Guild Wars 2

Reddit mirror: https://redd.it/5qpet4

Hi guys!

I’m aRestless and I’m the lead developer on Who’s Talking for Guild Wars 2. Who’s Talking (or WT) is a free app for Overwolf and TeamSpeak that allows you and your friends to see each other’s position projected into the game, marked with a customizable icon. This makes it very easy to keep track of one another, even in crowded situations, and you’ll always know where to go when asked for help. Here’s a quick GIF how that looks. If you’re more into videos than walls of text, there’s a quick guide to the app available on YouTube here.

Very similar to the popular GW2TacO, WT utilizes the official MumbleLink API to extract position information from the game. While TacO aims to be a helpful universal tool with integrated guides and utilities, our projects are all about sharing information and even content between players, to enrich everyone’s gameplay experience. Who’s Talking is one way of doing that.

Who’s Talking is as “officially allowed” as it gets, since its first version won two awards in the Overwolf App Challenge in 2015, where the winners were determined purely by ArenaNet employees. So we can confidently say that you won’t get into trouble for using WT, and, if there’s any problem with it, that ArenaNet will definitely approach us first before taking actions against individual players.

Getting Who’s Talking

If you’re impatient and just want to know where to get it, here’s a direct download link. This installer will either add Who’s Talking to an existing Overwolf installation, or provide you with a version of Overwolf that has WT (and only WT) preinstalled. If you don’t trust directly linked .exe files, just get it from Overwolf’s built-in app store.

2.0

The actual reason for this post is the newly released 2.0 version, which has been in on/off development since that contest in 2015. We weren’t happy with performance and especially usability, so we pretty much overhauled the whole thing. Here are some highlights:

• Nondisturbing by default. With the default settings, your gameplay won’t be interrupted and you’ll only notice WT when it actually benefits you (i.e. there’s another WT user in your TeamSpeak channel).
• It truly works right out of the box. Install it via Overwolf and it just works, no need to set up anything, everything happens automatically.
• We don’t utilize the TeamSpeak chat anymore. That was annoying as heck.
• Customizable icons (not just colors), including the ability to upload your own images. Kappa
• Support for different modes that decide when your own icon is shown to others (see below)

What is it useful for?

While using WT ourselves we encountered three different scenarios where WT is useful for different reasons, and we recommend a different operation mode for each of them:

• Open world with one or two friends. Even while exploring, people tend to get sidetracked and are quickly out of sight, or you stumble into a big event and the screen is cluttered with other players. We wouldn’t have thought so beforehand, but for us WT really shines in these situations. For this use-case, we recommend to set WT to always send your position, regardless if you’re talking or not.
• 5 man instances. Hearing “stack on me” or “I need healing” on TS becomes way more useful when you directly see which character that voice belongs to. For groups like this, we recommend to set WT to send your position while talking, so that the screen isn’t cluttered with icons while you don’t need them.
• For big groups like WvW zergs, we recommend to never send your position automatically for the average player. You can then use a hotkey to ping your current position to others. Important members of the group may use other settings, just as you’d mark certain players with squad symbols.

By default, WT is configured to only send your position while talking.

Upcoming Features

• Discord support. Nothing more to say.
• Support for multiple TeamSpeak tabs / server connections. Currently WT doesn’t like multiple TS tabs, but we’ll change that.
• More performance improvements. We made big leaps from where we were before, but there’s still stuff to be improved upon.

Remarks

• Without WT, try to stay below ~90% CPU usage to get a smooth experience. Maybe consider limiting FPS in GW2’s setting so that GW2 doesn’t take all resources it can get.
• There are two rendering methods to choose from in WT’s settings in the “Performance” menu. The default is “Injected”, which should work in all scenarios. The alternative, “Overlayed”, yields better performance, but doesn’t work in full screen and has some other small disadvantages which are explained within the app. I personally prefer the overlayed version because it’s a bit smoother, but decide for yourself.

Special Thanks

Our thanks go out to WoodenPotatoes, who covered the beta of the 2.0 version on a stream quite early (in a very wonky state), as well as to all players who participated in our beta tests. I’m sure there are still a few bugs hiding in our code, but without you it would be a whole lot more. As the beta phase is now officially over, we will contact all of our beta testers because of some little prizes we promised a while ago.

And of course, big thanks to you, who read this wall of text and considers trying out our app. Have fun with it and let us know what you think!

all it does is say “teamspeak server not connected to client”