting out, then I heard someone mention turning down the hardware acceleration for sounds from full acell to 3/4ths. I did that and now I've had several nights without any problems. Not quite as nice as getting a fix from HTC. but I might do the trick and be done much quicker. :)
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vox booted on me tonight.. it is quite aggravating.
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Lower your sound acceleration from Full to Standard in DXDiagnostics and disable any MIDI features your sound card has.
ack-ack
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Since v1.11 my vox has either dropped out or an old problem (when AHVoice was a separate file) where my vox goes really quiet and I can't increase the volume.
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Rude?
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Funked,
Why you would consider this to be rude is beyond me.
// fats
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The turning down the hardware acceleration for sound has nothing to do with any problems and is not a work around for the voice system.
Hardware acceleration for sound is a bit misunderstood. When you run full hardware acceleration, it tells DirectX to just hand off the sound data directly to the sound card driver.
All fine and good, but it means if the hardware does not have enough buffering ability, the sounds get dropped, lost, garbled, or some other malady.
Turning down the sound acceleration allows DirectX to help with the buffering, which smoothes quite a few things out.
The most common problem I have seen with sound occurs with onboard sound devices. They lack the buffering of a PCI based sound card requiring the local CPU to handle the sound data, which means the sound card driver has to manage it.
With a PCI based card, they typically have external hardware buffers which allow the data to migrate to the sound card and the data is handled there, instead of local CPU memory.
This usually lowers the CPU utilization for sound considerably, and reduces the chances of lost or dropped sounds.
The voice system requires a certain amount of Internet bandwidth in order to work. If the local client machine's network bandwidth is being overrun, voice could be lost. Nothing we can do about this. The problem is exacerbated when you have many players talking over the voice channel.
I am not saying the system is perfect. We are always looking at ways to improve everything in Aces High. However, the problems I get reported about voice usually are associated with onboard sound chips, sound cards/chips sharing interrupts, old drivers, multiple installations of drivers, or poor Internet connections.
Jumping on the board and yelling "fix it!" is not going to solve anything. How could it?
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Thanks Skuzzy, I hope you don't think I was demanding anything, just adding that I also had problems. I did a search at Creative and found some drivers that were released late July this year perhaps this will help. Up until now vox has been good for me and some squaddies had a few problems, now they all work fine and I don't..just my luck!
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I do know that when you recieve a player id in vox and it remains in the upper corner, just alt tab out and back in again...that will fix it.
I don't have the problems some speak of here, but of course, I'm a computer genius and build my own puters so that explains it.
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Originally posted by Midnight
I am so tired of VOX dropping out during play. The only way to fix it is quit out of AH entirely and come back in.
That is NOT possible during TODs and is really becoming a big problem in my opinion.
HTC knows it's broke, we all know it's broke. So, HTC, please either fix it right, or give us the option to disable it and use Roger Wilco or TeamSpeak again.
I had my vox go out too!
Once in 4 months.
Fix it or I quit! :mad: :mad:
No joke I think its pork on yer end Midnight.
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Works fine fr me all all days, hardware accel at 100%
Turtle Beach Montego 2
blitz
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Please do not take the tone of my post to mean I was jumping on anyone or side-stepping the issue.
Fact of the matter is, until a problem can be successfully reproduced it is virtually impossible to fix it. That is the nature of software development.
I have not been able to reproduce the problem, nor has HT. Makes it difficult to know where to start looking for something.
There are a lot of things that *could* be done. But a simplistic complaint with no data is not one that helps, other than telling us something we may already know. Voice drops out. All well and good, but why?
That's the hard part. I can post all types of possibilites, but that is all they are. Nothing concrete can be offered as to why it happens as there is little concrete data being offered back to us, in this instance.
Does it mean we are not looking at it? Absolutely not. People seem to think we control the hardware in the game. Fact of the matter is, we are removed at least 2 levels from the hardware (hardware->drivers->directx->Aces High).
