Anyone still using the old voice system for landline calls?

[Ross Carlson]

Hi all,

As most of you have probably seen, I am beginning to plan for retiring VRC, and enhancing vSTARS and vERAM to be more suitable for top-down controlling and for controlling tower cab positions. I'm currently working on restructuring the vSTARS code in preparation for this future update, and I'm running into a problem with the old voice system code library, which is known as VVL.

VVL is no longer used for air-to-ground VHF comms, since we all use AFV for that, but you can still use the VVL system for landline calls. As I was running into these issues, I realized that I'm probably wasting my time, since I assume most facilities use TeamSpeak or Discord for their coordination, rather than using the override and intercom calls built into vSTARS and vERAM. They generally don't even work properly if you don't have port forwarding set up in your router anyway.

So, my inclination is to remove all remnants of VVL from vSTARS and vERAM, and let everyone use TS or Discord for landline calls, and/or use AFV for landlines if that functionality is added to AFV in the future. However, I wanted to make sure my assumption is correct, and nobody is using (or very few people are using) VVL for landline calls.

Please let me know your thoughts, especially FEs.

Thanks!

[David Stone]

Ross, while I would agree as far as intra-facility communications go it is (or would be) still useful for inter-facility comms. Something for thought.

[Ryan Pitt]

Ross, while I would agree as far as intra-facility communications go it is (or would be) still useful for inter-facility comms. Something for thought.

I agree with David. Intrafacility is all done on TS or Discord. I would like for there to eventually be interfacility call options.

[Dan Michael Bonaga]

agreed in terms of the above, while it's not used as of now by most ARTCCs, it's not used because of AFV, not because controllers don't find landine in the client not useful

[Kyle Sanders]

The VLL system in these clients are setup but not used by me or my facility. I don't like the old way of setting these up and have an idea to make the system more useable and realistic in mind.

So right now we use Discord to communicate intra/inter-facility but it is a pain.

Funny that this should be posted today as just earlier I posted a topic asking for collaboration with this project.
https://forums.vatsim.net/topic/31317-virtual-landline-software-development/

[Noah Perlman]

Ross, while I would agree as far as intra-facility communications go it is (or would be) still useful for inter-facility comms. Something for thought.

Agreed. Although it might be something "cool" to include but if it's integrated or not I will be happy either way.

[Ross Carlson]

The more I think about it, the more I realize that landline stuff (really ALL comms stuff) should be handled by AFV, primarily because FEs are already managing a database of facility-specific configuration data for AFV, and it would be good to keep that all in one place. We'll just need to have some inter-app communication happening between the controller clients and the AFV client to keep the text frequencies in sync, since all text comms will still flow through the controller client.

[Matthew Bartels]

Landline calls seemed to not be used much due to the system not working most of the time. If the other controller wasn’t correctly configured the landline call would fail.

If there’s a way through AFV to get VCCS working reliably I’d much rather use that over Teamspeak / Discord as it adds to the immersion.

[Josh Glottmann]

If there’s a way through AFV to get VCCS working reliably I’d much rather use that over Teamspeak / Discord as it adds to the immersion.

To add to this. I would definitely try using the landline if it worked. I think it's a bit more "organized" than sometimes having to search for a specific person in a Discord/Teamspeak channel. Being able to just call/override someone would be nice during events, especially inter-facility.

[Lee Sacharin]

One issue is a lack of standard or preferred (order) method on how LLCalls should be handled.  Depending on the ARTCC (and the controller), some have Discord, others TS, and some facilities with both.  Many ARTCC's do not share their login's with Tier1 neighbors or locally have a process where that info is published for easy use.  Of course there is private/atc chat functions and we all know the pros/cons of each.  In a more perfect world (that's what we strive for...) global guidance would dictate policy and method (i.e. use (1) client intercom, (2) TS, (3) Discord, (4) Private Chat, (5) ATC Chat...or whatever the order may be.