HOW TO: GamingMasters Ventrilo

HOW TO: GamingMasters Ventrilo

Please read and follow.

Ventrilo - Please Read and Follow
Theres quick details down the bottom if you know what to do.

Download vent from here: http://www.ventrilo.com/download.php

You'll need the windows i386 version, as there is no other, its the one at the top.

Install, im sure you can do that.

Fire up vent, and you should see a screen looking roughly like this (first attachment, called openscreen)

You need to click the top button labelled "->" Which is the one next to the drop down box for username.

A dialog box will appear, It's fairly self explanatory, just click "New" Enter the username and click okay, the rest of the stuff is irrelevant for the moment.

Now to connect to the server, click the button labbeled "->" that is second down, again a dialog opens. Again push new, type in Gaming Masters, click okay. Then set the IP address to ventrilo-5.clanplanet.co.uk, and the port to 3822 (which will be set by default) and click okay, everything else doesnt matter.

Your screen should now look something like attachment goodscreen.jpg

From here simply press connect, you should hear a silly connecting sound, and then in the main pane a whole lot of channels and stuff should appear. You should see yourself at the top under Ventrilo erver. select which team you are hoing in under the tf2 header red or blue. Hooray, we are nearly set.

Now we want to setup how vent works wth your mic (you might actually choose to do this BEFORE you connect, but make sure you do it before 7:59)

click the setup button on the right hand side, a pretty massive dialog box appears, from here you can control how you want vent to work, ill show you how I like to set it up, but ill show you a few options.

Lets test that your mic is working properly, so plug it in. Youll then need to select a codec to test, so from the drop down box called codec select speex, and then select whatever you like. Then push test say something, when you stop talking/release the key you should hear yourself. If you havent disabled push to talk yet, you might need to hit the button it requires. When it registeres some noise or a proper key input you will hear a sound, and it will say --Begin--.

Firstly lets setup voice activation. If you want to have to push a a button to talk, you'll need to have the "Push to talk" checkbox enabled (which is in the top left corner), which is enabled by default. You can then choose which key you want to push by clicking on the area next to where it says "Hotkey" (which ironically will set it to mouse button 1) and then clicking the button you want.

If like me, you prefer to have vent detect when you start talking and respond accordingly, youll want to uncheck "push to talk". Youll see now that two new dialog boxes are available, sensitivity and silence time. Silence time is easy, its how long after you stop talking you want the mic to keep recording. I find 1..5 or 1 second to be best, any shorter and if you talk a little to quiet for a bit, it will cut you off. The next is sensitivity, this is the level at which you want vent to detect you are now talking and to start broadcasting your voice accordingly. The asy way to determine what this should be is to click the monitor button. Youll see a whole mess of numbers scrolling past now, this is what volume level the mic is receiving. So take note of what ambient is, and then what it is when you talk, and set it something in between. Once you've set it to a value you can use test, which will only kick in once you break the sensitivity threshold.

If you want you can select a hardware input mixer. Set mixer to whatever your sound device is (this i cant help you with, but if you havent got a soundcard it will probably be the only one there). set mux to recording control, and line to microphone. You can then use the line volume to boost your microphone volume. You can also fiddle with the software microphone volume by clicking on recording (input) in the bottom right. This opens up the windows xp sound mixer. You can then adjust the volume of the microphone.

TROUBLESHOOTING: If you cant hear anything from your mic, or it constantly displays abs zero in the monitor, it is probably not monitoring your microphone. Go to the windows mixer (as described above) and make sure microphone has a checkbox by it. You can also do this by setting a hardware mixer.

The last thing to fix is events. Vent by default tells you everytime something entirely trivial occur. So for instance everytime someone levaes the server (which for such a large server happens almost constantly) it plays a sound. We want to disable these events. Click the events tab (which is the second) in the same setup dialog. Click the button that says all nothing. You can then set any you want to have to wave by clicking it wiht your mouse and then clicking on the wave button on the right in the box labelled type. But honestly, i dont think you need sounds for any of those events.

Thats it your done.

 

Re: For those that havent used Ventrillo before ...

Many thanks + topic stickied.

 

Re: For those that havent used Ventrillo before ...

Thanks, now I know.