Want to help? Send me the output from DXDIAG, along with the listing of hardware IRQ's being used in your computer, and an explanation of your Internet connection (include details about all the hardware involved in your connection and what type/speed up and down).
Oh,..one other thing that could cause it. If you run a background application that uses sound, this could potentially cause a problem and there is nothing we can do about that one, if it is the problem.
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Please do not take the tone of my post to mean I was jumping on anyone or side-stepping the issue.
Fact of the matter is, until a problem can be successfully reproduced it is virtually impossible to fix it. That is the nature of software development.
I have not been able to reproduce the problem, nor has HT. Makes it difficult to know where to start looking for something.
There are a lot of things that *could* be done. But a simplistic complaint with no data is not one that helps, other than telling us something we may already know. Voice drops out. All well and good, but why?
That's the hard part. I can post all types of possibilites, but that is all they are. Nothing concrete can be offered as to why it happens as there is little concrete data being offered back to us, in this instance.
Does it mean we are not looking at it? Absolutely not. People seem to think we control the hardware in the game. Fact of the matter is, we are removed at least 2 levels from the hardware (hardware->drivers->directx->Aces High).
Want to help? Send me the output from DXDIAG, along with the listing of hardware IRQ's being used in your computer, and an explanation of your Internet connection (include details about all the hardware involved in your connection and what type/speed up and down).
Oh,..one other thing that could cause it. If you run a background application that uses sound, this could potentially cause a problem and there is nothing we can do about that one, if it is the problem.
Oh sure!
Go about it YOUR way, with facts, information, and actual data, and take all of the FUN out of whining! That's just not what the BB is all about.
:)
eskimo
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I have both integrated sound and a lousy connect, and never lose vox. Go figure....
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The only Vox prob I have is uneven volume, with some players hardly audible, and some blasting the speakers out.
Any thing I can do my end to even things out? (sound blaster live)
OTOH; one thing I've noticed in the last couple of nights uneven connections is that vox continues to work even when there's immense text lag and planes are warping all over the place. How does that work?
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Skuzzy, what you said about the network client being overrun seems to make the most sense to me. Just trying to understand this better so bear with me a minute.
Let's say I'm talking and as I do my voice is being buffered by my PC and sent down the pipe as bandwidth is available. Suddenly my pipe is clogged (for whatever reason) and my voice buffer is overrun, AH Voice shuts down. Exiting the arena and coming back in restores voice.
I'm just speculating as of course I haven't seen the code for AH Voice. But if something like this is happening then there ought to be a way to automatically reset AH Voice from within the arena.
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There is an issue with vox locking up sounds for many of my squadmates on occasion. Not a HUGE issue most times, but does effect some more than others (me only twice in 6 months, some in my squad, almost every night at least once)
Im sure HT would love to stomp out the issue, but with so many people transmiting, going in and out of range, there must be a number of issues that contribute to the problem
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VOX works great for me! No problems. But then again I fly under 25K feet.
:)
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Fixing bugs like this can be difficult but what annoys me is RW worked perfect for me and now it won't work because there is no way to disable AHV. I only talk to 1 other person and we had crystal clear voice comms in RW, in AHV I have a lot of difficulty understanding what he is saying. I don't care and in fact would be glad to loose the range channel as I ignore it now as much as possible.
des
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When my vox quits, I usually have to reboot my computer to get it going again. The memory is so low, that I usually can't open my email client without memory warnings. I've always just thought that losing vox was due to a memory leak. I've also got a sticky mic key problem too tho. Who knows, it may be time to upgrade my system.
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Skuzzy:
Can you give us a quick rundown of how we should be using DXDIAG to help do some of the analysis for vox dropouts or perhaps point us to some resources to help us be more helpful in capturing the problem?
BTW- I have run some network traces when this occurs to try and begin isolation for my vox issues. The only thing I've seen so far is for whatever reason the client stops transmitting vox (I forget the port numbers etc. involved). I'm pretty confident for me that it is on the client side that it is dropping but was at a loss as to how to analyze my PC's operations to see if I could detect when and how the vox was dropping out. I definitely don't see the client trying to send anything to the server when my vox drops out whenever I depress the mic switch. What I haven't done yet is to see if the server side is still trying to transmit to my client with the vox dropouts and will try and get a check of that next time it happens.
