Fixing VON should have been a very high priority task.

Note I say should, as its been broken for so long that the ArmA playerbase has already been dented by such a deteriorated ability to socialize ingame. I personally have a friend who stopped playing for good, after being shouted at to "Get off side! its lagging! shut up!".

Any (good) MP game designer knows how important it is to be able to communicate with one another, in terms of player retention and game popularity.

'The social' is a very important principle to nurture in game design, and a broken VON really impacts beginners and newbies from getting connected and socializing in the community.

Sure us 'vets' know about Teamspeak and related plug-ins. But I first entered 'the community' through VON chat in the beta, before it was broken.

For 18 months now, the state of VON and in-game CHAT actively discourages communication between newbies more experienced members. Try to speak on VON, no one can hear you and you get yelled at. Try to type, and BattlEye swallows up your text with its systemChat spam.

We are two years after game launch, so it's history now. Still worthy of a fix, but the community has already been heavily impacted.

I say this as someone who has 'been there done that' as both a server admin (christmas day 2013 there were over 200 players on our community servers), and as one of the core developers of Invade & Annex with AhoyWorld.

Regards,
Quiksilver

Terox, yep, really good point, I've experimented as well, we might want to bash devs about this to fix ASAP, this VON bug is really really annoying...

Terox: I've witnessed this bug with players 10 or less, and only occurring a select few players!

still persists in 1.44
Are you still on it Bohemia?

its all to do with the number of players on the server RogerX, not many servers have 40-50 players on at any one time, this is why I suspect some servers report no issues and am not sure if it is actually packetloss, as just before the voip clears up, the voip chat from an individual comes through at an increased speed, like speeding up an old record on the record player. That to me looks more, like a queue of data backing up and then suddenly surging through.
This all started happening when voip started to use the game port, initially it used its own port

Can we all slander the guy whom invented the script to hurt/injure players whenever they activate chat when tuned to Side/Global chat? (ie. Two accidental chat key presses while tuned to Side chat and the player dies.)

I encountered this script on Engin/Ingin 69 server.

This is exactly likely why BI will not provide hooks for disabling the channel for (child) server owners, as doing so deters socialization and makes game play worse. (Give's BI's game a bad impression for players.)

Although as irritating as Global/Side chat channels being broken, it's even far worse to implement a hack that is not well tested or engineered correctly! And using or abusing the injure functions is a bad response for when more experienced typers whom always have their finger hovering above this key on the keyboard!

And to think, some servers are not effected by this bug nowadays, while some are or some individuals are. So likely something within the firewall settings of players and servers is the cause, and something with optimizing the runtime executable provoked this bug even further.

I was messing around a few nights ago monitoring up and down bit rates of my network interface.

If I'm not mistaken, I saw similar up/down bit rates when talking within ARMA 3 voice chat as compared to TeamSpeak. So one should expect voice chat to be as clear as when using TeamSpeak with those bit rates.

On the flip and I keep forgetting to mention, I doubt if many have utilized digital two-way radios within a wide area network (ie. 5-10 square miles), but the audio quality within the game is still far better than that of real life digital radios! (Aside from this bug concerning packet loss.) Fact is, most do not know how to talk on a radio, which further creates over use (or stress) on the voice chat engine within the game.

I am guessing, because Arma 3 using UDP connectivity in multiplayer, the laggy voice chat might be the result of lost packets and Arma 3 doesn't have a packet tracer to ensure that every data packet sent from a sender has reached it's destination. Easy solution would be to move voice chat to TCP connectivity, a harder would be to implement CRC for current UDP connectivity.
Also, implemintation of compressed data would be nice, this would make voice chat flexible, in case sender gets slow connectivity (for example Skype is really good at reducing sound quality when sender gets a slow connectivity)

@MDCCLXXV1

We've been using that "Fix" if you can call it that for a while now.

