Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: In Second Life, Vivox and Linden Labs have implemented telephone booths to make outside calls and do text messages to allow real-world communication from in-game. Are there plans to create anything like this, or put purely social features in the game, like a GTA 4-style cellphone to call other players, for example, or is it all about the gameplay?

Ray - There’ll absolutely be social options for players. APB really has two distinct districts, there’s an action district where the hardcore gameplay takes place and a social district. I believe the users will absolutely use the Vivox client in that space just to kind of chat at a club or stuff like that. Getting back to your question about - will we allow players to call each other in-game or SMS each other in or out of the game, I think for launch, we won’t be supporting those features, but we certainly like them and think they’re cool. We just want to make sure we don’t put too much on the table; we want to make sure we’re ready to launch when we get there.

Ten Ton Hammer - How did the Vivox partnership come about? What makes Vivox a good fit for APB?

Ray - For us, we met them at a Virtual Worlds conference and we’d been looking at some competing technologies and hadn’t really been aware of their solution. We realized that technically, having that type of 3-D voice over IP integrated into a game, it just made perfect sense. Right from the first time we started looking at and evaluating the solution, I think everyone knew this had the potential to be a real winner for APB.

I also liked the fact that, in the case of Vivox, you really let them take care of all the infrastructure. So it really saved us a whole part of the infrastructure build where we’d be responsible for providing the bandwidth and the additional server. So the business model for their solution just really makes sense for us in terms of bringing our game online.

Ten Ton Hammer - Was positional audio, the infrastructure, or some other feature of Vivox (voice fonts, sound quality, etc.) the thing that jumped out at you when you considered it?

Ray - It’s funny, it’s one of those things that when you read it on paper, it sounds cool for sure. But when you actually experience it in game, it really adds a whole other dimension. We already know that people have developed strategies of hiding and going behind corners and listening to other gangs in the game.

Roland - Something I was always really interested to see was how the 3-D features would work. Once we put it in, it was really cool, especially at unexpected moments. In the game you can run someone over. Once we put it in, it was really cool, especially at unexpected moments. In the game currently you can run over other players in your car. To hear the reactions when people get run over unexpectedly is quite funny. (laughter)

Ten Ton Hammer - One of the usual concerns with positional audio is that in a crowded space, it can be difficult to separate the conversation you want to hear from those you don’t. I was wondering if I could get your take on that issue.

Roland - There’s a lot that can be done on the visual side of things to help sort things out. With a sandbox style game, it’s difficult to account for every kind of situation that can occur, but it’s not really something that’s shown to be a massive problem so far in our testing. At least not the kind of problem we don’t think we can resolve. We’ll probably be doing things like adjusting the distance sound travels to get around some of those situations where there’s a lot of people in a small area.

Ten Ton Hammer - I like what you said about visual cues to show who’s talking. You mentioned testing it out - you already have the Vivox client working in the testbed of your game?

Roland - Yea, that’s right, we’ve had it integrated for quite a while now in a fairly limited prototype form that we’re continuing to work on, but yea.

Ray - We’re in the friends and family stage of testing right now; we’re having a lot of fun with it.