We’ve been working hard at improving our Mumble 1.2 service which we hope will coincide with the release of 1.2 – if you’re wondering, word on “the street” is 1.2 is anywhere from two months to twelve months away from release, most of it depending on what happens with CELT, an important part of Mumble 1.2.
Every day, more and more bugs are tracked down and squished. Most of the desired functionality is there and works great, there are just a few things that’ll require a lot of thought to ensure they’re implemented correctly.
Now I’ve finally tracked down the issues I was having with Mumble’s overlay feature, I started to play with it some more:
Since I wanted more of a “watermark” than an overlay, I’m using Alpha value of 16 for idle users and an Alpha value of 96 for people who are speaking. In the above image, Tidler and SoulThps are both using the standard text overlay because they haven’t uploaded a user texture. Tidler is transmitting (because his voice activation is broken so he’s transmitting 99% of the time) and SoulThps isn’t.
You can see my name looks a little different however, because I wanted a little extra flair so I created a custom user texture and uploaded it via the client. I then decided it wasn’t fancy enough, so I went trawling Google images for “cartoon cow” and pretty quickly came up with this cute little fella. 30 seconds in Photoshop and I have a new and improved user texture!
On the whole, the overlay is a fantastic feature – you can run fullscreen games and still know exactly what’s going on with your voice chat. Frame rate drops for me are practically non-existent, and my PC is garbage anyway.
