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

Ventrilo

[EvilJohn]

I highly recommend Ventrilo.

// EvilJohn

Teamspeak

[errorlevel]

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

Re:TeamSpeak

[DeathPenguin]

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.

Re:Teamspeak

[wossName]

The Linux server for TS2 is rock-solid. It's running on my box 24/7 and I only have to shut it down to update.

The installation might intimidate some people, because this thing is built to scale. You have a superadmin who can set up several servers, all with their own admins, channel ops and whatnot, but you can configure all of that through the web interface, or the client.

Heres a second..

[BillYak]

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.

Re:Heres a second..

[wossName]

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 ?

Limitations?

[cloudless.net]

"GameVoice requires a .net passport and Windows Messenger"

It is a requirement not a limitation. If you are really trying to avoid using any Microsoft service, then why play games on Windows?

Re:Limitations?

[saden1]

You pay arlight...how else do you think M$ got the 45 billion dollars it is sitting on?

Perfect!

[Wuffle]

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!

TeamSpeak

[thefatz]

Teamspeak supports Windows & Linux. It now uses the speex codec.

Best in-game Voice? Xbox Live.

[SuperRob]

Get Xbox Live.

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

simple: play Half-life games

[junkgrep]

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.

Roger Wilco

[TheDarkRogue]

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.

Unknown, but superb

[frangro]

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.

I vouch for teamspeak

[BurnMage]

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.

Gamevoice and MS Messenger/Passport

[Un1v4c]

Gamevoice does not require a messenger or passport account. Just exit the installer when it gets to that part.

TeamSpeak is Windows and Linux ready...

[msimm]

Check it out at www.teamspeak.org:

TeamSpeak was primarily designed to work for people who are behind a NAT router (share internet). Further more it was designed for gamers. That mean to us it had to use as little bandwidth as possible, while having a reasonable voice quality. We think we achieved that with the 650 bytes/s maximum CELP codec.

• Support for lower latency. (Theoretically as low as 50 ms)
• Support for better quality codecs. (CELP and GSM)
• Support for user based logins.
• Support for per channel passwords.
• Support for temporary channels.
• Support for sub channels.
• Support for moderated channels for conferencing.
• Linux client.
• TeamSpeak uses fewer threads on a server now. Helps to conserve resources.
• TeamSpeak Super Server design. One program can start several TS servers.
• Web based management interface to the server.
• TeamSpeak Client/Server SDK's, for including in your games/applications.

I used it with my Tribes 2 clan and it worked pretty nicely.