September 6, 2010 at 15:37

Overview of team voice communication software

    imageThe problem of voice communication in network games, whether it is a grand MMORPG or a simple network shooter, is very acute. With active actions, often there is not enough time to use the built-in chat in the game, and in most cases using the chat will greatly aggravate your situation with your partner in front of other players due to wasting time empty, unless of course your enemies use voice communication.

    In team games, where the interaction between the participants is crucial, fast and high-quality communication is simply necessary - you need to take this for an axiom. Yes, and exchange matyuk with friends is much nicer voice than chat.

    Many game developers include any means of voice communication in their products, but often these tools are extremely inconvenient or have poor sound quality and meager capabilities. Third-party products usually outperform in-game voice communication tools both in terms of communication quality, as well as an abundance of settings and ease of use.

    In this article, I will review the four most popular voice communication programs. Meet the candidates - Ventrilo , TeamSpeak 2 , TeamSpeak 3 , Mumble . Some of them are paid, some are absolutely free, as well as open sourceWell, let's try to identify the best candidate. Such “experimental” qualities can be studied as: supported codecs, supported operating systems, number and availability of servers, scaling, the ability to put the server part on a dedicated server, sound enhancement algorithms, and much more.


    Ventrilo


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    The official website is http://www.ventrilo.com/

    The first candidate in our review is a fairly well-known product that has been on the market for a very long time - Ventrilo . To be precise, Ventrilo has been developing since 2002. At the moment, the latest version is 3.0.5 . Ventrilo is available for all Microsoft Windows operating systems starting from Windows 95 and ending with Windows 7 , including 64 bit versions, as well as Mac OSX 10.4 and higher, the Linux version has been under development for more than 3 years and when the company rolls it out for trial the public is not known but under linuxthe client can be run under Wine . There is an open source client for Linux that can connect to Ventrilo - Mangler servers .

    Ventrilo is a commercial product, it is free for the end user, but you will have to pay for server rental, there are no free servers. Prices do not bite much, a quality server can be rented from $ 4.95 for 10 seats, up to $ 99.95 for 400 seats. Rent is possible in almost all major cities of Europe and the USA , including Moscow .

    What do we offer for this money: support for codecs - Speex, GSM 6.10, Lernout & Hauspie, DSP Group TrueSpeech; voice notification of players entering / leaving the channel with the pronunciation of his name; the ability to give privileges for team broadcasting to all or selected channels; noise reduction; individual volume setting for each user; overlay - display the nickname of the speaker on top of the game; Support for keyboard screens Logitech G15, G13, G19; Unique features include Phantoms, this is your double, which you can put on any channel and listen to what they say, although you yourself are currently on a completely different channel.

    Many gaming communities choose Ventrilo.for good sound quality and excellent scalability, if you need more seats for people, you can just rent more seats on the server. Server rental provides voice communication 99.9% of the time and eliminates all kinds of lags, which is very important for large gaming communities.

    It was decided to display all the features in a table for later comparison, the table can be found at the end of the article.


    TeamSpeak 2


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    The official website - http://www.teamspeak.com/

    TeamSpeak 2 has been developed since 2002, the latest version is dated 2007. TeamSpeak 2 is completely free, available for Microsoft Windows and Linux , and a free server part is also available for these operating systems, which allows you to upgrade your free server to your gaming community.

    If you don’t have a machine near the server, or you have problems with the Internet channel, you can use many free servers or rent your own, the price starts from $ 0.14 per place.

    The capabilities of the program are scarce: there is no overlay, keyboard screens are not supported, there is no possibility of broadcasting to all channels, there is no noise reduction. The advantage is the prevalence of the program and servers; most of the gaming communities use TeamSpeak 2 .


    TeamSpeak 3


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    Official website - http://www.teamspeak.com/

    TeamSpeak 3 is an evolutionary development of TeamSpeak 2 . The 26 BETA version is currently available, the release date is not known, the program has been under development for a long time. In essence, TeamSpeak 3 is a work on bugs; almost all the shortcomings of the previous version are eliminated.

    There are clients for almost all operating systems - Microsoft Windows , Linux and MacOS , while the server side, in addition to these OSs, also has a version for FreeBSD .

    TeamSpeak 3just starting to gain popularity, but judging by its capabilities, coupled with free, it is now clear that it will become the most popular program for voice communication among gaming communities. Already, there are many free servers for communication.


    Mumble


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    The official website is http://mumble.sourceforge.net/

    Mumble is a free open source program that has all the features of its paid competitor - Ventrilo and even a little more. Of the unique features, it is worth noting the positioning of the sound (if, for example, the player is on your right and speaks, then the sound will also be heard on your right. If the player is far from you, the sound will be muffled), but it requires a game plug-in and therefore is not available for all games , it is also possible to encrypt all traffic via SSL and effectively suppress echo. Mumble

    Client and Server are available for Microsoft Windows , MacOS, and Linux . Lately

    Mumble gained a lot of users and became popular, there are many free servers around the world.


    Summary table of reviewed programs


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    The best codec for voice is CELT , it gives better quality and less latency with slightly more traffic consumption than Speex . The choice is made based on the needs of users and the capabilities of the community, if you have your own dedicated server, then the best choice is TeamSpeak 3 or Mumble . If you intend to rent space on the server, pay attention to Ventrilo .

    There are several features - Ventrilo is critical to packet loss, if the packet is lost, the phrase downloaded by the interlocutor will not end, but will reach with a rather large delay (sometimes up to 10-15 seconds). TeamSpeak uses UDP, there will be just a short-term loss of communication. Mumble can use both protocols to transmit both UDP and TCP .
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