In-game voice communication comes of age

VOICE COMMUNICATION in games is a big thing. When it comes to titles that thousands or even millions of gamers are playing, communication is becoming of massive importance. Getting the communication part done is the biggest challenge that faces folk working on World of Warcraft, Rainbow Six: Vegas or - more simply - Second Life.

Vivox here showed off an implementation that runs of its own servers, so game developers do not need to worry about supporting the title with additional in-game code and expense of running the infrastructure. Rather they can shell out for a hosted solution.

Vivox announced that the technology is now supported in two hot games of today, EVE: Online and Second Life.

What seems to be a most impressive part for massively lonely online gamers is the fact that they can interact with a game even if they are not present in the game. Yes, you have read that correctly. Vivox supports several interesting features in EVE: Online, including the possibility that you could use your mobile phone to dial a friend inside a game, just like receiving short messages with transactions that are happening inside the game.

The second supported game announced today was Second Life, a place where some of our authors are spending their time and drinking virtual beer simultaneously with a real one.

The approach to Second Life was a bit different when compared to EVE. The sound is positioned in three dimensions, surrounding the player with different levels of character voices, and the software even enables you to morph the voice using so-called voicefonts. µ