Getting Mumble

We’ve got a Mumble server set up for Guild use. The client is available at Mumble’s site.

When you first install it, you can skip the wizard for audio settings if you want. The certificate it uses is used to identify you if you authenticate/register your account with the Mumble server – you can either allow it to be autogenerated or create it with real values.

After it’s created, back it up. It’s located at:
<My Documents>/MumbleAutomaticCertificateBackup.p12
or can be exported from Mumble through “Configure->Certificate Wizard”.

See the Mumble Guide for more details.

Connecting to the Mumble Server

For the first time you connect, you’ll need to set up the server details.

In the connection window, select “Add New”
Servername: <You can give the server any name you want to use - the name is personal display-only>
Address: mumble.dawnmist.net
Port: 64738
Username: <The username you want to use for yourself>
Then hit “Ok”.

Once the server is in the list, select the Servername in the List then click “Connect”. Future connections will have the name already there, so you don’t need to reconfigure it every time.

Configuring Mumble

As a first step, get the settings panels all shown – there’s some settings that are hidden otherwise.

1. Go to Configure->Settings
2. At the bottom of the left pane is a box marked “Advanced”. Turn this on.

Audio Input/Output settings

1. Select the “Audio Input” option in the left pane
2. Change the “Interface: Device” option in the right pane to the microphone device you want to use for input.
3. Select the “Audio Output” option in the left pane
4. Change the “Interface: Device” option in the right pane to the speakers/headphones you want to use for output.

Talk Option 1: Push to Talk

At this stage, push-to-talk works a lot better than voice activated – the VA settings tend to result in you accidentally echoing other people’s speech, making stuff hard for everyone to hear. To set up push-to-talk, you need to:

1. Select the “Audio Input” option in the left pane
2. Change the “Transmission: Transmit” drop-down box from “Voice Activity” to “Push to Talk”
3. Select the Shortcuts option in the left pane
4. Hit the “Add” button at the bottom to create a new shortcut.
5. In the “Function” column, select “Push to Talk” to set this shortcut for push to talk
6. In the “Shortcut” column, click once with the mouse to select this field, then push the button you want to use to activate push to talk (your microphone will be unmuted while this button is held down, and muted otherwise).

Talk Option 2: Continuous Voice with Microphone On/Off toggle

The other alternative to push to talk (where you have to hold the key down to talk) is setting up a “mute self” toggle and using Continuous Transmission. To set up the Mute Self toggle, you need to:

1. Select the “Audio Input” option in the left pane
2. Change the “Transmission: Transmit” drop-down box to “Continuous”
3. Select the Shortcuts option in the left pane
4. Hit the “Add” button at the bottom to create a new shortcut.
5. In the “Function” column, select “Push to Mute” to set this shortcut for push to mute
6. In the “Data” column, select “toggle” as the data type to make this a “press to turn mic on, another press to turn mic off”
7. In the “Shortcut” column, click once with the mouse to select this field, then push the button you want to use to turn your microphone on/off.

Mumble seems to reconnect with your microphone in the same state it was in previously, so I think if you logged out with the mic off, it’ll be off again when you log back in.

Listening Option: Push to Mute

It is also possible to set up a shortcut to mute everyone (called “deafen self”), so that you can listen to cut-scenes/dialog without having people in the voice chat channel talk over the top of your game. To set up push-to-mute/deafen self, you need to:

1. Select the Shortcuts option in the left pane
2. Hit the “Add” button at the bottom to create a new shortcut.
3. In the “Function” column, select “Deafen Self” to set this shortcut for muting all sound from mumble.
4. In the “Shortcut” column, click once with the mouse to select this field, then push the button you want to use to activate push to mute.
5. (Optional) If you want this to be a toggle (push once to turn on audio, push again to turn off) instead of having to hold the button down, click in the “Data” column and select “toggle” as the data type.

Overlay

This one may cause issues – some people have used it without problems, while others find it makes GW/GW2 crash. It’s possible that another program with an overlay could be conflicting – MSI Afterburner has been tested to conflict on my system – so if you’re having trouble try shutting down any other programs with overlays and test again. If you’re still having trouble running GW/GW2 while Mumble is on, try turning the overlay OFF.

To turn the overlay itself on/off:

1. Select the “Overlay” option in the left pane in Mumble Settings
2. Tick/untick the “Enable Overlay” option

To move the overlay:

1. Click on the sample display of the overlay and drag it to where you’d like it to be.

To resize the overlay:

1. Put your mouse over the sample display of the overlay, and use the mouse scroll wheel to increase/decrease display size.

To change what the overlay shows, right-click on the sample of the overlay option, and select:

•  Filter to change what it shows (talking users, all users in channel, etc)
• Columns to set the number of columns to use in the display
• Edit to change the colours used to show it.

