Does anyone here have any experience with Teamspeak? (). It's commonly used on the bigger graphical MUDs for guilds to organize raids and such.

What we want to look into doing is buying a bunch of Teamspeak licenses and running it on one of our servers, and then allow players to dynamically form voice channels to use. So, say you're going on a city raid. You get all the raiders on Teamspeak and PvP becomes much easier to coordinate. Or say you just want to have a private voice chat with 8 or 9 guild members. Skype is nice and works fine but doesn't allow more than 5 people in a conversation at once.

The difficulty here is that if we just set up Teamspeak and left it at that, anyone could use our resources, whether they are one of our players or not. What we'd want to do, I think, is do some reasonably trivial integration ensuring you can't use it unless you have a character logged into an IRE game at the time that's above X level (or whatever bar we set).

Does anyone have any experience using it that could tell me whether Teamspeak is written in a way as to facilitate this kind of integration with our game code? We can do whatever is necessary from our side.

--matt

Wow, that sounds pretty cool. But I would just call my buddies on the phone if I wanted to do that, or get them all together in a chatroom.

You can't spontaneously decide to talk to 8 of your guildmates on the phone, and you can't participate in a raid while you're typing away in a chatroom.

I can spontaneously decide to talk to whomever the #### I want! But it still sounds neat.. I wouldn't pay for it.

Well, not in a group you can't. I mean, setting up a conference call for, say, 8 people takes some effort and can't just be done in game. You have to distribute the phone number to everyone along with the call-on code, etc.

You also wouldn't have to pay for it. It'd be another service to provide to our players for free.

--matt

Do you think that a voice protocol is really all that useful in a mud? I don't think a lot of MMORPG's have VoIP protocols installed because of latency issues, and issues of people speaking different languages. The question here, I guess, is why?

The only real purpose I've found for Teamspeak on our games is for staff meetings. It takes a lot of time for some people to compose their thoughts in writing as we discuss issues, and so meetings can take several hours. So, Teamspeak can help cut down on that time.

We're working with integrating both voice and video communication in our game client. Will be pretty neat :=)

Anyone with mic or cam will be able to participate in meetings/gatherings. You could for example set up a small conference with your guild or similar. It is made without contact to the game server so it doen't affect the game's bandwidth usage (which could be pretty high otherwise).

Of course you can use other third party software but joining the session by simply clicking a join button in the client is so much easier.

Teamspeak is used largely by players of the big graphical MUDs (or MMORPGs or whatever you want to call them) actually. It's essentially de rigeur for some guilds for high end raids or for the PvP stuff in games like Shadowbane.

--matt

Isn't usually third party software, and not integrated into the system? I myself have never played one, I refuse to pay to play. But, from what I've heard, few of them have it integrated.

I use Teamspeak all the time for various reasons, playing counterstrike, world of warcraft, talking with family, friends, internet folks etc. Half the time it's my alarm clock.

I can see how it would be useful to have teamspeak integration. Having preset channels for people to jump into for easier communication during pk events and raids is helpful. I wouldn't recommend it for RP MUD's though, since some tend to frown away from sharing info OOC like that.

Heya Matt.

A few of us were using Teamspeak for a few days, while playing Achaea, basically just for chatting, though raids and such were being discussed too. Sure livened up my bashing in the UW.

It's completely doable, but I don't know if it's worth it.

I have a feeling it will get mega-interest for maybe a week, then die off with maybe a few voice-chatting loyals, and other spontaneous groups looking for something to do.

Oh, right right. Yeah, it's always third party as far as I know.

But it'd be better if it was integrated!
--matt

Would it not be better to keep it 3rd party but see if there is a way to interface from within the client, I do not know if teamspeak allows external hooks or equivalent.

To my mind that would be a better way of doing it rather than an integral connection to teamspeak, keeps updates of the VoIP side separate from the MU side (unless the teamspeak interface/hooks change)

Well, by integrated I mainly mean that it has to be able to recognize that someone is on one of our games and only permit them to connect if they are. We aren't intending to run a public Teamspeak server for use by anyone.

I have no idea if we'll end up doing this at all. I was just curious if anyone had experience with the technical side of it.

--matt

Just a first passing thought looking over some of the documentation of Teamspeak - as admin you can set it up that registered users only have access.  So, as long as you can alter whatever DB Teamspeak uses, you could have your game server update the DB everytime someone logs on or off meeting whatever minimum requirements you need.  This would probably create some lag for the DB ... but it would work.

I would really like to hear about your trials/success with this.  I am interested in doing something similar - but had only thought of the (daunting) task of trying to create the software myself.  I would rather use 3rd party software if I could.