It's that time of the year again, and SOE is kicking off their 2008 Sony Online Entertainment Fan Faire. This year's event will have SOE president John Smedley delivering the keynote address, as well as loads of fun gaming-related activities for the attendees. Event details can be found after the jump.

Sony Online Entertainment has announced that it has implemented a voice chat service for EverQuest 2 and Star Wars Galaxies. Further details on the new service are available in the full article.

It's one thing to type out your commands to your allies in the middle of a heated battle; it's another thing to actually bark out orders they can hear. Get ready for a slew of new communication devices designed to revolutionize the system of voice chatting, courtesy of Sony Online Entertainment and Vivox. More auditory stimuli ensues after the jump.

Gone are the days of tabletop RPGs being relegated to kitchen tables and basements. When Wizards of the Coast (WotC) introduced Dungeons and Dragons Insider, it opened up new avenues of gaming for "dice chuckers" everywhere.

In an effort to make online campaigns more convenient (and attractive) for gamers everywhere, WotC has announced that they have entered into a contract with Vivox to provide voice chat to those playing on the Dungeons and Dragons Gaming Table.

The options in the voice chat are pretty comprehensive with players being able to create private conversations, start, leave, or even rejoin ongoing conversations.

The Dungeon Master of the game will be granted full moderator controls such as muting, kicking, and banning players which should be enough to help police the players when they get out of line. In addition to all of this, on-screen indicators indicate which players are using voice channels, as well as which voice channels are currently being used. R&D Director of Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast Bill Slavicsek had this to say about the service:

Voice is an essential component of the D&D Insider player experience. The roots of classic Dungeons and Dragons lie in the ability to play interactively with your friends, communicating openly around a table, developing characters, building the scene, laying out the adventure and communicating actions and dialog.

To recreate this experience online, we needed a voice partner with the ability to deliver a consistently high quality and reliable voice experience for our players. We also needed a company with the resources to support us during and after the integration, with a proven ability to scale to a very large online community. Vivox is well positioned to deliver on these elements and we look forward to a successful relationship.

If you're into classic table-top Dungeons and Dragons, you might want to head on over to the D&D homepage via our read link and try it out. After all, the only thing that WotC has yet to recreate is being able to punch a friend in the arm when he makes a comment about how your Rogue "always seems to get it from behind."

Thanks to a deal just recently signed by online voice communication service provider Vivox and software development solution provider Monumental Games, any game now developed with the Monumental Technology Suite will have a full-featured and robust voice communication solution.

 

The Monumental Technology Suite is a middleware solution for MMO developers to create a platform for vast online virtual worlds. Epic MMOs such as Blizzard's World of Warcraft usually don't come with their own online voice service, requiring players to provide their own third-party voice communication support.

The integration of Vivox Precision Studio into the suite gives the development platform an edge over other engines and middleware solutions provided for MMO developers today, although it is unclear whether this integration will set licensing and development budgets back. Rik Alexander, CEO of Monumental Games, said:

Our players, our licensees, and the market in general all expect integrated and enhanced voice communications in the next generation of MMO games. By partnering with a sophisticated market leader like Vivox, we can develop imaginative and innovative next generation MMO games and provide unique gameplay, communication and community experiences for the long term.

Vivox voice technologies were utilized in Linden Labs' Second Life, which also sports the company's virtual existence within the game.

EVE Voice has finally gone live thanks to the deployment of the Revelations 1.4 update for CCP Games's sci-fi MMORPG, EVE Online. This update is part of the ongoing Path to Kali expansion and introduces quite a few changes and new features. One of the most anticipated and hyped-about new features is EVE Voice, the integrated voice chat system for Eve Online.

The feature was developed by CCP in partnership with Vivox. For a look at what EVE Voice brings to the game, check out our previous post on the topic by clicking here. In order to bring players onto the whole voice wagon, CCP is offering EVE Voice at a special promo price of US$ 9.95 for one year of unlimited use. EVE Voice doesn't require any additional downloads and is an optional part of the Eve Online experience.

 

CCP Games, the folks responsible for the Sci-Fi/heist-fest/corporate/roguish Massively Multiplayer Online Game, EVE Online, announced at the Game Developers Conference 2007 that players will now be able to utilize voice and speech functions in EVE.

CCP claims that with the addition to communicate via voice from within the game without the use of third party communication applications, allows for enhanced coordination between players during intense gameplay. And of course, new “spying” opportunities and experiences for all you sneaky EVE Online information brokers out there.

Features of EVE Voice include:

• Player to Player direct chat
• Group Chat that allows for corporate, fleet, or alliance players to communicate one-to-many within a dedicated audio channel
• Group leader talk – a function that mutes other players ensuring that the leaders instructions are heard.
• Map integration – shows where the players are when speaking allowing for better coordination of tactical assaults
• Moderation Control – annoying guy in the group chat? Kick him out.

