[MUD-Dev] online voice communication

[Amanda Walker]

On 11/29/02 9:28 PM, Ted L. Chen <tedlchen at yahoo.com> wrote:

> True, delay is cumbersome.  Although, if you're strictly not
> showing your character while you speak, you can always mute your
> own voice.  There's still delay and overlapping during
> conversations, but like you said, it's livable.

It's livable as long as everyone cooperates to keep it livable.  I
have a lot of experience with videoconferencing (which involves a
noticeable but fixed delay).  It takes a while to learn avoid having
the conversation screech to a halt even when everyone is trying to
compensate for the delay and keep the conversation
going--turn-taking and other time-based conversational cues get very
messed up by delay.

When I imagine combining that with unpredictable delay, a lot more
people trying to talk at once, and people who don't care about
cooperating, text chat starts to look good.  Imagine popping into a
busy "market" area in an MMORPG, for example--shudder.

One way to deal with this is to make it less like a cocktail party
and more like a walkie talkie.  Roger Wilco was an excellent
example.  Half duplex, so you don't pause when you hear someone else
speak; buffered rather than mixed, so that different peoples'
utterances don't overlap each other, and push-to-talk so that you
don't have "open mic" problems ("aw, mommmm!").

This works fine for two uses of voice: tactical communication within
a group (which is what Roger Wilco was pitched as), or "trash
talking" in combat or radial chat (things like the taunts in UT).
Not great for interacting with NPCs, general conversation, and so
on.

> It works best if you can setup the expectation for the player of a
> dialogue exchange.  That is, they've been exposed to the give-take
> exchanges in TV and Movies.  If you can leverage that idea, then
> they're more willing to accept the fact that they can't all speak
> at once and must wait for the other to finish.

Things might work better in a role-playing oriented game than a
general-interest game, I think.


Amanda Walker


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