How to get non-delayed sound and VOIP working in ETQW?

Question

The sound in Enemy Territory: Quake wars used to work fine before, except that using the VOIP hotkey would crash it outright. Now, after some fiddling, I at first had sound that was delayed by half a minute, and now no sound at all.

Does anyone have tips on how to get VOIP working?

Answer 1

I realize I am late on this, but hopefully it will help those who come here by a generic search.

As an alternative you can use the PulseAudio suspend command which is a little more convenient once you get it going but takes a little bit of set-up.

1. Install alsa-oss if you have not already done so.

2. Then in the ETQW configuration file called etqwconfig.cfg (~/.etqwcl/base/etqwconfig.cfg) you need to make small changes.

   Note that it is inside a hidden directory, as indicated by the dot in front of the name. You need to show hidden files in your file browser in order to find it. .etqwcl should be inside your home directory. The file contains a note not to modify it directly, but I think that may be a Windows only thing.

3. Find the lines that begin with:

   seta s_alsa_lib
   seta s_alsa_pcm
   

   Change them to:

   seta s_alsa_lib "libasound.so.2"
   seta s_alsa_pcm "hw:0,0"
   

   "hw:0,0" refers to my sound card and the fact that the system calls it card 0, device 0. On a command line, type aplay -l to see your sound devices and to find out the number of your card. If you only have one sound device (such as on board sound), it will probably be 0,0.

   My config also has the following line, but I believe it to only be related to using my USB boom microphone.

   seta s_alsa_mic "plughw:1"
   

   So you installed alsa-oss and changed the two lines in etqwconfig.cfg, now you can set the launcher to not use PulseAudio.

4. Edit your launcher menu entry for Quake Wars so it has pasuspender in front of it. As an example, here is the command on my menu:

   pasuspender /usr/local/games/etqw/etqw +set r_useThreadedRenderer "4"
   

   The +set r_useThreadedRenderer "4" part is not necessary, it just tells the game to use 4 CPU cores, which my system has.

With this setup, you will not need to type extra PulseAudio related commands each time you want to play the game, and it should automatically turn PulseAudio back on when you quit the game.

Answer 2

This is a temporary fix and is a bit of a nuisance but...it works!

Before you run etqw open Terminal. (Can be found in Applications>Accessories) Run sudo killall pulseaudio then run etqw and the audio will be perfect!

Afterward you will need to start pulseaudio again if you need it.

Answer 3

You can temporarily suspend PulseAudio access while a program is running. To do this, run the program in question from the terminal, and prepend "pasuspender" to the command name.

Example:

pasuspender /usr/local/games/etqw/etqw-rthread