EVE Voice was developed in partnership with Vivox, and should be available late March 2007 as an optional feature for players for a price of $10 for unlimited usage over twelve months.

Linden Lab is happy to announce that players will soon have the opportunity to communicate with each other better if they wish to. And no, we're not talking about chat or instant messaging here. Second Life will soon have voice capabilities that will prove to be ground-breaking, invaluable, and immersive.

The company added that the voice technology is going to be 3D proximity-based, meaning a more realistic in-world experience. It will use spatial awareness and take distance and direction into consideration. Likewise, avatars will become animated depending on the intensity of the speech volume.

Furthermore, a limited beta program on a test-grid will commence next week, for 1,000 users. In case you missed that, a Grid-wide beta trial will follow before the technology is officially launched in Q2 2007. Some features of Second Life Voice are:

• Voice will be enabled throughout Second Life, and will be available to all Residents.
• To use the voice option, Residents must have a computer headset connected to their PC or Mac. Residents simply log into the Second Life Grid and can automatically start speaking to others on voice-enabled land.
• Mainland "parcel" landowners can choose to disable the voice option on their land at their own discretion.
• Private island owners will have the option to enable voice on their own land, dependent on the terms of their subscription.
• Scenario 1 - Residents can teleport to voice-enabled land, and automatically start speaking, with the volume of speech modified according to their spatial relationship with others. Up to 100 users can be present in the same audio channel at once.
• Scenario 2 - Group conference calls for two or more Residents. This enables Residents to communicate with large groups across geographical boundaries (e.g. concert setting, or between pockets of land etc).
• Scenario 3 - One-to-one personal communication. This enables Residents to privately share a conversation, which can be initiated by an Instant Message. Residents don't have to be on voice-enabled land to do this.
• Core voice capabilities are provided by Vivox, under the terms of a service agreement with Linden Lab, incorporating 3D voice technology from DiamondWare.

Whenever the company Vivox is mentioned, VP of Product Management and Marketing Monty Sharma almost always comes to mind. He's always actively campaigning for their VOIP gaming technology and to be frank about it, the service is indeed innovative and impressive. We came across the guy again today through an interview by gaming site MMORPG and as always, he always has something new and interesting to say.

Sharma initially reflected on how the in-game voice service change the game. "As we've all learned the hard way, typing and combat don't mix - it's a good way to die. And being able to talk freely improves strategy because your guild can discuss the plan of attack in detail without being tied to the keyboard for IM."

He then went on to  enumerate rival companies like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak and emphasized that the main difference between them is that Vivox requires no separate application to run and no credentials and server addresses to negotiate.

As of now, MMOs such as Fallen Earth and EVE Online use the Vivox technology. However, Sharma reveals that they are most excited about their partnership with BigWorld. "We have integrated our voice services into BigWorld's suite of game development tools. Game developers using the BigWorld Technology Suite can now have access to a pre-implemented and tested voice solution," the official said.

Lastly, Sharma would like to remind everyone that the Vivox technology can actually be used even if the player is not in the game. He even mentioned an example of that feature's benefits - "Imagine that your guild is about to plan a raid and you need to have an important strategy meeting, but you are stuck in your car commuting, or your corporation is under attack, and you need to get a message to all of the members whether they are in the game or not. You shouldn't be left out just because you are not running the game."

At the eve of the biggest improvements and additions yet to Eve Online, developer CCP Games gives a li'l preview of things to happen as it announced that the game and servers will have intensive hardware upgrades this month. This development only implies that Revelations is good to go and they are already fine tuning their system to accommodate the fifth expansion known as Kali.

Furthermore, the upgrades are needed to make room for the following newly introduced features to Revelations:

• Contracts: allows players to enter into traceable, limited trust relationships to create missions and business opportunities; four basic types of contracts will be available: Auction, Item Exchange, Courier, Loan, Freeform.
• Combat Organization: EVE gang system plus tactical features and management tools that will make basic communication faster and more efficient; grouping dynamics such as Squadrons, Wings and Fleets provide possibilities for dominating the galaxy on a grand scale
• Salvaging: all ships, both NPC and PC, will leave behind wreckage upon destruction, replacing the canisters that had been dropped previously; Once the initial loot is retrieved, a salvaging module may be used to extract additional ingredients

Well, it seems that Revelations is not just a hyped-up expansion as others initially thought it was. Aside from the above mentioned, the expansion was also incorporated with tiered voice support for the client designed by Vivox. It was also reported that the whole patch will come in three forms, the first one to come out this December while the last one to become available April of 2007.