Major_Blammo

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Yep, everytime I've seen threads in the past brought up about voice there was a good portion that were against the idea. Not sure what you were reading that makes you think the word "fickle" applies.

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Well, fandom includes people who love the idea and people who hate it. If we don't look fickle to the devs, we must at least look conflicted.

Returning to TerraDraconis' point, it's not surprising that a "solid group" who dislike the idea of voice turns up on message boards. This is, after all, a text medium which plays to their biases.

I'd never quit the game over the lack of built-in voice support, but it actually does annoy me to have to turn to external solutions to get the functionality. (It also annoys me to team with people who fail to respond in text chat, attack the enemy before the group is ready, etc. Gameplay with text chat is far from perfect.) If voice is someday added to the game, your future annoyance will be the cost of ending my present annoyance.


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Once again they've announced something with sketchy details.

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Yep. From a "City of" viewpoint, they actually haven't announced much of anything. Based on Lighthouse's info, all we're really looking at so far is the equivalent of an official Ventrilo/Teamspeak server that has to be logged into from outside the game. GeneralChaos has nothing to fear.

I will continue to sincerely hope that NCNC will look into what Vivox has coming and will take this much further, but that's just wishful thinking at this stage.

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As in lots of control, different voice modulators, text to voice and vs. versa (although the voice to text would be extra hard I'd say so I wouldn't hold them to that). Will take a lot to get me on board, but maybe they'll surprise me.

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Yeah! Fingers crossed.

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Either way, IMHO, more options > less options.

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Absolutely.

I trust the devs will remain aware of the needs of people who have hearing problems, social issues or preferences that make voice chat unusable or undesirable for them.

On the other hand, some of the opponents of voice are making harsh statements about how it's a waste of resources, a huge step backward, and so on.

Please be fair. For those of us who want it, this is a huge benefit that will make the game a lot more fun.

As with every other aspect of teaming, you may run into bad teams or annoying people. If it becomes a problem, move on. Speaking as a fan of voice, I expect to have to do that part of the time.

Agreed, Jasra. The possibilities seem to be the most interesting part.

If they can someday offer decent-sounding synthetic speech for chat purposes, won't that mean that NPC dialog and mission text can be voiced too? That'd make every mission from Outbreak/Breakout onward a lot more cinematic. And it'd make user-created missions that much cooler.


Incidentally, I think Vivox have changed their stand on the "voice font" thing. The meaning that Tahquitz was assigning to it above is the one that AT&T has been using for their speech synthesis voices, well before Vivox started using the term.

The links in my previous message are a few months old. Now that I've been reading up on PlayXpert (thanks, Plasma!), I see their CEO recently referred to Vivox's masking technology as "Voice Skins."

Actually, if some of the stuff Vivox is working on pans out, their tech could make life easier for people who hate voice chat too.

They are working on ways to integrate text-to-speech and speech-to-text into MMOs, so that mixed groups of voice-only and text-only players can coexist easily.

The text input of one player could be synthesized into voice for the benefit of voice-chatters, and spoken words could be rendered back into the chat window for people who don't want to (or can't) hear them.

It's described in this article, starting in the sixth paragraph.


Somewhere earlier in this thread, someone said that "voice fonts" probably are speech synthesis voices, but Vivox is using the term to mean voice modification technology (male to female, vice versa, human to robot, etc.). It's covered in the article here.

In both cases, the interviewers were favorably impressed with how well Vivox can make an ordinary gamer sound like a Paladin. That'd be a nice feature to have in a superhero game.


Of course, all of this would need to be integrated into CoH/V itself, rather than in the launcher, to really be useful. Count me in as someone who hopes the Vivox implementation will end up going much further than the launcher.



So far as the existing solutions go...

My group uses Ventrilo currently, but we're not eager to give out our server info to strangers. Built-in voice chat would be a lot better for use in pick-up groups.

Some logos don't look so good on the banners because of the way their colors work. It'd be nice to have some versions of the banners that put all parts of the logo in the first SG color, and just use the second color for the background.

Here's an example:
Click me.

Agreed on access to all of the character-available logos rather than just the ones groups can have. In addition to giving groups more choices, it would be nice to put a banner up for each player's main.

Please adjust the sizing for the podiums and tables. A huge character should look huge standing next to things, rather than having average-sized characters look tiny.

Really, it would have been nice to have the tables without chairs attached. Then we could have had chairs in a few different sizes that we could put in according to who is in the group.

(Of course, then we'd want the ability to rotate in more than just 90 degree increments... and the ability to put each character's logo on the back of each chair.)

Is it too late to get wall signs that say "Transport" and "Sickbay" and so on, with directional arrows? I can see why PvPers might not want to use them, but for PvE bases they'd be handy.

The changes suggested in this thread would be much appreciated. Having said that... the new stuff is great. It definitely makes the base feel more like it's ours.

To rotate objects, you can also "R" key when the item is selected. That seems to be the easier way, actually.