Developers Team 5150 are also working on integration with the voice command program Game Commander 2, although I couldn't find anything specifically in the software at this time that mentions Game Commander 2. As things stand, the two can easily be set up to operate together perfectly anyway. They've even included a feature that lets you use Team Sound with Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing – the program generates a .inf file, and once you've run that and rebooted, that machine can use Team Sound on an internet connection shared over a network.
Team Sound is very easy to use, flexible and most importantly the voice communication function works well. Best of all, it won't even cost you a penny.
Web page: www.teamsound.com
Cost: Free
Download size: 1.75 megs
Compression Levels:
- High (4.8kbps – 1/10)
- Medium (13kbps – quarter of 56k modem)
- Low (32kbps)
Roger Wilco is actually the first program of its type I came across as it was adopted by my Team Fortress clan pretty soon after it was released. The first thing you'll notice when you look at it is that the interface is particularly simple – most configuration is done through a step by step wizard procedure, and the main program is just a small window with four tabs. The four tabs are: 'Channel,' which offers options to create, join or leave a channel or kick a user; 'Transmit,' which sets transmission as voice activated or key press activated; 'Adjust,' where you can fiddle with microphone and speaker volume levels; and 'About' where… well, that's pretty self explanatory. The configuration wizard lets you set playback and recording devices, your modem speed, CPU usage and a few other settings. As with all the voice communication programs in this article, you connect to other users by entering the IP address of the person running a Roger Wilco server. Simple. In fact, it's almost too simple.
There aren't as many configuration options as many of the other programs and it only lets you create one channel at a time using the standard client. Also, there is no way to change chat channels in the middle of a game. If you're playing a team game and want to change from offence to defence, to change to the relevant team you have to alt-tab to do it, and unless the Roger Wilco server is using Roger Wilco Base Station (I'll get to describing that in a minute) that channel will have to be on a different IP address. This is even more of a problem if the game you're playing is unhappy with alt-tabbing – for instance, alt-tabbing out and back into a game of Counter Strike will mute all game sound. You can download a user made add-on to let you change channels in game, but it would've been much more convenient if this feature were included in the standard download package.