Getting the Mumble Overlay reliably showing in GW2

Courtesy of BAK’s post:

Melana’s note: I’ve tested this without adding Gw2.exe to the Mumble whitelist, and it worked for me – you may only need to do the shortcut modification.

Add the game to the “Whitelist” for overlay:

1. Open Mumble, Go to the Configure Menu, Click “Settings”.
2. If it isn’t already ticked, tick “Advanced” at the bottom right.
3. Select “Overlay” on the left, and click the “Overlay Exceptions” tab. Select “Whitelist”.
4. Click “Add” and browse to your GW2 install directory. Select GW2.exe.

Modify the shortcut you use to open Guild Wars 2 to skip the patch/login screen:

1. Right click the shortcut.
2. Add the following to the end of the “Target” field:
    -password YOURPASS -email YOURGW2EMAIL -nopatchui
3. The shorcut “Target” field should now look something like this:
   “D:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe” -password MyPa$$worD -email bak@thelols.com -nopatchui
4. Load GW2 and it should now display the Mumble overlay

How it works:

The reason that Mumble Overlay can break is because the game loads the launcher screen. We stop this with the “-nopatchui”. This alone is sufficient to get the overlay to display – but since we don’t see the launcher screen we can’t actually log in.

Since that’s a bit of a problem, we have to add the username and password to the shortcut so we can log in.

The Risks:

You’re adding your username and password to the local shortcut on your machine. This means:

• Anybody who double clicks the shortcut on your computer will automatically log in as you.
• Anybody who has access to your computer could look at the properties of the shortcut to see your username and password.
• You are NOT at any additional risk of your account being hacked, unless somebody logs into your computer and looks at the shortcut.

Guild Wars 2 Mumble Skin

If you’d like to reskin your mumble client so it uses a GW2-based theme, there’s a free skin available:

• Custom GW2 Mumble Skin by Darkhand

See Installing a Mumble Skin for how to install skins.

Text-to-speech Notifications

When using mumble, you can set it to read messages saying when people join/leave channel, etc. To set up the messages to be read to you:

1. Select the “Messages” option from the left-hand pane.
2. Tick/Untick the “Text-To-Speech” column for the messages that you want read out by the system.
3. Adjust the volume for messages using the volume slider here.
4. Hit Apply.

To alter the device that Text-To-Speech is read on (i.e. to get it through the headphones or speakers by default), you need to set it up in the OS – mumble uses your default text-to-speech settings.

For Win 7 (and maybe Vista?):

1. Open Control Panel
2. Choose “Speech Recognition”
3. In the left column, choose “Text to Speech”
4. In the Text to Speech tab, click on the “Advanced…” button at the bottom right of the main pane
5. Click on the radio button “Use this audio output device”, and choose your desired output device from the drop-down box.
6. Hit Ok in this window, then Ok in the Text to Speech one to apply the setting.

For Win XP (SP3):

1. Open Control Panel
2. Choose “Speech”
3. In the Text to Speech window, click on the “Audio Output…” button
4. Click on the radio button “Use this audio output device”, and choose your desired output device from the drop-down box.
5. Hit Ok in this window, then Ok in the Text to Speech one to apply the setting.

Using Mumble

Registration and Certificates

The server is set up so that any registered user can freely create new temporary chat channels/rooms. To register:

1. Connect to the server with your desired username.
2. Right-click on your username, and select “register”.

That’s it. However, from now on you can ONLY log into the server with that username using the certificate you created (or was autogenerated) when you first ran Mumble. So, back that certificate up!

To restore a previous certificate (e.g. because you had to reinstall mumble), you can:

• Choose to import your backup at that first step, or
• Go to “Configure->Certificate Wizard” to get the initial prompts back again.

You can also backup the certificate through the “Configure->Certificate Wizard” window.

If you need to regenerate the certificate AFTER you’ve registered, you’ll have to talk to one of the server admins (currently Alorian or Melana) to get your current registration removed on the server side.

Creating new rooms – Temporary Rooms

In order to create a new (temporary) room, your account needs to be registered with the server.

Right-click on the server name, and select “Add”. A new room will be created, and you will be automatically moved there. Useful for things like creating a party-specific chat room.

Temporary rooms will remain for as long as there is 1 person still in the room.

Creating new rooms – Permanent Rooms

Talk with one of the server admins (currently Alorian and Melana) to request the creation of a permanent channel.

Text Chat

You CAN send text chat to people in mumble, so even if you don’t have a microphone you can still listen in AND send messages back. It’s just less convenient ;).

Be aware that the message will be sent to the currently-selected person/channel, not necessarily the channel you’re in.

This is admittedly awkward in-game…you’re probably better off using in-game guild chat or party chat :(.