It's as if the packets are being queued up (Which doesnt make sense unless they are tcp) then all of a sudden a burst comes through as if you've speeded up the recording, once the burst comes through everything is then fine for that player.
By holding the microphone down you are basically transmitting "Quiet noise" so its not obvious that this occurs.

One other pointer is.

A player suffering from this can have stopped transmitting several minutes before you actually hear their transmission end. This we have verified over and over again via teamspeak.

This has now got to be one of the top priority MP bugs surely.

Take the hit for once and buy a teamspeak license and integrate it into the game. It would be a fantastic feature to have the Task force radio or ACRE system in game with preset voip channels

I previously already mentioned here or elsewhere, this seems to have started occurring about the same time they rewrote code for optimizing execution due to the popular slow framerate bug. Therefore, you can likely see the optimizing occurring within the globally defined variables, while there is no problem within locally defined variables. Likely this further has to deal with optimizing automatic intelligence (ie. AI), as those would be globally defined variables. If you also notice when you see similar network lag or "desync", the sound on global/side chat is also similar on playback, or stutters.

I do not think TeamSpeak is a viable solution for communications per the following:

1. There's no indication of who is speaking. Nobody knows how to talk on a real radio system by first indicating who they are, and who they're talking to. (ie. Amateur Radio)

2. TeamSpeak creates odd or strange activity while using alongside Saitek's Profiling software. I forget the bug as I've stopped using the Saitek Profiling software, but I think it has to do with direct access somewhere and will cause a blue screen or operating system crash and reset when encountered. Many bugs seem to persist and go unfixed.

As such, TeamSpeak is great for listening to the girls chat away.

Personally, I'm biased toward vanilla solutions and at most scripting. Requiring a player to get many other XYZ plugins and/or applications, significantly deters player involvement.

There's already an open bug concerning integrating something similar to ACRE within ARMA 3. I gander, this might be a possible next feature to be implemented as it is quite popular.

I use to frequent a co-op multiplayer server where you'd get this one guy who would lead the charge using in game audio comms. It was a pretty cool experience with him coordinating with the mortar team, ground forces, and air strikes. Why is a feature that worked fine, what a year ago?, since become a huge failure. I'm old enough to know that things go wrong and bugs occur. I'm patient with these things but come on. You've been busy with adding DLC's and fixing issues but this has been left in limbo.

Dunno. Maybe they sliced network optimizations right through globally defined chat somehow? All other chat channels (I think) are defined locally. Hence, maybe the global/side playback function is somehow checking intermittently for a return 0 from all players on the network during playback?

I don't have the code in front of me, so it's not like I can tell you, or even guess for that fact unless I could read hex or binary. ;-)

Ah, the Seven Wonders of closed source code! You never know what you're going to get! (Except you're always assured to always receive the never ending phone calls from phone solicitors, wanting to gut your heart out. And I've yet to hear a phone solicitor stutter.)

Just a note, you can actually overcome the stuttering VON on side/global, simply by transmitting for upwards of 30 to 60 seconds.

Cliffs:

The more you use it, the clearer it gets.

A good reference for this is to check out one of the EUTW servers (use filter in server browser.)

There is usually one of them at full capacity starting from late afternoon (GMT+1).

You can observe lagging voip in the following channels:

• Lobby
• Global channel
• Command channel
• Side channel

It will work fine for:

• Group channel
• Vehicle channel
• Direct communication

Please try to fix this for the next patch. As mentioned by lot of people, this kills teamplay on multiplayer servers.

Last official update 5 months ago. Still know about...

Still persists in 1.4
Please BI, these laggy channels are killing multiplayer gameplay. Please fix it! You are hopefully still in Progress with that.

please give this bug some love.

teamplay on public servers is severely degraded without working von.

But it seems more realistic with Global/Side chat channels restricting global communications. (Just like it is in the real world!)

