How about a better ingame media player. One that supports MP3, OGG and WAV. A nice menu for editing your playlist and bindable controls to change tracks and such.

A gui would be good.
MP3 is probably a no-no since an mp3-decoder requires a license from fraunhofer institute, of around 25 000$ per quarter or so.

There are some free decodes in Linux.. Mpg321 is one of them. For windows I am not sure though. I'd like to trash Windows Media Player and play my music from within the game, but I dont really want to convert 60 Gigs of music to OGG :-/ I'd rather be playing Vendetta!

I dont' think mac users need to worry about this as much, we can just run iTunes in the background.

I run winamp in the background on my pc, but an internal player, or maybe a plugin for the player that allows in-game controls (don't ask me how to do this) would be handy, but not a big priority for me. I still want more ways to interact with the universe that has been developed.

mpg321 is not a commercial program. Vendetta Online is, and thus cannot include a MP3 decoder without licensing one. They already have an Ogg Vorbis decoder built in. A winamp control module could probably be done, though. The X-Chat Winamp control dll is something like three hundred lines of code. But let's let them handle the big things first, k?

:P

Actually, they could get an LGPL'd decoder library and link it into the code. mpglib (from the mpg123 project) is available under the LGPL and would therefore be suitable. The only catch would be whether or not the library would work under OSX and Windows as well. If not, and if it was enough of a priority, they could modify the code for the library and still be allowed to redistribute it, as long as they shared their changes to the code. (Though they would NOT need to share any of the actual game code.)

But that's all largely academic for me since my entire collection is in FLAC and Ogg. (FLAC originals transcoded to Ogg for portable devices.)

AFAIK the problem is that the original creators of the mp3 format charge a fee for every copy of soft or hardware which uses mp3 that is distributed in a commercial way.

EDIT: oh right it was a already said

Umm, just run a player in the background and set up shortcut keys? :\

(eg. on Linux, run Amarok and set it up to use the Windows Key + letter to change tracks, pause, etc.)

Another thing you can do is get a keyboard that has built-in media player capabilities, like the M$ Digital Media Pro. It's a USB keyboard that (yes, I know I'm a Mac user, yes I KNOW it's made by M$, YES I KNOW APPLE KEYBOARDS ARE $50 AS OPPOSED TO $20. I'm a college freshman, guys... gimme a break >_>) has all sorts of extra features for media playing, and a bunch of extra OSX/Apple-specific options for people like me. :3

Also, if you have one of the newer Macs that came with the remote, just boot up iTunes before going ingame and use the remote to change songs.

It is also possible to set up a simple script that echos your current song title/artist/album to the VO chat log, either with AppleScript (Mac OSX only) or with some scripting language, such as Lua, BASH, Perl or Python (multiplatform). I believe an ingame GUI "player" where you can pick songs from a playlist that includes VO's soundtrack and files that you provide to the game in .ogg format (which can already be played via /playmusic /stopmusic and /playlist) is on the list of things to get done, but I think it's way past the Soon™ point.

You mean... In game Pron? that would be so cool. I always wanted to watch those corvus holo disks.

Maybe if the game could access iTunes internally. It would be cool for immersion purposes to have a "radio" in the dashboard of the ship, that's connected to your iTunes library. Windows users can't even complain, because iTunes is free and cross-platform. I don't know how hard this would be, in the back of my mind it seems another game does this, but I can't remember.

Prof. Chaos:

Redline Racer has ingame iTunes Support. World of Warcraft too, as far as I know.