VOIP

Speak for yourself. I find pings, labels, and the strategic whiteboard more than make up for the lack of VOIP.

But in any case, the only advantage integrated VOIP has over TS/Mumble is that there's no effort required on the player's part in order to start using it. All they need to do is join a server like they normally would, and they are instantly connected.

However, in every other aspect, external VOIP clients tend to be superior. The quality is better, control over who you can hear is better, etc. This is why I'm suggesting using something like the Mumble command line commands. Say you join a game server, if you have it enabled, the game server would automatically send you the link to the appropriate Mumble server (and channel, for the correct team), which PA would then pass on to Mumble for you. As a result, you would be connected with no effort on your part, and from there on out it's just standard voice chat. Leave the game, PA leaves the Mumble server.

Of course, there are plenty of details to work out (such as preventing players from ghosting), but most of these problems occur in integrated VOIP games too.

Also, using Steam's VOIP tools is undesirable, as it requires Steamworks integration, which is already something we want to avoid in PA.

Interesting, but low priority.

Also "Kiddie's syndrome" may hit hard.

VOIP will require groups and filters - to talk only with your allies, enemies, particular person. It will also require ability to ignore someone who only producing noise or is distracting. Also it will increase number of dummies speaking in non-english into international match.

In order to not inventing the well, it's rather better to use well-established solutions, like Mumble integration or using Steam VOIP.

There are plenty of good third party solutions for VoIP. If people cannot figure out how to use one of them I doubt that they will spend much time on PA.

I would rather see a fleshed out whiteboard and marker system that works fluidly with the UI.

If we could have a VOIP client bundled with the game and controllable from inside the game UI, then that would be great. If we could have something that is bundled with the game already, and controllable with the in-game UI, then it will greatly decrease the barrier towards using it.

20v20 battles is going to involve alot of randoms, there should be directional VOIP (1 on 1 conversations within the game, and also some kind of team voicechat in the game, something like proximity voice so perhaps it could be that you talk to all the players fighting on your planet at the moment.

So for example,

Planet X is under attack, there are 2 allies of you and you say something like

"I need an airstrike on that nuclear facility right now"

The player in specific where you talking too, would get a very tiny minimal notification in the top of his screen saying that someone needs help and hears your voice. That how it could work, it's gonna be very hard to make it right though, but it should be possible.

VOIP sounds like a lot of work. However, the answer is very simple. Just go with a third party solution, because they have already figured it all out.

And if ingame voip were to be included, please make it easy to disable.

Nothing is worse then some kid screaming for nothing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T37pmuGEzrc#t=0m09s

I love the idea of not having to use teamspeak and arrange things ahead of time. To have it built into the game so you can chat to your ally (and the rest of the people in the game can't hear) would be very, very covenient. If it was that easy everybody would use voice chat but the sad fact is 99% of people don't bother. If you built it into the game I'd imagine 75% still wouldn't bother but it'd be a marked improvement.

What rock have you been living under molloy? 99% of multiplayer games these days offer voice chat, and about 10% of them are actually used by the community.

I will probably never use internal VOIP if PA modability allows us to make server mod that tries to connect players to TS server through ts3server://

That's a pretty big 'IF' you got there buddy.

Mike

I'm surprised you think that way nobrains. As at least a previous eve player you should be well versed in assuming that the game and it's official functionality is there to be substituted, circumvented and outright disregarded.

^^^ This is so crucial. It needs to be easy or people won't use it in practice, and collaboration will be sacrificed.

It's going to be crucial for those times when you're trying to coordinate sophisticated attacks between players, or brainstorm on strategy that isn't simple enough to type.

There have got to be some easy ways to work something built-in with the JavaScript UI. Neutrino mentioned that it may come for free from using fmod, but I guess we'll see.

I think it's worth the effort.

FAF has a nice integration going on with mumble

World in conflict had a very good voip. I could understand 95 % of the people talking very well. The rest must have had some shitty mic or just talk not clear. You could disable the talking of certain players or a one-button disable all. Worked fine.

I agree that if you dont integrate it, most people wont use it. Besides the fact that you want to talk to the ones who dont have a mic too. Those people actually dont bother joining an external ts, mumble or whatever. So it makes it much easier to talk to teammates.
If it is not much hassle to integrate, which if I understand corectly is not the case, then I see only good reason to integrate it.

I really do hope there is ingame VOIP. Skype, mumble, teamspeak etc is nice, but it's not useful for pub games (which will be most of my games probably).

Between Mumble, Skype, Ventrilo, Team Speak, and Steam's (I am assuming that Valve will let Uber sell PA though steam.) built in voice chat feature I don't think its really critical that PA have built in VOIP. It would be nice if PA had it but there are plenty of other ways to get voice chat going over the internet so its not really critical IMO.

This. They have set it up where it does everything for you. It starts up when the program starts, automatically puts you into teams to be able to chat with your teammates, and easily bring up a menu to mute annoying people are some of the key points. It acts almost identically as Valve's in game VOIP. No mess, no fuss, just push a button to talk or have it sound activated.

All Uber need is a mumble server, which I think they already have.