does anyone else miss the really atmospheric visual chat from wing commander and starfox (amongst many other early space shooters)?

whilst actual voice chat would obviously strain the servers considerably, i was thinking that it would make a great addition to a game like this to be able to perhaps select a voice style for your player and piece together audio sentences or select specific quotes to send to other ships, friend or foe. Along with this audio transmission could be a repeated movie of some sort (even simply a gif file) that is either chosen from a generic game database or uploaded by each player. This short movie would display the craft's pilot speaking (in a comparable fashion to Lylat Wars and similar games of the time). i personally feel that a set of generic voice samples/quotes (such as in the Wing Commander games) and character animations would be best as opposed to voice chat or uploaded movies.

i believe this would work wonders for the game's atmosphere and would really liven up space battles and combat.

let me know what you think people!! =)

ah one thing i forgot to point out is that this system may also help in forming a sense of individual identity for every player. at the moment, people appear pretty much the same and there is not as much variation as in some other online rpgs. Perhaps rules could be introduced about the changing of your chosen transmission appearance and voice sound after it has been initially set, so people would be encouraged to keep a single appearance and identity.

and one other point - some purely aesthetic ship upgrades and addons would be quite nice for the individuality aspect of the game too! =)

Since you brought it up, I'd like to see a system of pre-configured voice messages you could trigger, such as "Thanks!" and "On my way!" and "I can't hold her ... she's breaking up, she's breaking up!".

Would be interesting, but I don't think any of the four devs is a voice actor, nor does it appear that they have the money to hire one. Or the time to do the recordings.

I'm sure there are players who would love to do this, but in order for it to sound professional and immersive they would have to have good voices. Too bad James Earl Jones doesn't play vendetta... the ultimate voice ever.

you could write your own using the /alias command, and then you could post them to the "Custom binds" thread for the benefit of others :)

but y do u have to use pre-made voices. Why not just make it a live chat thing. Like you hit a key and are able to talk to the sector, a certain player, group, guild, etc. Such like you can do in Counter Strike:Source

And i know the first argument against this would be that people would start spamming sectors with loud and offecive comments/music. A way to stop this is just to limit the sectors in-which you can use the "live chat" function. Or a second way to do this would be too make people like sign up for it over the Vendetta website. Make them sign an agreement form stating that there is to be no vulger language or spamming. Should they disregaurd this cancel their "subscription" so that they are not able to use the "live chat" function anymore.

Feedback plz :)

well, for starters, VO is apparently designed to work well over low-bandwidth connections. i suspect voice chat would kill that.

on my personal top 100 features i'd like to see in VO, voice chat is #98 or #99, but that's just my opinion. most people have no idea of radio discipline, and so you get constant crosstalk, and interrupted messages; and what's more, most people aren't interested in learning.

and even if i /ignore voice chat, it's still consuming server resources (and maybe even client resources and bandwidth - is /ignore server-side or client-side?).

I like the idea of the pre defined voice messages. You could even add the following to the list:

"There's too many of them!"
"I've got a bad feeling about this..."

and

"That's no moon, it's a space station!"

Actually a simple solution to the voice chat bandwidth would be for an integrated voice chat program on the client side. Then each player can host/join one (or maybe more) voicechat groups and the bandwidth for hosting it is on one of the players, not the vendetta server. A voicechat that ran clientside and was controled via the command-line is probably doable. While it wouldnt be total-game voicechat, I dont really want to hear everyone in the game anyhow, just guildmembers/groupmates.

i agree with spell cast, i don;t give a flaming hoot to what some 14 year old is flaming about the mac, saying that they suck, i don't need that.

and second, i only have 56K which mens my download is limited to 16K AT THE MOST. i can't even dual at that speed. sometime i get killed by pirates before they are even on my radar. i have also gone from 100% life to 12 because i all of a sudden it a roid.

but the idea of premed voice chat would be great.

maybe the f4-f10 keys. make it like bf-1942.

f4 is agreements
f5 is requests
f6 is enemy related
f7-f10 are general chat.

