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Best Voice Chat Software For Gaming?
a-freeman writes "I frequently play Everquest and Quake III with some close friends that (now) live far away, and we've been looking for a solid voice-chat package to encourage trash-talking and taunting during our raid/frag sessions.
We have variously tried Roger Wilco, TeamSound, TeamTalk, and Microsoft's Sidewinder GameVoice, and all of them have various limitations. TeamTalk has the best latency and sound quality but poor compatibility, TeamSound has terrible latency and requires lots of firewall holes, GameVoice requires a .net passport and Windows Messenger, and Roger Wilco is horribly unstable.
This is a fairly simple problem, and I refuse to believe that these are the best-of-breed solutions. Can anyone recommend a solution that they are pleased with?"
I highly recommend Ventrilo.
// EvilJohn
Less Talk, More Beer.
I know that quite a few of my friends that play America's Army: Online use a program called TeamSpeak from http://www.teamspeak.org . I can't vouch for its stability, but I haven't heard any complains from them.
For those that care, there is even a Linux client and server.
Jared Lash
The Moo went "Cow!"
After the Teamspeak fiasco (they pulled one of those "forced updates" where all the servers just shut down and required everyone move to a new user database setup) 90% of the gaming tribes and clans switched over to Ventrilo. It works great.
i figure i have 3000 minutes (nights and weekends) and three way calling....
sadly, i have to wear my cell phone ear piece under my headphones (which cover my entire ear) but it works...
also DO NOT LET ANYONE see you in this setup. its quite embarassing.
my chat in America's Army (Pipeline map)
"dork 1 to dork 2 enemies at secondary door...203 them"
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
I like TeamSpeak 2. Only the server's UDP port 8767 must be accessible, and the latest release candidate achieves excellent results with the open codec Speex. Both client and server are available for Windows and Linux.
It is a requirement not a limitation. If you are really trying to avoid using any Microsoft service, then why play games on Windows?
Everyone buy a mobile phone, get into a super-expensive cross-border conference call and duct tape the phone to your head.
It's the perfect solution I tells ya!
More importantly, is there a free and open solution that has code available and no restrictive licence?
All of the solutions people have pointed so far are leech-ware given that this is not something that anyone *should* pay for.
Hell, I'm almost thinking about starting such an open-source project myself...
We've used Teamspeak alot. It's stable and free.
Teamspeak supports Windows & Linux. It now uses the speex codec.
http://www.freebsd.org
Why bother?
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
but I've been using Roger Wilco for BF1942/RS games with buddies and it's been pretty stable.
How about, get two Xboxes, sign into a private room and use those to talk. For whatever reason, the Xbox voice-ip works really well. If I actually used the phone more often, that's what I would try to do.
& I wish I knew the password to your heart . . . &
ventrilo is my choice over a second place teamspeak, the sound fidelity is much clearer, other than that both are good
I know you're talking about PC's, but xbox live is totally fun and voice is very stable. You should all buy xbox's and sign up for live.
My clan members meet up on Yahoo Messenger first in a chat room for ourselves, then use the voice feature. Works a treat.
Get Xbox Live.
... since the entire service was designed around voice communications to begin with, it works REMARKABLY well.
No, seriously
All Half-Life games now have a very nice voice-chat feature. In fact, I don't think games like Natural Selection would be anywhere near as fun without it.
I suppose if there's one alternative, it becomes the best by default.
(Yes, I know, Macs are a rather expensive way to game, but I'm not actually the one doing it, just asking on behalf of my housemates.)
...you need to change the game(s) you play to half-life (or a mod of). the in-game voice is perfect if you have a mic you know works.
Different codecs to control quality and no latency problems. It even supports the MS Sidewinder Gamevoice device.
Roger Wilco is NOT unstable.
The problem lies in GameSpy and their Lacing of RW with Shit. Go look for 'rw_mk1c.exe' on some FTP Searches and such, that is the last version (That I know of) that Resounding made before fucking GSI came in and fucked it all up. I have never ONCE had Mark1c crash on me, and I know of no one else who has either. But stay the fuck away from the versions after it, I.E. Mark 1d and such, They are the tainted ones.
(Score:0, Interesting)
After playing CS and DOD with integrated voice communication, I can't stand not having it.
I'm using msn 6.0 and i must tell you, Microsoft did one hell of a job. I'm behind a FreeBSD router/server and now I can voice chat and sendfiles. Everything is working. Without IPMasquerading shit and you know what i tried. I installed msn 6.0 and all my problems were solved. Even the voice quality is beter then i have with my normal phone line. I play Quake3 and warcraft3 both with team m8's and/or against friends so we can shout eachother to smithereens :) Dont you just love the old rocket in the belly trick and you can laugh and the other one hears it. Nothing can beat that :)
Check my site: http://pixel.pagina.nl
I have friends up to 6 states away that I know IRL, and we gamed when we lived close using a standared phone. Now I have Verizons free long distance plan, which is like, 45 or something a month. I'd say I easily play about 40+ hours of gaming during a week, so thats a small price to pay. Plus, its nice to be able to call relatives "for free". I have found one person that I met on Bnet that I call, but it took a few months (and some Wilco chatting) before I was willing to ring up a perfect stranger.
