Valve doesn’t want you to miss one millisecond of in-game cooperative planning, warnings and bitter cussing before a ragequit, announcing Steam has upgraded its voice chat system to the SILK audio codec.
SILK is the system used by Skype, and if it’s good enough for the world’s largest voice communication service, it should be good enough for TF2.
Valve promises a vast improvement in sound quality while noting the codec uses slightly more bandwidth than Steam Voice did.
SILK voice chat is up and running now on Steam, and it is available for all games under the influence of Steamworks, including April’s coming release of Portal 2. Where it will be used for co-op play. In Portal
Have any of you tried out the new voice system on Steam? What do you think?
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR VGH's founder and El Jefe. Lance is a longtime 'gaming connoisseur', indie music junkie, recovering asshole and video game enthusiast. His main objective is to develop Video Game Henchmen into a gaming site known for its intelligence, timeliness, originality and integrity. Lance spends part of his free-time in the virtual world and has a lot of gaming experience since he started at a very young age. |
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Nice, though I never had any quality issues as it was before.
On other Valve news, the beta is out for the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 DLC, Cold Stream. Just let it update itself and you’re set to go. Let’s kill some zombies people!!
I’m not sure about this…I love valve and steam but do we really want more bandwidth taken away from the games we play. Let’s be honest, we mostly (90%+) use voice chat to organise and participate in online games. So if it takes more bandwidth, what is suffering?
On another point, the steam service does allow you to “seamlessly” connect to your friends while playing with such innovation as, the Steam overlay. But when your in a hecktic game of BC2 or L4D2 – the last thing you want is a spamming friend to lagg you out (and then you blame it on the guy with a regular ping – or – “rates” lol)
I personally use TeamSpeak2 – its low cost to bandwidth and does the job with as little consumption as possible (imo). I often (more recently than before) close Steam once we have organised a match time, just to cut down on the excess memory and bandwidth costs.
As you may have gathered, I’m a hardcore gamer with lots of testosterone and manly manlike anger – GRRR :P Why can’t steam facilitate that demographic too?
But yeh, great idea! Better quality voice chat and hopefully less lagg ;-)