Reproduction steps:
Join a server.
Go into the middle of nowhere (out of direct range)
Populate one side with >= 20 players.(the more players receiving the worse it gets)
Speak on sidechat/global/command (broadcast channels)
VON is received choppy.

Server side Settings of Von Quality in steps of 1-0, 11-20 and 21-30 seem to have no effect on choppy/stuttering VON.

Type: Public
Branch: Stable
Version: 1.30.127372

VOIP still affected, no improvement

This is getting very tiring now and really needs fixing quickly

known issue, still wip

Issue still persists and can be easily reproduced on many (if not all) public servers.

v 1.28

Well something like that wasn't listed as a "feature" (and you don't create features to not list them on the box or somewhere.) and dropping codec quality seems to help it.

is it possible that this problem is related to the (in-game) distance between sender and receiver?

Any way of getting the pre-VON-Broken version released please so many of us who enjoy and rely on ingame VON for gameplay can roll back ?

Still persists in 1.26, recent upgrade to 100Mbps internet feed has had no impact on this from a user perspective.

Just wanted to confirm. It's still there, it's very common and very annoying. Seems mainly (only?) global and side channels are affected.
It's since 1.22 and has never been there before.

edit:
It may appear on every server, no matter what ping, fps and number of players.

A fix for this issue may be too much load on the voice server; it could be as simple as reducing the codec quality in terms of a quick and dirty fix.
At least until something can be done to fix the underlying issue; besides, voice comms don't need to be as clean as they are.
The encoder settings are definitely set to high quality / bit-rate; it's like listening to FM when all we really need is Shortwave or AM.
By contrast even SiriusXM Radio's music channels doesn't sound as good as the comms in Arma III and we don't really need to broadcast music over side chat do we? lol

The following I can say with certainty:
Is affected: side channel
Is not affected: direct communication, group channel, vehicle channel
Not yet assured: global channel, command channel

Pretty much all VoIP in game is effected by this issue. Simply join an online server and you will experience the problem. Easily recreatable.

This issue may have started when voip was switched from game port + 3 to gameport

Does anyone know if 1.24 RC is affected?

I just came back from a few months break time from playing. I am on my normal co-op server (it restarts every 6 hrs to maintain decent performance) and lots of people are comming through as stutterring really bad and other times they are fine. Normally I attribute this to people who don't use push to talk buttons but it seems to occur to anyone intermittently.

• The stutter seems to occur in any of the channels at random

@ Fireball - issue still persists in 1.24 RC

I purchased the game a few days and have had the same experience. Side & global severely stutter regardless of server or ping (problem just as pronounced on 30 ping servers as it is on 100 ping servers). Once in awhile 2 or 3 people on a server are able to speak perfectly clearly while the majority continue to stutter.

I hope you can find a solution - KoTH is incredibly frustrating with broken voip.

Also got VON Problems since the latest patch. Only affects the Group, Side and Global Channels though, Direct and Vehicle Channels still work great. The sounds stutter a lot if someone uses one of the mentioned channels, no matter how many players are connected.

Some more information on this, whens its worse and when it gets better. This information relates to the same server Terox is on about. We usually do pre-briefings before we start missions, during role selection. At this step VOIP is horrible for 90% of the players logged on, while one or two players could have perfect coms for everyone. When pre-brief is finished and the mission has started, all players spawn at the same location, within 20m of each other, VOIP chop continues at this stage but can better it self at this stage. What we noticed, which may help you resolve this quicker, was that if we moved our squad away from direct coms range of the other players, our team leader which none of us could make out before we moved, was suddenly clear on group channel. This correlates with other reports, where the issue gets resolved or better when the different sections deploy and get spread out across the map.

Edit: Also, this has been the case on two different servers, different hardware, different world location, same mission or different missions, doesn't matter.

• Apollo

This is still an issue, any update on a solution?

