topics

Overview
The Microsoft V-Chat team is pleased to announce the release of a beta version of V-Chat 2.0. V-Chat continues to be an exciting chat client filled with rich and engaging 3D chat rooms. We have made major performance improvements and added new features to give users a richer chat experience.

V-Chat 2.0 improves your 3D-chat experience by addressing your comments about V-Chat 1.1. In response, we've added the following features:

Uses any IRC/IRCX server - You can now connect to any IRC chat server.
Room Creation - You can create your own V-Chat rooms and tell your friends to join you.
Portals - You can now travel between V-Chat rooms without exiting V-Chat by moving your avatar through a portal or by clicking on it. You can also customize portals in your homespace for easy access to your favorite V-Chat rooms.
Automatic Artwork Downloading - You no longer need to manually download artwork before you can enter a V-Chat room. Whenever you visit a new V-Chat room, V-Chat will download the artwork for you.

Minimum System Requirements

A personal computer with a Pentium-based 100 MHz or higher processor
16MB of RAM and 11MB of hard-disk space
Windows 95 with DirectX 5.0 (or 3.0) or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3
Super VGA video-display card
14.4K-baud modem (28.8K recommended)
Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device
Optional: sound card and speakers

Installing and Getting Started

DirectX must be installed on your computer before you can run V-Chat 2.0. If you haven't installed DirectX, go to the Microsoft DirectX installation page and follow the instructions to download and install DirectX 5.0. Be sure to restart your machine after installing DirectX.
After installing DirectX, download and install the V-Chat 2.0 Beta (approximately 3.3MB). If there is a previous version of V-Chat on your machine, you do not need to uninstall it before installing the beta version of V-Chat 2.0. All previous versions of V-Chat will continue to work after installing V-Chat 2.0.
Start V-Chat 2.0. Click the Start button, point to Programs, point to Microsoft V-Chat, and then click Microsoft V-Chat 2.0. When you first log on to V-Chat, you are in your homespace. To begin chatting, move your avatar through or click on a portal to go to a V-Chat room.

Bug Reporting
We urge you to report any bugs you find in the beta version of V-Chat 2.0, but please include the following information when you do report a bug:

The exact steps required to reproduce this bug. For example:
1. Start V-Chat.
2. In the homespace, move your avatar through the portal that says "Portal to Lobby."
3. Nothing happens (I expected to go to the Lobby).

Also, try to reproduce the bug a few times on your own. If you can reproduce it, it's more likely that we can reproduce it and try to fix it. If you can't reproduce it, it makes it more difficult to find a solution.

What type of system are you using?

Include any error message that appears when the bug occurred.

You can download the readme.txt file containing late-breaking news and known V-Chat issues from here. Please send all your bug reports to vchatbug@microsoft.com. For peer-to-peer discussions on V-Chat 2.0, visit our V-Chat public newsgroup.

Feedback
If you have any suggestions on how to improve V-Chat, or feedback on the beta version of V-Chat, please send them to vchatsug@microsoft.com.

Disclaimer
The information on this web site discusses a beta release of a Microsoft product. This information is provided as-is and is subject to change without notice. No formal product support is available from Microsoft for this beta product.