and you don't even need to hire voice actors, just give the voice actor a free 3 month subscription. i know i would say 300 lines of chat 5 time to get that.

and yes, many people could voice act. JUST ask around in vendetta, and hold additions. you could even have an option when starting the game if you are Male, female, reptilian...

wow i didnt expect to get this many replies - im not complaining though =)

i have to say i really dont like the idea of normal live voice chat either, i think it would spoil the mood of the game. thats why i was suggesting simply sending transmissions of prerecorded quotes and phrases in the particular chosen voice style of your character. and i agree fully with knight, the idea of binding them to the F keys would be perfect. your appearance (the animation) would also be selected but would not have to necessarily match your voice (although perhaps the three sides - itani, UIT and serco - could have entirely different selections for appearance and voice).

i think the best way to integrate this feature into the game would be to only allow transmissions to be sent to those in the same sector as you. you could first target them with B, and press say an F key to open transmission options. oh, and a received transmission would have to fuzz and crackle as if the connection is weak, because that always looks fantastic. =)

DO IT! Ok the devs already contemplated this and wanted to put it in... but they couldn't. but i say it's do'able and a cool idea. And if you don't want to hear someone you shouldn't have to.

/givemoney Devs 2c

They could do this. They couldn't do full voice chat, but something like this would be elementary to program.

Actually, we the players could probably do this to some extent, without bothering the devs, if we're willing to put enough work into it. I wanted an audio warning for the five minute CtC announcements, so I whipped up this very klugey shell script to watch for CtC announcements & play an audio file. I did this on Linux, but it might work on Mac with minimal modifications. I present this as a proof-of-concept, that we can parse errors.log for certain messages, and act on those messages in a certain way, such as playing an audio version of the message.

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/.vendetta
tail -f errors.log | {
while true ; do
grep -il "\[201\] Itani convoy scheduled to depart from Bractus Watch in five minutes." && ogg123 ~/vendetta/Itani-Five_minute.ogg ;
done ; }

If you're using OS X you can change the last bit so that rather than using an audio file and ogg123, it used the "say" command and some text for the audio.

I'm not sure if any other tweaks are required.

I think voice chat is a good idea. I take the point about voice actors, but I'm sure that a few good messages are bound to come from such a large community. As for bandwidth, if the audio files were part of the initial download then the bandwidth requirements for using voice chat would be no more than what is required for text.

I used to play Enemy Territory, which uses voice chat very well. It is used to co-ordinate team play, while the same can be done with text binds it over-clutters the visual information channel and may not be noticed at all. Voice is harder to miss and doesn't require you to move your eyes from whatever they are looking at.

I envisage voice chat working in 2 modes (transparent to the user). Group chat would allow chat between group members, with messages like "watch your tail!", "enemy sighted", or "i need backup!". It would also be nice to be able to sent messages to your current (enemy) target, taunts and the like.

If i was to record some sayings such as "itani/serco convoy due to leave in 5 etc" would it be possible to use this method on mac osx to play them?

-Kestrel

I think so, Ben. You may have to download & install ogg123, which I've been told isn't included by default in Mac OS X, or else use some other commmand line player. Also, my little script is very rough, and will only trigger on the Itani announcement, it would need some major improvements to be truly useful. If there's enough people that would be willing to help, I really think we could turn this into a nice community project.

Beolach, i would be willing to help, BUT my programming is VERRY limited. i used to dabble in c++ but that was 5-7 years ago, AND back when i had a PII 200 mhz (God i hated that computer)

i could help with the voice though.

Beo, It is possible to run bash, tail, and grep (a great command huh?) under windows, Cygwin is the easiest way to go, 5 .dll files, and the three .exe's (bash, grep, tail) and a command line replacement for ogg123, and i have created a windows version of your script, as im stuck in windows most the time when im at work, and a few players i spoke to were also on the windows platform, and thought something like this would be usefull =D

When i find a way to get rid of the *Cannot find temp, please create* Error i'll post a zip here with contents.