More info.
a few days ago, the voip started acting incredibly oddly, it was like slowing down the speed of a record then speeding it up. Every client experienced the same effect.(Kids wont understand this, only knowing about cd's)). This happened once for a few seconds at most. It may have a bearing on the issue raised in this ticket, it may not and it hasn't reproduced itself since.

This is quite a major bug for us and i believe for a lot of others who rely on
ingame VOIP during gameplay
@Ocf, you need to reread my replies. I stated this occurs before the mission starts, and it is for every mission on 2 different servers.
It occurs during unit selection screen before the mission is launched, during the briefing screen and also in game
Typically with somewhere between 30 and 50 players.
It was not a problem before the 118 patch and it still exists in the 122 patch

Does that same mission yield the same result on different server configs? How about user configs?
Missions can be set up in different ways making the load they put on servers very different. Maybe under low load situations it resolves itself, but under high load situations it might not.

I haven't seen the improvement happen that Terox is reporting. Might be down to individual missions and configs.

I've started doing this during the unit selection screen phase before the mission is launched. So that should rule out missions having an effect on this.
I ask all the group leaders, one at a time to continuously speak until i request they stop. Eventually they come through clear and unbroken and this seems to work every time. (Who the hell voted against this ?)

in my case, while playing zeus on official servers, the global chat stuttered but the others were okay. when playing wasteland, both global and side chat are stuttering but group/direct works okay. It's not like it starts to lag and every channel goes stuttering.

More info:

When a player initially starts to speak, its very stuttery. If the player continues to transmit after about 5 seconds it starts to improve. After 10 seconds in most cases it then comes through clear and unbroken.

It's as if the packets are trying to find the correct path and then eventually they do or the bandwidth they require for von is somehow being adjusted from "not enough" to okay.

This could explain why (am assuming you are testing over lan) you are not seeing this on your test rigs

I don't see any difference.

I'm expecting a busy public server tonight which uses only VON while ingame.
What data do you want collecting ?

I can do wireshark logs etc, any partcular filter you need applying?

I can also do a text log dump from Freds Arma3 server app

If you experience the problem in other than Global chat, do these channels behave differently or is there no difference in the lagging/stuttering?

This is not restricted to global chat, we use command chat extensively and group chat. This was definitely not an issue before the 118 patch.
Your probably trying to reproduce this issue in a LAN environment, try reproducing it on Dwardens CZ servers in a WAN environment. The higher the player count the more likely this is going to occur. Some players do not suffer, I personally don't but I do have a good connection and plenty of bandwidth, so this may be caused by limited bandwidth on some players.

I have a query on voip too.
Once the server has passed initial data from and too the clients, their IP etc, is von then purely peer to peer or do von packets still pass through the server ?

I would say no difference, but our server doesn't fill up to this level every day, so I can't just go on and verify this right now. The times that it happened we were using side/com most of the time.

also, if someone held the voip button and spoke on the global chan for 30 seconds, only the first 10 seconds of his transmission were choppy. it went better as he spoke.

From what we've gathered, Desync seems to shoot up when the chat starts getting laggy. As far as we're aware it is not to do with server load because it was working fine when we spawned 100+ AI in before the patch and afterwards, it's still choppy. We also tried it under various numbers of players (5 - 20) and the results of people who had lagged VoN were inconsistent.

I can confirm this as well. The weird thing is that you'd expect the server to be maxed out on CPU because it only happens past a certain number of players, but the task manager was showing none of the cores maxing out. We run a heavy mission: "BECTI0.97 (modified)" and it starts acting up for some players at ~ 15 players on a 4 core 3,2 GHz / 8GB / 1GBit server.
Server frame rate was ~ 8 to 12 fps at the times when it occurred.After the 1.18 patch I had expected that the multi threading might increase load in order to up the frame rate to something acceptable (20 fps+). One would expect that the load would to go up to ~ 90%, but it was running at ~ 60% CPU load.
It might be that it's the clients that have the problems transmitting, not the server relaying. On the whole I'm a bit surprised that Arma 3 is not running a bit more greedily to aid performance after the MT update.

