I suppose I could talk about some useless piece of technobabble news, but instead I thought I'd fill in how things have been going with the implementation of the voice chat. Something tells me its the right decision.
In my last post, I talked about the lag/latency in the voice chats that I had tested up until then. I found where the latency was actually being added in as a protection to the audio buffer, and have made it a user-configurable option. The value by default was 200 ms, but I have adjusted the default down to 25 ms. That means round-trip latency is reduced by 300 ms, which is definitely noticable. I also want to add that I compared the BitWise quality and latency with Skype, and found that the BitWise voice chat provided not only higher voice quality, but used only a fraction of Skype's bandwidth and had noticably less lag/latency in conversation. After my tests, I'm not sure what's so great about the so-called "P2P telephony" that Skype seems to be flaunting (other than the ability to work around routers/NAT by using middlemen--maybe that's why it lags?).
Many other issues / features have been addressed / added. The Linux and Mac OS X versions have been tested and required some minor adjustments; only a few more tweaks (and testing) are needed on those versions (code is compiling right now!). The Routing Server has been updated to route the BitWise voice traffic along with the regular BitWise traffic. The toolbar on the chats now has a click-on, click-off toggle button for voice chat. Many new levels of error checking have also been added, as well as some additional security (in terms of verifying that the data actually belongs to an existing call). The clients are better able to inform each other of problems (like if one side couldn't initialize the audio hardware).
Overall, I think the voice chat is definitely getting close to being ready for some good testing. The voice icons are still needed (see the forums), I still want to add a help window to explain what the settings are, and I still need to do some more testing here. However, in terms of major functionality, it's all there, and it's looking pretty darn good, if I say so myself.
Soon, soon... I'm as excited about it as you are and I'll be getting it ready for more testing my more people as soon as I can!
how did you know I was excited by it!!
compile faster dammit, overclock everything!
lol
;-)