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Every thing leaving the country is an export. The question is whether it's a taxable export, and whether your post office workers care.

This seems like a good thing to me. I know programs like Ventrilo were a restricted export.

http://www.ventrilo.com/dlprod.php?id=1

Exact same restrictions!

In addition, with the Internet you can basically walk to your computer and email the person you just talked to halfway around the world.

Seriously, when I group with people and they have vent or Team Speak I am not amazed that most of them do not have any relationship except with their mom upstairs. When my girlfriend comes on the microphone at least half the time they make lewd remarks. I am using a decent headset is there a way to filter out background noise or make it just broadcast my voice?

Skype is noisy - period. If you listen to most podcasts that try to carry on "phone interviews" over Skype, you'll soon realize that they're all noisy, too.

Try downloading a copy of Ventrilo and running a small server and allowing your guests to log into that. It's a little less convenient than Skype, but the audio quality is limited only by the quality of your equipment.

Some MMORPG friends and myself use Ventrilo as our voice chat method. We tried using Skype the other night and not only is it adversely affected by the presence of other net traffic and high CPU use, it was N-O-I-S-Y, and so after about 3 minutes we switched back to Ventrilo and it was blissful.

Screw $0.02/minute, Ventrilo is free and much less likely to be wiretapped!

Why don't you just set up Teamspeak or Roger Wilco or Ventrilo or something?

If you want to run WoW in linux, it runs, with a very few small bugs, faster than it does on a windows box with Cedega from http://www.transgaming.com/. What I want to know, is when http://www.ventrilo.com/ will be putting out a linux client so it's worth using Cedega for MMO games. Let's get on them, guys!

Yeah, good point.
I play Q3 online with dozens of other players. We use Ventrilo to comunicate.
http://www.ventrilo.com/

So I was asking the others, why hasn't a better game than Quake 3 been produced?
We have seen some nice games; Far Cry, Unreal Tournament, Doom 3, Painkiller.
Each of these holds the gaming community's attention for about 2 months, then it is back to Q3.

The others told me that they had tried all these other games, but they always returned to Q3.
No one had a good explanation. Quake 3 is just better.

It seems to me that when the game producers produce a game, they had ought to try to produce someting better than the last game, or at least as good.

Why hasn't a better game than Q3 arrived?

I think it is because they, the game producers, don't know how.

Quake 3 Arena's success was a bit of an accident. There was no story at all. Single player was a series of 1 vs 1 encounters with various odd oponents. The graphics were superb. The physics were awesome. The game was entertaining, but was a hi-tech arcade.

Then evolved the internet.

Suddenly Quake 3 was a worldwide phenomenon. Networking and computers were judged by their ability to handle Q3 multiplayer. Quake 3 became an important part of our day. I regularly play with people who are in the United Kingdom (sleepless I presume). I am in North Am.
Q3 gave us the ability to become part of a different universe, one with strict rules of physics, but also fantastic cartoon environment. It was like being a character in a comic book.

It still is this way. No other game provides the equal experience.

I assume the pursuit of ever more spiffier graphics has consumed all of the time and money of the game producers. The game producers run out of resources before the game is actually done. There may not be enough resources on the planet to produce a game as good as Quake3 with the graphics of Doom3.

And, of course, graphics don't matter. Players turn down the graphics regularly. Gameplay counts, graphics don't.

The cartoon physics of Quake 3 is what is important. Consistent behavior of all the various objects.
As time has gone by, this object behavior has been scrutinized, critisied, evaluated, and modified.

It a stunning burst of genious, John Carmack made Quake 3 modifiable by users. A standard user with a standard PC could hope to create maps, models, and even new games with the Quake 3 resources.

Then came the semi-professional modifiers.

How should the Quake 3 Rocket Launcher really work? How fast should the projectile fly? How powerful should the blast from the rocket be? What splash effects of the rocket should occur?

How should the Quake 3 Armor work? How should the various types of armor resist the various types of weaponry? How much armor damage occurs with each strike of each weapon?

How far should the grenade bounce? How long should the Rail-Gun recharge be? How big and how fast should the plasma ball be? Is there really a need for the BFG at all?

Days, weeks, months, and years have been spent arguring and refining these concepts. Each successive argument consumes the previous argment, and evolves. Sort of like computer and software evolution.
Eventually the objects in the game become so argued and evolved that they become real. The objects don't really exist, just as software doesn't exist. But in the minds of people who use these imaginary software objects, the objects are used as if they are real.

This is real game development.

Pity the poor game producers who must toil at creating the ever more spiffy and scary looking monster or hallway.

Quake 3 will remain the best game until a better game arrives.
That better game will evolve from Quake 3. Which means to evolve in terms of gameplay, not graphics.

