Voice Communications

Our team needs to evaluate different voice communication software applications and select one. There are programmers on our team, if we can't find one we like, we shouldn't overlook the possibility of writing one.

I'm not very good at reading the screen for text messages while I'm gaming. Other people seem to be better at it than I am. My fight/flight instinct gives me tunnel vision or something. When we're all in the same room, it's one thing, but I want to get to the point where we are gaming from home over the Internet. Voice communications will be important.

In particular, I would like software that works well with my Tacticalboard. It has a groups of controls called the Chatterbox. It has buttons to allow be to speak directly with one of up to four team members, the entire team, or all players. It has a volume control, as well. The buttons come up as F1 through F6, and they light up after they have been hit.

TeamSound

Tim and I have played around with TeamSound a bit, which is what came with my Tacticalboard. It does not exactly have an intuitive user interface. We did finally get it to work, once we got around my weird networking issues. It claims to be "lag free", but in my opinion, it has an intolerable amount of lag. I also can't figure out how to make it work with the Chatterbox controls of my Tacticalboard.

Lag: The lag is very bad, about 1 and a half seconds. I hope the other packages are better than that.

Tacticalboard: I think I have discovered, in a way, how to use TeamSound with my Tacticalboard. TeamSound has a command & control section, which includes a "when pressed, join channel". It is not exactly what I had imagined, and in reality, it won't be as useful as I had hoped. The first problem is that I would have to coordinate with my team member to move into that channel with them. The second problem is that I would not be able to hear the other team members anymore, and neither would the person who came into that channel with me. That makes it very cumbersome and not very useful during combat.

Server: The server works reasonably. There can be a password for the server, but not for individual channels.

User Interface: The user interface sucks, but I eventually figured out what I needed to.

Roger Wilco

From what I can tell, Roger Wilco is probably the most popular software in this niche. I have loaded it and tried it out, but I have not tested it with anyone else, so I don't know if it works or how well. One advantage is that there is a FreeBSD dedicated server available for it, but I haven't tried that, either. The user interface is not real great here, either.

Lag: I haven't tested this yet.

Tacticalboard: I don't see any way to utilize the Chatterbox functions of my Tacticalboard with Roger Wilco.

Server: The server works reasonably. Dedicated servers are available, including one for FreeBSD (not yet tested). Passwords appear to be for channels, not for servers. Roger Wilco has a server listing feature, which means people can find your server in a public list (probably good for people with dynamic IP addresses), and it may also mean one can create a channel on someone else's server. It does not appear to be possible to join or even be aware of multiple channels.

User Interface: The user interface isn't real great here, either. Particularly annoying is the relocation of the mouse pointer when selecting window tabs. There are several buttons intended to open a web page, and they don't work right.

Game Voice

This is the one made by Microsoft. It is a hardware/software combination. I bought one of these a while back, but I never found anyone to use it with. I don't even recall how the software user interface worked. It has the same general controls as the voice controls on the Tacticalboard.

BattleCom

It would appear that this product was bought out by Microsoft to make way for GameVoice. Figures. There is still an unofficial site where I can download the software, though. It actually seems to be very good. The user interface is a bit more sensible, with very good explanations of features.

Lag: Running a local test, lag seems to be about a half second, which is much better than TeamSound. I can almost tolerate a half second.

Tacticalboard: This is actually the closest I've seen to being useable with the Tacticalboard. It has hotkey functions for switching channels, but more importantly, it has hotkey functions for "whispering" to an individual player. The only trouble is the lights with the Tacticalboard, which stay lit on that button until another of the buttons is hit. If I can ignore the lights, I may be able to use this software.

Server: It has a server, along with a wizard to set it up. There is also a hierarchical server-channel-user display like TeamSound.

User Interface: The user-interface is the best I've seen so far. It has wizards to step you through the settings, so you actually know what they are. Everything is laid out in a relatively sensible manner. One drawback is that many of the functions take a couple seconds to respond. I'm not sure what is going on during these times.

Our Own Solution

If I don't find anything available to be adequate, I may just start developing my own solution. Apparently there is some support for real-time voice chat in DirectX 8. I'll have to look into that. To pull this off, some skill with audio input and audio compression would be necessary.