I think voice comm would be more appropriate for a smaller group of people (say Neverwinter Nights). As with table-top RPGs, you''re pretty used to the acting ability and sound of your friends and compatriots, so you''d have less of the strange voiced stranger problem. For this scale, I think it''d kick a$$.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Why do it that way, when there exists an easier way.

Basically, allow the user to set all the charactoristics of the charactors voice (eg, sex, pitch, speed, accent,...) so that they can sound like a 13 year old kid or a old italian gentleman, and then use TEXT TO SPEECH.

yes, you heard right. Have the client''s computer convert whatever the other person said to speech! If you apply a 3d sound algo to it, you can have it sound like they spoke from behind or to your left....


13 year old kid warrior sneaks behind 27 year old mage.
13 year old kid types.
27 year old mage hears, in an evil, omnipitent voice, "behind you"
27 year old mage whips around and recieves a sword in the skull
27 year old mage runs like a 13 year old complaining about pk''s

hehehe

Well I''ll have to totally agree to benc, just imagine all the information that will be handled... (I can imagine it and I''m not into PC music stuff).

But I don''t think we can desmiss something like that, at much smaller scale. We''ll have to wait to see what the future comes up with...

Oh, and a word to nicba and other''s that don''t trust their language skills, through my life I''ve past through South Africa, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Holand, Portugal...(well actually I don''t remembe any more) and I can clearly state three things:

1. If you hear and try to speak the language you''ll end up learning to speak it well,

2. No matter what, 110% garanteed, absolutly garanteed, if two people want to comunicate (or accidentely bump into each other and feel like comunicating) then by some means they will find some way to comunicate (eaven buy speach), comprimisng when necessary, inventing a few things, and so on (I remember once a time when I was trying to talk to a guy who hardly knew any english and we started of by identifying to each other by saying the names of soccer players from our countries, we ended up finding a compromise...)

3. After some time this voice stuff will turn into an industry default and it''ll be just another component of normal games (I remeber some such cases), but I''ll garantee anyone that this voice thing (which if I''m has already been pushed by quite some PTBs, and has already got quite some APIs,not actually me programming area of interest...), when expanded a bit, will for some time be the focus of interest of some online games and be center of entertainment (to satisfy the peoples socialogical needs). Who can forget the phenomenom that irc and other chat things are over the net when the nets focus was surely not social interaction...

A thought for things to be...

Being punctual is only making your mistake on time...

Murphy

So far everyone seems to hold to the ideal of mixing 3000 voices simultaneously. I don''t know anyone that can listen to that many voices. Realistically you can''t pay attention to more than 10, and the rest is background noise.