It's been a few days since 1.0.3 was released, and things have been smooth overall. It's always a relief to roll out a new version and have things work well; releasing always causes some anxiety because suddenly many people are switching to a newer version that doesn't have the known reliability of the previous one. Anyway, that's not really the subject of this evening's post.
We've been getting some really great feedback about the new voice chat feature. Several people have told us that it hands-down beats Skype for quality and being non-laggy, even over dial-up connections. Some of the quotes were excited enough that they aren't even rated G! Hearing such glowing comments definitely makes any developer or publisher proud, and everyone involved with BitWise is very proud indeed. That's the glory.
The not so good news is that some users have found it somewhat difficult to configure their PC and/or router for use with BitWise voice. This is understandable, though not any worse than what's required for direct connections except that it must be set up both ways, whereas a direct connection only needs to happen one way. Obviously BitWise isn't as useful to people when they can't use it to its full potential, but on the other hand, it's the little bit of extra setup effort that allows the high quality low-lag voice chat, the fast file transfers, and everything about the direct connect.
It's a tradeoff, you can't have it both ways: you can't have direct connections without some setup in some scenarios. This has always been BitWise's "Catch-22," so to speak. We do our best to give people information to get set up correctly, but we also know that some, for one reason or another, never figure it out, and that's really a shame. We continually improve the documentation and self-help on the web site to aid understanding, but maybe others have some radical ideas for making BitWise more accessible without sacrificing the power.
And no, making it P2P like Kazaa or Skype is not an option. ;)