I am someone who, on other toons, flew with CCD/CCG rather frequently and I actually welcome this for three primary reasons.
EVE Voice was hopelessly laggy and volume controls aren’t implemented well leading to vastly varying volumes across the board.
We’ve been plagued in CCG with veteran players who are so bitter and toxic that they come into fleets screeching because we’re having fun. It happened repeatedly but not much can be done. With third party systems we do have the benefit of muting people like that across the board.
It does happen that EVE disconnects especially with worse connections. Losing access to communications and being dead in space really doesn’t work in your favour.
Additionally, I see:
To that reasoning I can only say this.
You are an EVE Online player, a game that is known to require external communication systems for many activities. A majority uses Discord / Teamspeak / Mumble, but you end up having to rage-download it right before content happens. That isn’t a problem of the tools or the speed of your connection, but rather the lack of foresight. I have all three above clients installed, even if 99% is Discord-based.
A fair assessment, except plenty of other development studios have been integrating Discord with their environment through cooperation. A lot of things that I posted above are not yet available in any API. There’s not a single API that enables you to integrate EVE Chat into your Discord chatroom.
From a Discord perspective, it would be interesting if there is some form of webhook that can post in-game messages along with something that pulls messages back into an in-game channel. To enable such functionality, CCP will need to work with Discord. Slack is already XMPP-enabled and thus easier to bridge for the tech savvy community members.
On a further note, why isnt there an official Eve Online Discord that has messages and links to announcements and public channels and such … or did I miss that memo?
Every so often after a patch/update/expansion the Eve Voice would turn itself back on. It’s habit now, if my game client is acting up, see if it’s on (then turn it back off.) There were a couple times then that solved the buggy problem, so I’m one of those edge cases. Yay that this iteration is going away!
Integration is entirely doable. it just needs some coding work.
I’ve already written the very basics (in php) of linking an Eve character, with a discord id.
Once that’s done, you can have something which puts them into the appropriate ‘guild’ for that discord to manage permissions. (One reason you can’t do it directly is you need to have a scheduled job which removes people too.)
APIs adapt to changing conditions as much as any other architectural component. I’m fine with CCP furthering their API development to improve discord integration even if discord is driving industry standards by virtue of player choices. It sucks if TS and mumble are less popular. With younger players
This means we keep the full functionality of text chats, including local etc., in the game, because changes are only “backend”?
Please keep in mind that chats are the backbone of today’s socialization, and EvE is much more social media than a regular game. So a tight integration of chats all over EvE and with the EvE client is a key success factor. Take this away, or make it feel external, will make people not logging in anymore … there are better ways to socialize outside EvE. In short, disconnect chat and gameplay - disconnect players from the game, fragment the player base even more.
I’m all up for the 64-bit clients, it has more potential than just plain RAM allocation. Maybe more multi-core focus?
Also I would love to hear about any plans for moving to DX12. I know that EVE started using DX11 only few years ago, but imho the difference in these two APIs is significant enough. (I’m also an owner of AMD GPU sooo… Hehe)
Good luck with these plans, I’m looking forward to it!
It will be awesome if there was a local voice chat. You could meet pirates and reach agreement like
– dont kill me pls
– pay 10M ISK
– ok
– pass
though this can be done with a regular chat
I’m honestly discouraged to see in-game voice go, for several reasons.
My primary use of in-game voice was with new players and folks I had no prior connection with, either in pairs or small gangs. It was the one voice system you could count on every player having access to, without struggling with setup or permissions.
I think the biggest reason in-game voice was little-used is that it never really worked for larger groups. You could delete it, or you could, well, fix it. The fact that the former was chosen makes me really concerned that ~Walking In Stations~ — sorry, “64-bit client” is being used as an excuse to put EVE deeper into low-cost maintenance mode. Abandoning feature after feature makes me concerned about CCP’s long-term level of commitment to the game. Can you share some details of the blockers for bringing a fixed 64-bit version of the voice code forward? Didn’t you just upgrade audio to a new engine?
Perhaps you could replace the current voice system with a client-integrated version of Mumble with a dedicated server run by CCP? This would move voice out of the core client and server codebase for the most part. Mumble is a well-maintained, portable and widely-used voice chat system that scales extremely well. This move would be consistent with the move to XMPP: rely on open source third-party software to do the heavy ancillary lifting.
SMP has been available for 32 bit systems for a very long time now and has nothing to do with 64bit.
It will be possible for the client to use 3501MB of system memory instead of 3499.
This is not the first time, not even the first time within the past couple months, where CCP has said “our tools suck, so we’re making them suck even worse.” The gap between “what should be” and what actually is is not an excuse to make things stupid.
On topic: EVE voice was a tool for strangers to spontaneously collaborate. Established groups could use 3rd party comms, of course, but for strangers that wasn’t ever a particularly viable option. Literally every multiplayer game on the market has built-in comms. It’s embarrassing that CCP can’t manage it. This also emphasizes that CCP has long since stopped caring about the communities that form in the game, and represents another nail in the coffin.
No, I don’t want EVE voice saved. It wasn’t particularly good, and it sounds like another development dead end. I’d have preferred to see EVE Voice replaced rather than removed, even if that meant a partnership with 3rd party software.
Large organizations would be unlikely to move off their currently-used third-party voice chat no matter what CCP did with voice. If that’s not an option in my situation, though, I’d rather risk a disconnect that just not be able to chat at all.
