The plane shifts server handling voice isn?t going to happen any time soon. My guess is it?s never going to happen. Why?
Voice is generated at 8000 to 44,000 samples per second. There is also an 8-bit mode and the 16 bit mode. That means in one second 8000 bytes 88,000 bytes of data have to be handled. At the lowest resolution the sound quality will totally suck. That?s a lot of data even if you compress it. And unless the player has a decent connection to the Internet they are out.
On the server side handling sound data would be a painful process indeed. You would have to transmit the sound data to everybody in ear shot. This would significantly increase the amount of bandwidth required to get the job done. Furthermore it would have to be done almost instantaneously. Otherwise the sound would have dropouts and pauses and not be understandable. Doing this with over 1000 online players is way beyond the scope of the game like this. If two people were talking at the same time the plane shift server would have to mix the sound together wasting hideous amounts of CPU time or send you both files real-time wasting hideous amounts of bandwidth. There would be no end to the nasty technical problems this would present. The problems incurred by getting the plane shift server to handle sound would be as complicated as the plane shift project itself. So the question is, do you want to have a video game or sound system?
I believe what you are left with is doing it yourself. You either create your sound connection without using the plane shifts server, or you use the existing text system with something like voice recognition.
This might be possible however in the foreseeable future. Technology is still increasing at a fast rate. But considering that plane shift is a free gaming system I seriously doubt a server capable of doing this will be handed to the community for free until the price comes down substantially. And bandwidth isn?t free either especially bandwidth like you?re talking about.
