Not Playing Elite Dangerous Much Anymore Due to Technical Issues - Can You Help?

[Daniel Cloudsifter]

First and foremost, the problem's I'm having are not in ANY way related to FDEV or Elite Dangerous itself. No, the issue is with the following parties: Voice Attack 2 and Steel Series GG (for an Arctis 7 headset).

Some of you may have seen a post, that I later cancelled, a couple of months ago asking if the audio mix was off for anyone else - e.g. thruster boosts, traffic controllers, and Galnet reader barely audible while everything else was really loud. That was the just the first symptom of an issue that got worse and has nothing to do with Elite.

I have an Arctis 7 Steelseries headset that used with ED and VoiceAttack. About two weeks after upgrading to VoiceAttack 2, the problems started. First, the GG app wouldn't open. It was in the system tray, but I couldn't open it. It also clearly wasn't working correctly, because I received no audio via the Sonar settings (which is necessary if you want the Equalizer). Trying to play without GG caused the audio issues I first reported. I was able to temporarily fix the problem by following instructions they've had posted for a year - close GG, run GG with admin rights, close GG, then re-open it with your normal user access and it should work. And it did... for awhile.

Then GG stopped opening again. Then the Sonar channels started to fail (or, more accurately, were clearly conveying sound but just not to me). Then only the basic Game audio channel would work; I couldn't even have the separate channel for communication which is why I bought this headset in the first place! And now if I even leave the GG app open, it will randomly reassign my default audio device from speakers to my headset even when my headset isn't on.

I've worked with SteelSeries tech support extensively for the last six weeks, in an email chain that is around 20 messages long. It looks like the problem may be with the new .NET 4.8 that VoiceAttack 2 requires. Don't know, but that's the only culprit (and yes, they had me run a repair on all the .NET installs).

Everything works fine when I'm logged in under my admin account, but in my in main account (which only has user access, no admin rights) it fails. I've spent 27 years getting applications to work under user accounts when the programmers were too lazy to accomodate anything but admin rights, but I've never seen anything like this. I don't expect any help from VoiceAttack or HCS Voicepacks as they both expect you to run as admin to avoid issues. That position is just insane.

Anyway, if anyone else is having issues with GG, using VoiceAttack 2, and running Windows 11 let me know. Even better, let me know if you fixed the issue (running with admin rights doesn't count). For now, I won't be playing much. I can play without VoiceAttack... but not having decent sound (speakers aren't as good as my headset (when it works properly)) is just a buzzkill.

 

[DjVortex]

Since I have no experience whatsoever about either software (and had never even heard of them before), I may be speaking completely out of my ass here, and there are probably people much more experienced at this than me, but I would just like to describe a somewhat related problem I had, and the solution to it. It might have absolutely nothing to do with the problems you are experiencing and the solution might not work at all, but who knows.

I recently got a new work laptop (with Windows 11 installed), and it had the problem that the microphone was really quiet. All the volume settings everywhere were at maximum, and there was nothing else to ramp up any more, but it still was really quiet. (This was a problem because I often need to be in Teams calls for my work, so people barely being able to hear me is a big problem.)

From the myriads of suggestions I found online, one particular one that I found worked like a miracle: The suggestion was to replace the Realtek sound driver with Microsoft's default one. I tried that, and what do you know, the microphone started working perfectly. Loud and clear.

Now, I have absolutely no idea if this will help your case, but decided to write about it anyway. If the problems are with the microphone, who knows. (Also disclaimer: Since this is messing up with drivers, do it at your own risk. It should be quite safe, but who knows about these things. The inner workings of Windows are sometimes mysterious. I suggest at a minimum creating a restore point before doing it.)

 

[Daniel Cloudsifter]

Since I have no experience whatsoever about either software (and had never even heard of them before), I may be speaking completely out of my ass here, and there are probably people much more experienced at this than me, but I would just like to describe a somewhat related problem I had, and the solution to it. It might have absolutely nothing to do with the problems you are experiencing and the solution might not work at all, but who knows.

I recently got a new work laptop (with Windows 11 installed), and it had the problem that the microphone was really quiet. All the volume settings everywhere were at maximum, and there was nothing else to ramp up any more, but it still was really quiet. (This was a problem because I often need to be in Teams calls for my work, so people barely being able to hear me is a big problem.)

From the myriads of suggestions I found online, one particular one that I found worked like a miracle: The suggestion was to replace the Realtek sound driver with Microsoft's default one. I tried that, and what do you know, the microphone started working perfectly. Loud and clear.

Now, I have absolutely no idea if this will help your case, but decided to write about it anyway. If the problems are with the microphone, who knows. (Also disclaimer: Since this is messing up with drivers, do it at your own risk. It should be quite safe, but who knows about these things. The inner workings of Windows are sometimes mysterious. I suggest at a minimum creating a restore point before doing it.)

Thanks for your suggestion. It won't help with the headset/GG app issue, but it might improve my sound using the speakers. I'm using Realtek drivers, provided by the motherboard manufacturer; perhaps the generic Windows drivers will work better.

Any suggestions are appreciated, save for "just run as admin." I've been in tech support for 30 years and running NT class Windows at "user level" at home and at work since NT 4.0; since Windows 2000, there has been no excuse for a program to not work under user level permissions. That some small companies would still recommend that - 25 years later - is egregious.

 

[DjVortex]

Any suggestions are appreciated, save for "just run as admin."

If it works ok when run as admin but not when run as a regular user, it might be something that the change in the sound driver could fix. I don't know. It helped in my case at least. Could be worth a try.

 

[Daniel Cloudsifter]

Just a quick update to close out this thread: my issue fixed itself (GG app working fine now under user account; full channel access again) after I updated my Nvidia drivers (I always do a full clean install). So I guess the issue was caused by a conflict with the Nvidia 576.52 drivers and was fixed when I upgraded to 576.88.

So problem solved. Only posting on the rare chance someone else has this incredibly annoying problem pop up.

 

[Cmdr Alphonso Dementia]

I tried GG a couple of years ago and found it very touchy. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. I went to Touch Portal, where you can make your own screens and do what ever you need to do. Not as fancy looking as GG, but it works reliably.

 

[Daniel Cloudsifter]

I tried GG a couple of years ago and found it very touchy. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. I went to Touch Portal, where you can make your own screens and do what ever you need to do. Not as fancy looking as GG, but it works reliably.

Um... are we talking about the same app? I'm referring to GG, the app for controlling the SteelSeries headset. I'd be fine with not using it at all, but without it and Sonar (where they moved the equalizer) ED sounds like crap without it: traffic controllers, Galnet reader, and boosts are barely audible while COVAS and weapons fire is booming.

I can play without the headset, using standard speakers, but it doesn't sound as good. More importantly, I need to use my headset for VoiceAttack 2 and the 10+ voices I purchased over the years.

Also, during the period where GG was screwed up, the head set starting having issues even when it wasn't running. The headset has two separate channels - one for chat, one for games/media/everything else - and the chat channel stopped working, leaving only the Game channel. Sometimes even the Game channel didn't work. It made my Teams meetings for work (nothing to do with ED) extra fun.

I'm aware of other touch screen apps for control (I think it had a different name) and thought they were need (wasn't that Game Glass?), but never bothered with it.