Tango, XO
412th FS Braunco Mustangs
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The guys that are having probs ieth AH VOX, what OS and sound card are you using? How much memory?
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Frenchy and Nomde have had that problem before. I think they both run Windows 98. I'm in 2000 with a Guillemot MaxiSound Fortissimo card and have never had voice drop out.
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Skuzzy, thanks for the responses, but this does not address my request. I am asking that until HTC can find a viable soulution, give us an option to use something else, like Roger Wilco, etc.
Futher, I pretty certain that I posted my full system specs once before, but I can do it again if it might help.
Lastly, I found that watching films can sometimes lead to VOX drop out if the film is stopped or ends when there is someone talking. When this happens, the last player's ID stays in the VOX window.
I am sorry to sound so negative in the intial post, but I was very frustrated. TODs are hard enough as it is, but loosing VOX in the middle of a huge battle over Malta cost us big time.
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Dunno about the voice cutting out when you are online because as I said it never happens to me, but film is a whole nuther animal, Midnight. After I think 1.10 the film viewer has become just about un-usable. Ever since voice was integrated into the files. The film viewer crashes if you look at it wrong, and forget about exporting to AVI. So sad because reviewing films used to be one of my favorite features in AH.... I really wish HTC would make it the bullet proof tool it used to be.
--
sancho
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It was so bad, we would lose com then try to finish the mission, quit the MA and start another. About half the way though 2 or 3 of us would lose com and do it again.
We just changed our squad fqcy and have not had a problem yet (crossing my fingers).
Good Huntin
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ok I used to have bad vox (like ver sion 1.10) heres my system:
1.1ghz athon
A7V mother board
Geforce 2 GTS 64 Mb AGP - display 1
Matrox Mystique PCI - display 2
512Mb pc133 sdram
duel boot- windows XP Pro/windows Me - use windows XP pro to play AH
soundblaster Live!
Microsoft FF 2 joystick
my vox problem was solved when I updated SURMIX to SURMIX2, well it wasn't solved as much as reversed, sometimes now when I boot up my machine I have to unclick the mic boost as it is to distorted and loud, where before it used to be too quiet.
It also never drops out during play unlike before the change.
I dont know what happened but I'm happy :)
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again .. not gonna read all this but...
my CO JB42 drops vox about 5-10 times per NIGHT!
he uses DSL and gets weird pings sometimes. (on a funny note for the last few weeks he gets screwed connect @ 10pm CST every night... 3 nights ago we found out his roomate was logging onto WinMx @ 10pm every night to DL mp3's faster LMFAO) but the vox prob still continues even though the roomate isin't online.
i use roadrunner (cable) and havent lost vox since AH version 1.09.
oh well my 2¢
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Five our six of us in our squad couldn't keep vox going tonight. Whole thing seem's wierd to me... prior to 1.11, I was dumping vox every other flight. Then after, I hardly ever dropped at all until tonight.
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Hiya Skuzzy,
yesterday our whole squad lost voice! This happens on a regular bases but most times only a few lose their voice.
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I have no VOX problems and have never had it cutting out. SBLive and 100% acceleration.
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Our squad has had an occasional problem with Vox, but nothing severe. Many of us remember the Air Warrior "Vox of Death" and how so many problems with Vox are related to user hardware and software. I solved my AW Vox problems by simply downgrading to a SB16-PCI and all my problems were solved. It's annoying, but very tricky to duplicate and thus fix. As Skuzzy suggested, make sure you're not running any other apps in the background, use a PCI soundcard, not onboard sound, and occasional network traffic can cause a problem.
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mine died twice last night, wingmans onece, and about 2other guys in a 10 man squad. id say is fubar.
my sys
abit a7v266 xp 1900( onboard sound) 512 mg mem
radion 8500
xp pro totaly updated.