Voice Chat Vs. Stylus Chat

[Risingsun]

http://www.dsfanboy.com/2008/10/24/point-counterpoint-voice-chat-vs-stylus-chat/

There is an interesting point counterpoint on DSfanboy about PS0. I'M curious to see where you all fall on the argument. Personally, I really like the idea of Visual Chat.

[Reginaldo]

voice chat in this game would lag us all to hell

[Niered]

voice chat in this game would lag us all to hell

Yeah, were already seeing a ridiculous push of the DS's hardware here, voice chat would not help this at all.

Also, the argument that drawing takes longer than typing is null. Reason? Once you get used to it, I would expect people to take advantage of symbols, not written text. Symbols can be conveyed in shorthand very quickly, especially if the community becomes strong enough that certain symbols become mass-used.

[Kent]

Maybe people would be a lot more complacent with the lack of voice chat if they knew how much processing power voice encoding and decoding in real-time takes.

People are used to things like the Xbox 360 (3x 3.2GHz CPU cores) and PCs, which can do this in real time with no problems, and have basically no impact on anything else they're doing... People often forget, however, the sheer abundance of CPU power these things have over the DS.

To put things into perspective... The DS has two CPUs. A 67MHz one and a 33MHz one. In order for real-time voice encoding and decoding to take place, it's safe to assume that at least one of these CPUs has to be bored off its ass in order to even try. Clearly, this is not going to be happening with 3D games any time soon, simply due to the fact that the faster of the two will be, more or less, serving as the system's GPU and processing all of its graphics.

And 3D graphics are a ton of math calculations.

There's no argument that having voice chat as an option would be bad, and I hope nobody here is daft enough to think it would be bad. However, it's simply not plausible to do with the hardware as it is, and the graphical prowess being shown in a game as such.

[Nitro Vordex]

Voice chat on a DS sucks horribly.

[Kent]

Voice chat on a DS sucks horribly.
I don't know about that - it works pretty well in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl and in the lobby in Metroid Prime: Hunters.

The only problems come in when you're in public areas, where there's a lot of background noise... But that's kind of a problem with any sort of voice chat.

[Dragwind]

I would assume if it were to be implemented, it would be in some sort of lobby or maybe private chat function. Most likely not during gameplay (as silly as that sounds).

[VR-Raiden]

The only problems come in when you're in public areas, where there's a lot of background noise... But that's kind of a problem with any sort of voice chat.
Yes, this is the sole reason I prefer text chat over voice chat. I don't feel like broadcasting my conversations to the world or other people in the room :/

[furrypaws]

Either way, both are much faster than trying to use the precision nessecary to hit the tiny letter keys on the DS bottom screen. I'm happy with stylus chat. I don't need to have the sound on to figure out what's going on with my team.

[Seority]

For me it goes like:
Hmm, I just bought this nifty DS to play when I'm out and about.
Oh, I have a docters appointment. I'll take my DS along and play PSØ.
(In the waiting lobby.)
With voice: "OMG! The noob got the rare AGAIN! Fuuuuc-!" Many adults and children stare at you.
With stylus: *Creates angry scribbles and sighs*

Sum up: When I'm in public places, I'd like to stay quiet concidering other people there. At home is where yell and complain about things =)

((These events are not real and were only used as in example of what might happen in different situations. I believe PSØ will be too much fun to complain about much of it. =) <3 ))

[jmanx]

Dude why not just have both like Metroid prime. Give people the options if they want voice on and have it originally off.

Hmmmm isn't ps0 going to have a DS keyboard or something as well?

But anyways! THAT IS A AWESOME WAY TO DO IT :P

[Percival]

I'm trying to find a good enough 100% sized screenshot of a PSØ pictochat window so I can know exactly how many pixels we have to work with. I could draw myself some icons ahead of time.

Test:
http://homepage.mac.com/srobert/.Pictures/WepPicPosts/Test.png