TeamSpeak 3 looking for Alpha Testers
The creators of TeamSpeak are moving forward with their upcoming version of a cross-platform Voice Communication Tool dubbed TeamSpeak 3. They have put out a request for Alpha Testers.but they are only looking for Linux and Mac OS X users at this point in time.. Additional information can be found here on their Developer Blog entry where the call for testers is put out.
This post was submitted by pwk.
November 10th, 2008 at 6:17 am
Given the low quality of the teamspeak2 port I think I will just stick with using Mumble.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Holy cheese!
ALPHA?!?
How long have they been developing TeamSpeak 3? Three years, I think. Correct me if I’m wrong. Three years and it’s in alpha. I wonder how their alpha compares to Mumble, which was registered on SourceForge on 2005-08-31.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:25 am
they’re insane. no one really cares about teamspeak any more… not since mumble anyways.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
> Given the low quality of the teamspeak2 port I think I will just stick with using Mumble.
If by low quality you mean quality of the speech, I can tell you that TS2 only had 8 kHz
codecs, TS3 has 8 kHz (like TS2), 16 kHz (like mumble) and also the insanely high 32 kHz
and 44.1 kHz codecs…
If by low quality you mean the fact that the TS2 Client had a few rough edges on Linux, of
which the most notable was missing ALSA support, then I agree with you. The reasons behind
this are that TeamSpeak 2 was a windows only product, with linux support added later on
as an after thought. With TeamSpeak 3 we have built everything up from the ground with
cross platform in mind.
> Three years and it’s in alpha.
Yes, development time was long, there are going to be many kick-ass features in TS3 which
*nobody* else has, now beta is getting close though, and since there are mostly windows
testers on the alpha team currently we want to make sure Linux and Mac OS X
gets equal attention before beta.
And mumble is a great piece of software yes, but (for various reasons), TeamSpeak is still
much much wider used among gamers (especially windows gamers which, let’s not kind
ourselves, make the vast majority).
November 11th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
That is a good, clear, and well thought out response. I like the way you just responded to the criticism, instead of just getting defensive with no real content.
I had used TeamSpeak2 and did not have issues with it back in the day. I find it odd that people would get upset about any project requesting help from the linux community.
I don’t even think I have a headset anymore or I would give it a shot. If I find one I will take a look at helping out.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I didn’t mean to sound too harsh about TS2, it was really the only good voice app around when it was first released. But by today’s standards it’s pretty lousy software.
Maybe TS3 will be a great a app when released but if it is likely to suffer from the same problem of not getting updates to fix crashes and support for new sound systems then I’d rather encourage people to use Mumble which has one thing I doubt Teamspeak ever will: Open source code.
November 11th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
that’s just plain awesome :)
November 12th, 2008 at 4:40 am
dnf anyone? common guys… i really looked forward to ts3 since everyone of my pals was using ventrilo which had better sound, but an even worse gui and no linux support whatsoever. i’m happy that i could get them to use mumble and even though it has some issues itself, it’s a pretty descent program. best of all: it’s gpl!!! you can’t compete with that.
you’re quite right, that the majority of players sadly still use ts2. that’s mostly because people got used to it and are afraid of change. i’m playing world of warcraft and i have to use ts2 in most raids, because everyone knows and has ts2. still… compared to mumble it just plain sucks, but convincing people to try something new is pretty hard. at least my friends don’t care for team speak any more. we have stopped to even care for ts3, because of it’s extremly long development and the hollow promises made by the devs over the years. we just lost interest. there is a product… it is better than ts2 and vent and ts3 is somewhere never to be finished. so who gives a shit. in the end ts3 won’t be open source and that’s just another reason to stick with mumble.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Well, I’ve never gotten mumble to compile on my system, and my gaming buddies all have used vent, so up till now, I’ve been using vent via wine…which sucks. So, I will gladly do what I can to help ts3 along, especially because A) they are actually designing with cross-platform in mind. it may not be open-source, but it’s about the next best thing B) the new features sound great and C) a team member actually took the time to deliver a helpful, clear, and polite response here. Awesome =)
November 12th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
We tried mumble for about 3 trains in our clan and were quite happy with the better quality and lower latency, but still there were key features missing or just poorly implemented, which made us switch back to TS2 (test wasn’t long before now, maybe 2 months).
I don’t know if we will make the switch to TS3, but i’m looking forward to it. Better speech quality and lower latency combined with a used-to-interface should make a switch less painless and comforting than to another software.