Some future tidbits:

[Toast]

CCP Games and Vivox today announced that subscribers of the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) EVE Online will soon have real-time, in-game voice communication as the result of a technology integration agreement between the two companies. Vivox will provide CCP with game-embedded voice communication services customized for and integrated into EVE.

The upcoming expansion to EVE Online—codenamed Kali—will introduce an innovative Advanced Reactive Content System (ARCS), in which the political landscape and physical borders of nation-states within the game can be altered dynamically through the collective outcome of player actions, thus directly controlling the game universe destiny and resulting storyline.

CCP will also release a newer version of the current award-winning graphics engine for EVE Online, which will take advantage of the latest DirectX 9 features to produce superior imagery and detail than the existing client. .

Very interesting. It looks like the graphics engine upgrade will actually initially come for DX9, ie before Vista. The in-game VOIP is a nice addition, although the 'premium feature' aspect worries me.

http://ve3d.ign.com/

[Sparky]

VOIP will apparently require more monies - so it's an utterly crap and useless waste of development time.  The main attraction of integrated voice comms would be universality.  You could hop onto the gang channel or chat in corp without having to fuck around with TS servers, registering people, kicking idling spies and so forth.  But if even a couple of guys in gang haven't ponied up you're all ending up on TS anyway.  Meh.

[Comstar]

You have got to be KIDDING. You'll have to PAY for ingame voice comms!?!? Thats insane. Very well done money wise, as I'm sure we'll all pay for it. But very very...slimey.

[Engels]

Why would we pay out if Roger Wilco or TeamSpeak or 3rd party program du-jour can do the job, without having to route packets to England and back? Unless the voice system in Eve is going to somehow be tailored specifically to a 'RP realistic' space communications system, in which case, it only seems like it'd be limited communication, versus a unlimited communication like Teamspeak.

[Toast]

CCP will need to be very careful with charging for the VOIP, lest it flop. I'm seeing a few options:

1. Charge a single fee for a given alliance or corp. Any member can join gratis.
2. Allow customers to buy the in game chat with ISK directly
3. Go Ronco-style and suddenly announce that the service will be free.

[MahrinSkel]

If they don't allow entire corp/alliances to sign up for a single fee, it's DOA.  Still may have difficulty, if you can't make common channels that cross corp/alliance lines (assuming they all have the service).  And if they do let them sign up as a group, the question of who pays the bill is a big one.

Integrated VOIP would be a great thing, but as a fee-for-service arrangement, it's probably not going to work as long as corps/alliances can get someone with a fat pipe to host a TeamSpeak or Ventrilo server.  It would have to bee a value-added "loss leader", and the economics of bandwidth requirements probably won't support that.

--Dave

[Toast]

Log-in traps are a lot harder to execute using in game VOIP as well