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?"

Comments

I've found Xbox Live! works well.

[Inoshiro]

Some games do have worse voice lag than others, but the support is 100% across the board for Live! enabled online play games, and you get a wide variety of features (muting, masking, etc). It's fairly simple to get through firewalls (88 udp, 3074 udp/tcp -- although Mech Assault team chat fails to work with this), and it features independant volume and mute controls right next to your control buttons.

I highly reccommend you try it out.