1.9.2: voices, and the server on Linux

1.9.2 came out on 10 October. Three things in it change how an evening goes.

Voices in the room

Until now, playing together meant a Discord call on the side, with everyone at the same volume wherever they stood. 1.9.2 puts voice chat in the game, through Steam's own voice.

It is positional. A friend within about five metres is at full volume, and their voice fades as they walk away until it is gone at about thirty. It comes from where they are standing, so you can tell which side of the camp the shouting is coming from. A member of your party who is far away, or not even loaded in your game, still comes through, centred and a little quieter, like a radio.

It starts switched off. Turn it on in the mod's menu, where there is also a volume slider and a microphone test: it records five seconds and plays them back, so you hear what the others will hear. Each player in the list has a Mute button, which only changes what you hear.

Its first real evening was 11 October, and it carried both ways.

The server on Linux

The dedicated server builds for Linux again, and from 1.9.2 every release carries it as two archives, one for x86-64 and one for ARM64. Before a release goes out, the pipeline starts each of them and waits until it says it is listening.

Unpack it, keep libSTServer.so next to urSovngardeServer, and start it from that folder with LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./urSovngardeServer. The first start writes config/STServer.ini, with the same settings as on Windows.

The parry, without its holes

The three ways a hit got through a parry, from the entry of 9 October, are all closed in this release:

• No player is number 0 any more, so nobody's hits slip past the rule unseen.
• A weapon's strike enchantment is no longer sent as a spell. Dawnbreaker's fire now stops at the blade, like the blade does.
• Only a weapon or a shield parries. A hand holding a spell, or nothing, takes the hit.

Also

• The mod is called urSovngarde all the way down now. The program is urSovngarde.exe and the server urSovngardeServer.exe. The update zip still carries a copy under the old name, so an older install, and a mod manager that still points at SkyrimTogetherVR.exe, keep working.
• The menu in the SteamVR dashboard wears the urSovngarde logo.