Voice

[FrostyDave]

I am new and only learned of this game from Apple.com because I\'m forced to use an Apple iBook G4 whenever I am away from my Alienware at home. I\'ve played alot of MMOs like Anarchy Online, EverQuest, and PlanetSide. I also play alot of FPSs and know of the gift of TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. I have no ideah if this has been brought up before or is allready implimented (server down) but, it would be great to be able to initiate voice chat with people. In town you could hear everyone within a radius. You could talk to people in your party or clan. It\'s not a new ideah, PlanetSide allready has it. Again, I am a noob to this game and if this topic isn\'t needed just delete it.

[Karyuu]

While an interesting idea, you have to remember that many people play characters that they themselves will never be able to recreate realistically with voice. Vocal roleplay only works well if you have everything else at your disposal too, such as... well, your actual body. Things have to be a lot more dynamic. You\'re always welcome to use teamspeak or whatnot in groups, but I can\'t see vocal integration into PlaneShift entirely :)

[Zan]

*imagines all the guys playing female characters doing their best to speak with a high voice and dies laughing*

Another thing is that such a system would mean a whole lot of information packages being sent back and forth, this \'ll probably be a big strain on the server. I\'m not even speaking of people\'s individual internet connection. I for one have a limited download and upload capacity from my provider, having actual voice chat in PS would definitely send me over that limit in a week of playing.

You can say \"Make sure it can be switched off.\" now ... but then I\'d be typing while half the world is talking. I\'m afraid current equipment, both hardware and software, just isn\'t optimal for something like this yet. It would exclude a lot of less fortunate computer/internet connection owners.

[acraig]

I\'ve played World of Warcraft a few times using Teamspeak.  The only time it was used was in instance raids where we are trying to plan things out.  I think that the voice emotes handle most of what needs to be said in a much more in game manner.  Everytime I heard somebody speak it made me realize that I was playing a game.   I think that if we develop a number of voice \'emotes\' that would be cool.

[Ethan]

Voice emotes is good because :
- your voice is not the voice of your character and so you could have a voice which really with with it,
- the voice being generated from the client or by reading a file, this would need less data than \"voice chat\".
I hope it will be implemented even if I understand that is not the prority.
In order to be a good idea, PS should have a lot of voice emotes to not get borring. The problem is that (I guess it would be client-side) it would need a lot of additional memory, and this will slow even more updates and/or first downloading. It could be resolved by making the player choose its game interface ie how many voices do you want to be able to heard for human male ? human female ? Xaxha male?.....

[Siegheart]

Also, to keep it interesting there would have to be variations in tone of voice. Things would start to sound monotone without a little change here and there.