sniping.org

I picked up a copy of Warhammer Online this past week, and have been quite enjoying it. Enjoying it enough that I’ve joined a guild. So far they seem to be a pretty decent, if somewhat sarcastic and crass, group of people; I should fit right in. They require the use of Ventrilo for voice chat, which is a pretty reasonable requirement for a guild that’s going to do PvP combat.

There are some quirks with Ventrilo and Vista, however, and I wanted to make mention of them here in the hopes that they might be useful to other people. Note that these tips were only tested with Warhammer Online and they may or may not apply to other games, and while this was done on 64-bit Vista, both Ventrilo and Warhammer Online were the 32-bit versions so they should behave the same on 32-bit Vista. Your mileage may vary.

Push-to-Talk (PTT)

In order for your PTT hotkey — which defaults to the left Ctrl key — to be recognized when you’re in WAR, you’ll need to run Ventrilo as an Administrator. This may be because WAR needs to run as admin, or maybe it’s just something with Vent. Either way, that’s how it has to be.

Overlay

The overlay is important to me, as I still don’t know how to recognize people on Vent by their voices. I spent a couple of hours fiddling with third-party overlay add-ons, graphics settings, compatibility options, etc. Then a clever idea hit me: run WAR in windowed mode, with the resolution set to the same thing I’d use for full-screen. That worked perfectly! I was able to position the overlay such that it didn’t cover anything too terribly useful, and I also set up a hot key so I could toggle the overlay display in the event that I did need to see something behind it.

So now I’m exceptionally happy with how Vent and WAR are playing together, and I’m looking forward to a long and happy life of fart jokes via voice chat while beating in the heads of stupid Destruction players.