At the moment, communications are ship-to-ship, and are over the following channels:
1. Text to LOCAL - this is a local text broadcast to your instance, all ships in the instance see the message
2. Text to Contact - this is a direct text message to a contact (another ship), only the recipient sees the message
3. Wing Voice Comms - this is the immersive "Roger-Wilko" static voice comms between members of a wing. Only members of the wing hear the message
I am assuming/hoping that once we have multi-crew (i.e. all commanders sitting in the same cockpit), they do not need to be in the same wing to do so. I can understand the concept of a wing of ships, but not a wing of people sitting in the same room, who can turn their heads and see each other (although admittedly at present glued to our seats). That is a crew, not a wing.
I would like to suggest that we have a further voice comms channel "CREW", which will allow players to voice chat (without the "Roger-Wilko" static) with players in the ship (i.e. the comms are not received outside the ship). This can also include a text interface (not just voice), and the text interface would result in a text bubble appearing above the player's head (as per most other MMOs)
This also leads on to later seasons when we are walking around. I appreciate that voice comms in a busy station or bar for example, will be difficult to manage, so, as in a lot of MMOs, we will be using text to communicate with other players. I would hope that we can have "TALK" and "WHISPER" channels for this, so when we use "TALK", a text bubble would appear above the player's head (overheard discussions), whereas whispers would be directed at another player, and the voice bubble would not appear.
1. Text to LOCAL - this is a local text broadcast to your instance, all ships in the instance see the message
2. Text to Contact - this is a direct text message to a contact (another ship), only the recipient sees the message
3. Wing Voice Comms - this is the immersive "Roger-Wilko" static voice comms between members of a wing. Only members of the wing hear the message
I am assuming/hoping that once we have multi-crew (i.e. all commanders sitting in the same cockpit), they do not need to be in the same wing to do so. I can understand the concept of a wing of ships, but not a wing of people sitting in the same room, who can turn their heads and see each other (although admittedly at present glued to our seats). That is a crew, not a wing.
I would like to suggest that we have a further voice comms channel "CREW", which will allow players to voice chat (without the "Roger-Wilko" static) with players in the ship (i.e. the comms are not received outside the ship). This can also include a text interface (not just voice), and the text interface would result in a text bubble appearing above the player's head (as per most other MMOs)
This also leads on to later seasons when we are walking around. I appreciate that voice comms in a busy station or bar for example, will be difficult to manage, so, as in a lot of MMOs, we will be using text to communicate with other players. I would hope that we can have "TALK" and "WHISPER" channels for this, so when we use "TALK", a text bubble would appear above the player's head (overheard discussions), whereas whispers would be directed at another player, and the voice bubble would not appear.