We tried Roger Wilco and the MS one, neither were bad, but neither were as clear at the phone either.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
how is this going to help him while playing games on the PC?
...windoze and unix works well, requires only one firewall hole at the client, though you may want to have one of your guys run a "look who's listening" server - add a port forward for that one, and one for a reflector if you want to use one, but one of those suffices for all the clients. It's not polished - no voice mixing, for instance, but it is very solid.
My friends and I used to play Quake III a lot at work on the corporate LAN, and since Roger Wilco pretty much sucked, one of my buddies wrote a really cool chat program. You can find Commcenter here:
;)
http://www.randomly.com/ccenter/index-en.html
Although this works great over a LAN, it can be used over the Internet as well with really good quality. He has gone a long way towards minimizing it's bandwidth requirements so that it will work almost anywhere. Some things it supports:
- Unlimited connections, with the option of setting up a "base station" to optimize traffic through a single network point
- Real-time voice modifiers to thrill and amaze your friends
- Ability to record directly from the audio stream
- Ability to map WAV files to keystrokes and play them back when you want
- Ability to send audio to specfic groups of users for teamplay purposes.
Probably its best feature is simply the quality of the sound. You don't get broken-up, garbled audio from this. FWIW.
As you said, Team Sound is the best but still has issues with compatability. Planetside has Team Sound 2 integrated within the game, it works suprisingly well. Team Sound 2 should be out pretty soon, I think that may just be what you need.
I run a teamspeak server for Planetside, it has great. I have been running it on a win2k server and it has run with no noticable memory leak or crashes. Since I moved it between servers it has been up stright, 22 days, it has sent 7.5GB of data and had 2500 logins, not one problem.
The best feature I think it has it that its a relatively clean, simple program that has a nice set of audio codecs. It has been very easy to use, and when you're using the higher end codecs, its just like you are talking on the phone with somebody.. or with many people. The only problem I think people run into with it is trying to serve multiple people voicechat on a line that can't support the outgoing traffic it needs.
althought i havn't tried it yet, i'd recommend checking out netfone by haxial.
it's available both for mac & pc (supposedly works across platforms), and if the quality of this ware stands up to their other stuff (specially kdx server/client) it must be good.
f64 : doing the boing since 1978
Nope, Roger Wilco sucks because it uses TCP/IP instead of UDP/IP.
:)
In other words, it wants to send ALL voice packets without skipping even 1, if 1 packet does not arrive, it keeps trying, even though you're already at the next sentence. Our gamer clan had frequent connection problems with it, sometimes everyone dropped, sometimes 1 of us was excluded from the group etc.
TeamSpeak (teamspeak.org?) is most probably the best, it's free, uses UDP (as it should) and has auto reconnect so you don't have to switch back to windows to reconnect, just stay in the game and wait
Gamevoice does not require a messenger or passport account. Just exit the installer when it gets to that part.
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
Quack, quack.
I use TeamSpeak, hosted by OSG, on a nightly basis for MMORPG's. It's fast, stable, and VERY reliable. You can't beat it.
It's 11PM, do you know where your pants are?
"Roger Wilco sucks because it uses TCP/IP instead of UDP/IP"
To the best of my knowledge, Roger Wilco uses UDP for voice data, and TCP for channel data.
On the other hand, the problems you mentioned are frequently reported on the support forums. GameSpy, who purchased Roger Wilco from HearMe/Resounding doesn't seem to be helping matters either. Each release after Mark1c, the last one before GameSpy bought it, has been buggier than the last.
I play with a group of guys and we use teamspeak which has been mentioned a few times, it is very stable and has good sound. I ping about 140 to the TS server we have and I have no problems talking or hear others on the program.
I installed Roger Wilco once, and it got Gator all over my PC. For those of you not "in the know", Gator is a spyware app that basically sucks 'n crap, or sucks crap, or is crap.
I'm with the majority here - TeamSpeak is the way to go, until game developers get smart an integrate voice comm. I think Counter-Strike has about the best version of this I've seen.
I have tried Roger Wilco, TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, etc etc etc....but I still keep going back to one that is always reliable:
Battlecom
I know, it doesn't exist anymore. The company was bought out by M$ so they could use the technology in GameVoice.
Luckily, some people have kept Battlecom alive:
http://www.battlecom.org/
I run the server and client progs with no trouble. Works with all games and never causes an issue.
/sig "Shop smart! Shop S-Mart!"