What Id Software should do is to consume, incorporate, embrace, and extend the work of the modifiers who have in

I find ventrilo better suited to games.
It also supports a good few more people in a conversation and doesn't have the irritation of working somewhat like a phone (rather, it uses channels)

One of the PCs on my home network hosts a Ventrilo http://ventrilo.com/ server (very minor overhead.) My group of friends installed the small client software and connect to a password protect "chat" room.

Push-to-talk and voice-activated modes are offered. The client software offers enough options to (possibly) intimidate new users, but once configured it is as easy as it gets.

However, a previous post mentioned the use of AIM to communicate with troops overseas. Many IM clients are now integrating voice/video communication. I believe MSN offers voice and video, and I think AIM has voice as well.

For PC voice communication, I suggest using a decent mic in a fixed location as well as a pair of headphones. The new Logitech webcam I have offers cool face-tracking features as well as an integrated mic.

Question to all: anyone aware of a Windows VOIP app that integrates strong encryption?? I believe Nero's SIPPS http://www.nero.com/us/632232585951420.html/ offers this feature, but I'm looking for an Open Source product. Free would be nice. Anyone??

Just mentioning that skype is a cpu hog. This matters because it means it's not great for playing recent video games.

A great alternative is teamspeak which lets groups of players talk. Another alternative (I haven't tried this one) is Ventrillo.

Skype is great if you just want to use your computer for wireless chit chat.

I might as well plug the Jabra BT250 bluetooth headset while I'm at it. Wireless headset with up to 8 hours of talk time. I use this plus teamspeak to give me the freedom to wander my house and not loose contact with my gaming buddies. It also works nicely with my powerbook and my cell phone.

When I play and use voice comm, I use Ventrilo. When I (or some of my colleagues) work from home, we use Ventrilo to conference, it works very well!
Ventrilo is also free.

If you don't mind a bit more messing around and can deal mentally with the stress of not actually having something that "makes calls", check out TeamSpeak or Ventrilo, both great voice communications packages.

I don't get what's so awesome about a peer-to-peer voice communications system. The fact that its encrypted sure is neat, but it doesn't seem to be a quantum leap over most of the other stuff we have now. Its not like a regular p2p system where you're going to get massive advantages - each voice call is different so its not like your client is going to be able to search these peers to get improved performance.

Surely, to decrease latency, you're going to connect directly between the peers anyway - hence, 'p2p', but it seems the marketing department are just focusing on the phrase 'p2p' to try and encourage more users to check it out. I found the explanation of Intelligent Routing on their p2p explained page a bit vague.

Anyway. Looks good for the newbies.

Also, there's a bunch of posts earlier whining about how Skype will be soon full of spyware. I'm not, and have never been, a Kazaa user so I'm not sure at which point the spyware stuff was introduced, but I feel its worth pointing out that the guys making Skype are NOT the same guys that currently manage Kazaa these days.

My friends and I play CounterStrike pretty regularly; using headsets we've been known to carry on lengthy discussions as we go around killing each other. I'll have to agree that giving your girlfriend a copy of CounterStrike, and a headset, might not be the most romantic thing, though. (Although my friend got his girlfriend a copy, and she's gotten pretty good.)

Anyway, we eventually got sick of the poor sound quality in game, as well as the fact that you can only talk to your own team, and only while you're alive. We ended up using Ventrilo, a nifty little voice chat program. (Although you'll need to find a server capable of running the server.) Ventrilo will let you bind a key to the 'transmit' feature; it's great for in-game talk, but it's also a great all-around chat program. I've spent hours sitting at my computer working, and chatting (voice) with friends. I hate talking on telephones even more -- you could even say I have a paranoia of them -- but I love Ventrilo. And unlike the phone, you're not paying by the minute, so you have no motivation to want to talk unceasingly and hang up the second you don't have anything to say.

Not quite a game, though. Although I think Yahoo has a ton of web-based games, don't they?

one tip, though: have characters that you only play when you and your girlfriend are *together*, so you stay at pretty much the same levels. you would not believe how boring a good game can become when your friend is "letting you level" by bringing you to some place *they* feel is fun, and letting you get kills from a distance. ruined dungeon siege for me.

Pick a game that you two could enjoy. Fire up your favourite voice chat proggie (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Roger Wilco, etc.) and frag away.

The game doesn't necessarily need headset support or anything like that. So long as you have a third party proggie to handle the mess.

- shazow

Only the client is windows only. However, the developer is currently working on Mac OS X and linux clients.Ventrilo has servers for just about any OS, including Mac OS X, Free/Netbsd, solaris, and linux, not just windows. As fluor2 stated, has excellent sound quality(providing you have a decent sound card).

He seems to mean Ventrilo - Scalable Voice Communication Software. Anyone have experience?

Use ventrilo. free and has a few different ports. My clan uses it when we play eve-online

There are several similar applications out there, the oldest I can remember off-hand is Speak Freely which does secure p2p.

Right now we use Ventrilo internally at work - it's not secure, but we can do conferencing in super quality with VERY low bandwidth! It's excellent!

I highly recommend Ventrilo.

// EvilJohn