BTW, it's not just global, it's all the channels on our server that send to one side as well. (commander and side)

just tested the other channels, everything except GLOBAL CHAT works okay.

Hello,

can you guys please try to confirm/specify the issue? Unfortunately, we are not able to reproduce it in our conditions.

Thank you very much!

by the way, to clarify things, this only started happening after the last update. i will capture a video of it when i play again later in the week.

Hopefully this information will be helpful...

The following video was submitted by gienkov on May 7th.
"After last ArmA 3 update all helicopters optics are gone, you only get zoomed screen from gunner seat but it's a no go that way..."

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VNgOOSaZYM&feature=youtu.be

However we have found this is NOT a CBA bug.

This was reproduced by a member of our CBA Team:
"I can actually reproduce this. Without having CBA loaded, or any other mods for that matter..."
http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?147535-CBA-Community-Base-Addons-ARMA-3-Alpha&p=2686035&viewfull=1#post2686035

Mass closing tickets marked as resolved more than 1 month ago.

If the issue is in fact not resolved, please create a new ticket referencing this one and ask for it to be re-opened.

Does the game server is scripted to connect to any external, third-party API's?
How many clients were connected during the crash?
Are you able to test the mission on different machine?

I don't know about any third-party API's and there were actually no clients connected when these crashes happend. I tried the mission on my PC multiple times and nothing like this happen. It was very random crash on multiple missions, but after last hotfix it seems to be gone, I have no idea what was causing, neither our server provider.

Any news on this?

Thanks, I know. I was just wondering if it's know what causes this crashes, because it's still happening on our server and I don't know what to do with it.

Hi,

please be patient, we are working on fixes as fast as we can. You were not forgotten. Thank you!

Hello,

thank you for the crashdumps (they were many), our programming department will look into it.

Thank you.

Same problem here.
Version 1.18 Vanilla and only crashes on dedicated server.
If I host a mission on the client, no problems.

I tested "Patrol Operations 3.1" with some friends and "Blitzkrieg A3 RandomMode".

@viper4aa,

could you please create another ticket regarding your issue?

Thank you

Hello,

thank you for the response. However, we cannot determine what exactly caused your game to crash. It is necessary you tried to run your Arma server without any mods. If the crashes still happen then, please send another crashdumps.

If the crashes stop (on Arma without mods), please try to activate mods one by one until you find out which one causes the crashes.

Mods are not official content from Bohemia Interactive and it is very likely that the CTDs you are experiencing are caused by collisions between two or more mods.

Please let us know, thank you.

Hi,

thank you for answer, I just tested server without any mod and got crash again, with the same error message. Crashdumbs are in crashvanilla.rar hope it helps somehow.

I also included Patrol Ops mission where that crash happen

So I left vanilla server without any mods for some hours and got multiple crashes on vanilla Patrol Ops. It's included in crashvanilla2.rar

So I have no idea what is causing this problem on our server and I really need help on this.

Mass closing tickets marked as resolved more than 1 month ago.

If the issue is in fact not resolved, please create a new ticket referencing this one and ask for it to be re-opened.

Difficulty setting on video - Elite.

Note what difficulty settings do you have selected. On Recruit and Regular the "Extended Armor" option is selected by default making player and AI units in his/her team more resilient

That's a design decision.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?149636-Development-Branch-Changelog&p=2599224&viewfull=1#post2599224

Not sure why though.

Now that could use some attention.

Some mines even can't kill you now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPD4tZSQvFM

Thank you, I was not notified about it for some reason. Will look into it.

Hello,

thank you for reporting the issue, it has been assigned to the responsible departments.

Have a nice day.

Hello,

thank you for reporting the ticket. Would it be possible to upload a simple editor-made repro mission? It would help us a lot.

Thank you very much!

Iceman, note that the requested mission has been attached.