Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Best Voice Chat Software For Gaming?

Posted by simoniker on from the lima-foxtrot-lollipop dept.

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?"

6 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Heres a second.. by BillYak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Heres a second.. by wossName · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What fiasco was that ? All I can remember is that the release candidates for version 2 have/had a limited life span, which is widely known (FYI: it's still in RC status). No problem if you can read instructions.

      As a PC gamer, you're used to patching and upgrading all the time, so what's the problem with updating one more piece of software ?

      --
      Someone is wrong on the Internet!
  2. Is there an *open* solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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...

  3. Best in-game Voice? Xbox Live. by SuperRob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Get Xbox Live.

    No, seriously ... since the entire service was designed around voice communications to begin with, it works REMARKABLY well.

  4. Re:TeamSpeak by DeathPenguin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Teamspeak is probably the best one for Linux. It's fairly easy to configure, offers voice activation (So you don't have to press a key to talk) and calibration (So it doesn't pick up breathing), and high-quality codecs.

    It works with Windows, too, so you and your buddies can all use the same voice chat program.

    I guess some people don't like the forced upgrades. While I do find them somewhat annoying, I don't blame the Teamspeak developers for not wanting to answer tech support requests from people using out-dated software.

  5. Unknown, but superb by frangro · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.