Spirit Designing In-game Voice Chat for MMOs

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Gamasutra - Spirit Announces Voice Conferencing Engine For MMOs

Originally Posted by Gamasutra

February 28, 2008

Spirit Announces Voice Conferencing Engine For MMOs

Voice and video software company Spirit DSP has announced TeamSpirit Conferencing Engine for developers and publishers in the gaming market, aimed specifically for MMOs, and as already used in World Of Warcraft.

The TeamSpirit Conferencing Engine allows developers to add support for in-game chat to their products. It also includes support for portable devices.

Blizzard's World of Warcraft uses voice chat powered by Spirit's voice solution, and Spirit says it is in discussions currently with several other MMO developers.

The engine contains a scalable Spirit IP-MR wideband codec, which the company says can adapt to any bandwidth connection without transcoding. Smart conferencing manager Multi-Pass is designed to decrease voice traffic and preserve high speech quality for conferences, thanks to active speaker selection algorithms.

Spirit says that TeamSpirit Voice Conferencing Engine can handle 1200 concurrent connections on a dual-core Intel-based server, without any noticeable degradation of voice quality. At the same time, SPIRIT's engine provides up to 20 percent improvement in voice traffic efficiency compared to similar solutions.

Spirit Voice Conferencing Engine is also free of codec patent fees. Potential migration of MMOG to mobile platforms can also be supported by TeamSpirit Voice&Video Engine M-bile.

Spirit product development VP Slava Borilin commented, "MMOGs have unique requirements that not all vendors can satisfy. A first-class solution must support diverse user terminals; it must provide superior wideband quality under adverse conditions; it must, as much as possible, reuse existing infrastructure to save investments; and it must be economical to purchase and maintain. Our Voice Conferencing Engine is the only one that satisfies all these requirements, and more."

POSTED: 11.55AM PST, 02/28/08 - Leigh Alexander

Oh man, I seriously want to see this feature put into Aion.

[Howling]

I never thought ingame voice chat was as difficult as they make it sound. Though I am impressed by the number of users supported on a dual core server - maybe the efficiency is what they're actually bragging about? Actual voice chat implementation would be fairly simple in an mmo - not as simple as in FPS games granted, but still not that difficult..

I've not played WoW since it got voice chat (WoW got voice chat? lol) so I'm not sure how they've worked it... Is it distance based? ie You have to be within range of char A to hear what they're saying

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Yeah I didn't hear anything about it either. But in the case of WoW, it seems kind of iffy. I can just imagine the audible chaos that would occur if it were open chat. Perhaps it's just limited to parties, raids, guilds, and other private channels.

And those are basically where I would like to see this feature put to use in Aion. It's too good to pass up.

Note: my friend who still plays WoW confirmed it with me. You can also use it for battlegrounds. Other than that, I've mentioned the other uses of the feature.