Dolby Axon Voice Chat Q&A
Dolby Laboratories has thrown their hat into the ring and entered the market of voice chat software for the PC. Dolby has released the first public version of the Dolby Axon Desktop Client - a stand-alone voice chat software for the PC. In limited beta since last autumn, the client is now freely available at the Dolby site. According to Dolby, Axon key features include:
Axon technology is available both as a stand-alone desktop client that can be used with any game or as a SDK for developers to be built into a game. The Desktop Client version comparison matrix shows that there are two levels of service available for the stand-alone client.
My first reaction was that their math seems faulty as this model would make Axon horribly expensive in many common scenarios where Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are used these days. So I tossed some questions towards a Dolby representative to figure out what the story was and turns out I was wrong - they really seem to have figured this stuff out and while the model is different, it doesn't expect everyone in the chat to be paying a yearly fee.
Trailer of Dolby Axon 3D features available when built into a game
YouGamers Q&A with Spencer Hooks of Dolby LaboratoriesQ: What kind of pricing do you have in the EU for the "Surround Pass Upgrade"? A: It is $19.99 (USD) per year. Pricing in other currencies is automatically calculated via our payment website based on the current exchange rate. Q: Assuming, say, 25 people wanted to use this for some light World of Warcraft raiding, would all 25 need the Surround Pass Upgrade, or just the person forming/administering the chat?" A: Not all people need to purchase the Surround Pass upgrade. If there is at least one Surround Pass user in a chat then everyone in the chat gets the upgraded experience. We expect that a raiding party would have a mix of basic and Surround Pass users. Q: What kind of server/client model is used? I would imagine that the 5 player free mode would be just peer-to-peer, but what about the paid version - does it use Dolby-hosted servers to run the chatrooms? Assuming it uses Dolby-hosted servers, where are those servers located? A: Yes, we use a combination of peer hosted and server hosted rooms. Currently the servers are on the East coast of North America. As we build out our infrastructure we will look at other locations. This will based on where our users are and the feedback we hear from them. Q: Does the client support Channel Command or Ghosting/Phantoms? A: We support channel command by allowing users to be in more than one chat simultaneously and can use different push-to-talk keys for each chat. Q: Is the 50 player chat mentioned in the Surround Pass a hard limitation? Isn't that kinda small? A: The limit right now is 50 people per chat. A user can have more than one chat, so larger groups can be managed that way. Simply creating a single very large chat can become unwieldy, so if we hear user feedback about larger chats we will consider the best way to handle it. Q: How does users per channel limitation work in games that (plan to) embed Axon into the client? A: There is no channel size limitation in games. Dolby Axon technology is designed to be massively scalable and the decisions about the in-game implementation (including channel size) are made by the game developer. Our thanks to Dolby who got the answers back to us promptly. For more technical details, check out the Axon technology page. Our Take: Very InterestingDolby Axon does appear to be an interesting alternative to TeamSpeak and Ventrilo and for a small guild or team, it could end up a lot cheaper than a dedicated Ventrilo server. It would also be much easier to maintain as the whole service model is different - you are not renting or running a server with a specific number of slots and there is no need to share server details join in, so it is a much simpler system to set up. Paid accounts can also create permanent chat rooms, so you can effectively emulate a "Ventrilo Lobby" - a channel where people can show up and idle to form up groups etc. The maximum chat size of 50 does make it unsuitable for some extreme scenarios - EVE fleets will stick to TeamSpeak as in EVE you commonly need 200+ people in one voice chat and TS is currently the only software that can pull it off. Still, I can't think of any other common scenario where you'd want more than 50 people in a single channel as you are free to set up and join multiple channels at once. Lack of European servers does make it less than ideal for Europeans at the moment, but it is obviously a brand new service, so I'm not going to hold that against them (yet). Only other unfortunate bit that I can think of is that there is currently no version for Mac available - only Windows XP / Vista / 7 is supported at this time. A downer for some WoW guilds as that game also available on the Mac. The quality really is very good and while the most common usage scenarios can't really use all those fancy 3D/Surround features, Axon does offer some completely new options for game developers that use the technology for built-in voice chat that seamlessly merges with the actual game environment. Definitely worth a look and easy to try out - new accounts receive 30 days of free "Surround Pass", so you can try out all the features before deciding to pay for the service. For more details and to sign up, visit the Dolby Axon Desktop Client page.
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