voice chat for games...

Hey guys -
I'm looking for some alternatives to Skype and Teamspeak for in-game voice chat.
Teamspeak's really is a bit evil when there are certain people who haven't got their heads around PTT when not using a headset.
Skype handles everything much better, but being peer to peer - there's no way to administrate it - also once you've started a conference (max 5 people) there's no way to drop out an join.
Roger Wilco - even when you're running your own base station... come on... give me a break. It's evil, it's awful - you can't define favourite channels and base stations... because if you want to change channels, you have to leave the channel - join the base station you were already on, and manually type in the channel name.
Silly - very silly. Especially if you've got 8 people sorting out teams for search and destroy in COD... or anything ... and want to discuss tactics... or anything... or if you're playing DM and just want to slag everyone off!

Made a couple of posts on Skype's suggestion board - so we'll see if anything comes of that (i.e. a central server to oversee clients connecting - something where you can set a general password and see everyone in the same pool - can also help monitor and control bandwidth)

We'll see...

But do any of you have any ideas of what would be a better solution?
Aside from having people from all over SW england come and camp in my lounge?

Scotty

For me, TS pretty much covers everything I need, you can set fave channels, automatically log in to a particular channel on log in etc etc.

There's a third party program out for it now that overlays who is in the channel onto your screen while in game. It shows who's talking too, so it could help you cure those PTT blues.

We used to use Ventrillo, but setting that baby up was like using black magic.... it could be very tempremental... it alos seemed to hog bandwidth more than TS.

Do you know what that 3rd party app is called? I'm thinking it's probably best if I order some bulk headsets from ebuyer ;)

Ventillo is the daddy, never had a problem with it at all. Uses less CPU than TS as well in my experience and the quality of the comms is way, way higher. :)

Ventrillo is quite nice - will have to wait until everyone is online tonight to test it me thinks

http://www.qbnut.com/tso

There ya go.

shiny... thanks Deck!
I'll have a fiddle with that tonight.
I've just got to get everyone onto headsets so I can work out which setup is better!

Scotty

Ventrillo and TS2 are the bast, don't know why you would use anything else.

My votes on Ventrillo and Teamspeak 2 as well :)

We use both of these for voice comms in CS and now even chatting over the net when we cannot be bothered to type in IRC after a few beers :D, Great for conference calls and configured correctly they can save a fortune on phone bills as they have for me :)

I've found Skype to have the best quality - but will see how TS goes with headsets, and have set up my Ventrillo server now, so will see how that plays! It's all about finding something that will work for the technically illiterate also!;)