In part one on voice communications I talked about the two card option for simultaneous voice and game sounds over the Internet. In part two, I will discuss some of the benefits and liabilities of the one sound card approach.

And, as we are trying to keep your Internet connection as clean as possible to send and receive the game related data packets, Peter "Faust" Barton ([email protected]) has compiled a very useful list of tactical commands (for brevity) to use when on "the radio." * ed note [Other contributors were Tom Culora ([email protected]) and myself ([email protected]). ]

First the bad news, the NuSound PCI 3D does not work with anything less than a P200. I do not know the requirements for the Monster PCI M80 Sound card, I suspect they are the same. Which ever sound card you are looking at, make sure it supports the DSP (Digital Signal Processing) instruction set. This is normally incorporated in a special chip set on the card. The Orchid NuSound 3d or Monster M80 3d are two I know of that do this.

While this may seem like a bit more of an expense than you bargained for to get voice comms if you are running a P166. 3d cards do other things besides allowing on the fly sound mixing, the 3d sound is quite spectacular from programs that support it. 3D sound is something like Surround Sound but from opnly two speakers and simulates spatial sound including Doppler effect incredibly well, very much better than the older 16 bit SB type cards. For more detailed information, see the Viking1's review of 3d sound cards on this site in the previous articles section.

The one card setup is the easiest by far of the two ways to accomplish Internet Voice Communications, basically all you need do is find an open pci slot and "slap" the card in. The install software should do the rest for you, for a basic setup. Then just make sure that your record options in the Multimedia control panel are set to web or telephone quality, this goes for ANY Internet voice comms.

Once set up you'll want to play with your mixer settings until you get the best balance between game sounds and voice. These setups will vary between games. Speakfreely or other Internet phones like InternetPhone 5 (http://www.vocaltec.com/) or Netmeeting will work just fine with this setup too.

I have recently become aware of a new voice conferencing application from Vocaltec (www.vocaltec.com) called Surf and Call. This app looks like it may have great potential for squadron ops or simulated ATC, unfortunately as of this writing I have been unable to test it thoroughly with another flyer on line because of a Netscape setup problem on our end.

Click to continue . . .

However the voice quality in the chat rooms is very good and I've been in rooms with as many as 32 participants where conversation was easily followed. Surf and Call is a plug in for Netscape 3+ and IE 3+. You can start your own private or public "chat" room for squad meetings or in flight comms, (hopefully).

One of the nice things about this plug in is that all of the voice digitizing and most of the transfer of ip packets takes place on the Vocaltec server (or your own). This means less bandwidth used and less load on each individual's connection and the server running the game being played. As I said we have yet to test this in a game so I'd like to hear from anybody who manages to get this working properly with their squad.

There are still some issues that need to be looked at with regard to voice comms over all and the single DSP card setup especially. Since part one of this article I have heard from several different people and one insisted that the one card setup was not as good as the two card. According to this person, voice comms (with one DSP card setup) affect the packet traffic of the currently running game, but not so much between the communicating player but with the incoming information from the opposing team. This is less noticeable with the 2 card setup apparently.

I personally have not encountered this to any great extent, but then I don't expect to get away unscathed using the current technology and you should expect to have network performance affected at least somewhat. This person made the point that he would use voice for training but not for a ladder match, this seems understandable and obviously depends on personal (or squad) preference.

Combatsim.com is looking into starting a mailing list or other information "clearing house" where we could discuss new developments and keep a knowledge base of the most current information regarding squadron voice comms. If you have anything to contribute please don't hesitate to contact me personally for now and I will try to keep everyone informed.

This is a partial list of some known voicecomm combinations:

• · LongBow 2 does work with SF and Netmeeting 2.1 and others
• · Warbirds 3D does work with SF and Netmeeting and others, WB has it's own "Intercomm" system, but we have found that SF works better
• · GSC's F\A Hornet 3 and Korea will work with the SF and Netmeeting 2.1
• · MS FlightSim 98 works with Netmeeting and SF and others
• · Internet Phone v5 and SpeakFreely will NOT work with Janes F15 on tcp/ip network game
• · MS Fighter Ace 1.5 may or may not work with SF, depending on server load (number of a/c)
• · Red Baron II and vox does not work on the TEN server but may on Kali ipx
• · This list is very incomplete but will grow as various combinations are tested.

Continued on Part II