My Weblogs Inc. pals over
at WoW Insider have been doing quite a handy job covering the universe of World
of Warcraft, the online role playing game, for the last month or so. The game offers a very cool, highly immersive
environment where you get to fight dragons and rescue princesses and so forth. But, to interact with your
teammates, you can only use the game's rudimentary text chat interface. So, especially on lengthier dungeon
crawls, typing to your buddies can get a little old. Verbal communication really enhances the experience and
allows you to get done with a particular mission faster so you don't have to spend as much of your precious time
playing the game that some are calling World of War-crack.I swear--I don't really play Warcraft *that* much. Maybe.
Anyway, enter Ventrilo. This a VoIP conferencing system designed for gamers that supports dozens to hundreds of simultaneous participants. Like its competitor Teamspeak, Ventrilo lets you run your own server, organize it into separate conference rooms or "channels", select from a number of sound codecs, and communicate with all your gaming buddies. A push-to-talk option allows you to "key up" like an old-fashioned CB radio. This is actually helpful, as it prevents massive echo problems in the conference.
Now, Teamspeak has basically the same featureset. But their server doesn't run on Mac OS X, so when my Linux box's power supply inexplicably crashed, I decided to try convincing my Warcraft buddies to try out Ventrilo instead of the Teamspeak setup I'd been running on it. So now, I have my Ventrilo server running on my Mac Mini, and it actually sounds better, for whatever reason, than the Teamspeak setup did. I haven't dug into the details to figure it out yet, but it does sound better.
Interestingly, the Teamspeak client for OS X is very cool, too. It doesn't allow management of the conference rooms, kicking users, etc., but the authors say that those features are on the way. I've used both Teamspeak and Ventrilo, and I'll take Ventrilo, thank you.
1. You do make a convincing case for Ventrilo...
I guess I've stuck with TeamSpeak because I'm comfortable with it. That and the $4.95 server charge with Ventrilo.
VoIP Articles and Reviews
http://www.voipjudge.com
Posted at 3:01AM on Jan 20th 2006 by Jonathan