My best friend is moving to Florida:(. I’m looking into a way that we could still play D&D over the Internet using a web cam. Unfortunately I know nothing about web cams. Anyone have any good advice? Could anyone point my in the right direction?
My only experience was with Logitech’s QuickCam, but that was in the era of 28mb modems. The QuickCams were only used in the office intranet so I don’t know what to recommend in your case. A lot has changed since then.
The guys at C-net recently did a recent review:
http://electronics.cnet.com/electronics/search/0,10126,0-6613936-1302-0,00.html
So, check the info, compare and shop around.
Oops, drop that added “recent” word there!
[sub]need some sleep![/sub]
anyone else??
Try NetMeeting…it now works with MSN Messenger, so you can place a video call to someone on your buddy list. To run NetMeeting alone, go to the run command line and type “conf”…
are you able to hear audio with this?
Some friends and I once tried this very thing (Internet D&D), and tried NetMeeting, but found that it worked less than satisfactorially (I don’t remember exactly what the problems were, though). We eventually settled on a program called Firetalk, which supported sound, text chat, and a whiteboard (essential for drawing maps and such). We didn’t try using a webcam with either program, so I can’t say how well (if at all) that was supported.
For that matter, depending on the computers of all involved, it might just be easier to use one of the recent D&D-based computer games for this purpose. I’ve yet to play it myself, but I understand that Neverwinter Nights was designed with this exact situation in mind.
Messenger limits the size of some streams on some cams - you could join the (non adult) section of iFriends and use their cam s/w - it’s basic but allows your own drivers to control of pic size etc.
As for webcam: If you have a video camera you’ll get much better images by using a composite video-in card (as video cams tend to have lower lux levels etc) - or if you have a DV cam get a Firewire card and capture through that. I find webcams need quite a lot of light to get a decent image. Also, if you’re using a 56kps modem, don’t expect more than 2fps, 1fps if you want press-to-talk sound (which is generally poor quality).
Not Messenger, I meant Netmeeting - Also, Netmeeting will disable DirectDraw and prevent PowerDVD from playing DVD’s on some systems. There’s a workaround on the 'net somewhere. Because of this I don’t like Netmeeting, though yes, it has audio.