BattleCom BattleCom is perhaps the most senior of the voice-over-IP programs reviewed here; its website was registered way back in August 1998. It has undergone many changes in that time: numerous upgrades, a change in name (from Battlefield Communicator), and several price reductions from the original $24.95 to the current $0.00. The biggest change is that the software's creator, ShadowFactor Software Inc., was purchased by Microsoft, which is now busily incorporating BattleCom's routines into DirectX 8. This is a Good Thing because it means that voice-over-IP will soon be part of Windows, and software developers will be able to build reliable support for it directly into their games without reinventing the wheel. The current version of BattleCom as of this writing, 1.31 build 170, is a 2.2MB download from www.shadowfactor.com, and no registration is required. BattleCom's most unique feature is its zillions of options. This program is by far the most configurable of the voice-over-IP programs we tried. Newbies may feel a bit overwhelmed by all the choices, but there are setup wizards and help to guide them. One change we made to the defaults during setup was the compression level. There are 8 settings available (not counting those included solely for compatibility with earlier versions of BattleCom), named, in order from highest to lowest compression, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Hotel, Indigo, and Juliet. The default is Delta, but we opted for Charlie because the help information claimed its CPU and bandwidth usage was lower. Indeed, I found Charlie's CPU usage to be about 25% when playing and recording simultaneously, and we were able to FTP zipped files at 2.5 kilobytes per second while talking. That's less CPU usage than Roger Wilco, and about the same bandwidth. If you own a more powerful system than ours (as you probably do) you should be able to stick with the even better-sounding Delta compression; even on our lowly machines, its CPU usage is only around 30%. And if you have a high-speed connection like cable, DSL, T1, etc., you'll love the even higher-bandwidth settings like Hotel and Indigo, with their terrific sound quality. But I'm getting ahead of the story. After wading through the installation, we linked successfully on the very first try. Better yet, when we launched Quake 2, we heard a cool cyberbabe voice announce, "GameLink enabled," and everything worked! Breakup was virtually nonexistant, and Quake 2 ran very smoothly. (I later tested this with timedemo; recording and playing simultaneously in BattleCom dropped the frame rate of the first built-in demo from 33 to 25 fps, or 24%.) BattleCom is the only voice-over-IP program we've tested that worked perfectly on the very first try. To get ZDOOM to work with BattleCom, we had to create a new entry in BattleCom's GameLink database (which tells the program how to interact with games that weren't designed for use with BattleCom). We found that the following settings work with ZDOOM: Name of Game: ZDoom Window Name: ZDOOM* Plug-in Type: Game normally mutes external programs Plug-in Delay: 2000 milliseconds Next, we had to increase BattleCom's base priority level to "high" to prevent voice breakup. With these settings, BattleCom worked fine, and I'm pretty sure that conversing with BattleCom still slowed the frame rate less than with Roger Wilco. Alas, when we launched Quake 2 for our next evening of gaming, BattleCom stopped recording on my end; Bryan could not hear me. Shutting down and restarting BattleCom did not help, and I had to reboot my computer to get things working again. We hypothesize that BattleCom's GameLink failed to operate with Quake II when set at the high priority level (where it was left after our ZDoom game) because Quake II, now slightly more starved for CPU time, failed to initialize the sound system as quickly as BattleCom expected. After resetting BattleCom's priority to normal, the program has worked flawlessly in our Quake II games for the last two evenings. Nonetheless, we have noticed that BattleCom does sometimes crash with illegal operations when we make changes to its myriad options or try to exit the program. At least it hasn't stopped working in the middle of a game. Despite its flaws, so far BattleCom seems perhaps a shade more reliable than Roger Wilco on our computers. We'll need weeks more testing to be sure of that. But we definitely like BattleCom's low CPU usage and high configurability. Unless its reliability takes a major downturn, BattleCom will be the Co-Op Certification Laboratory's official voice-over-IP software for the foreseeable future. Recommendations So much for us. What about you? The same features of BattleCom that appeal to us should make it a great choice for everyone. Roger Wilco is also superb; it wrings amazing voice quality out of very low data rates, its reliability seems close to BattleCom's, its size is miniscule, and its ease of use is excellent. Don't ignore TeamSound and First Contact either; they might work for you, and their unique features could be just what you're looking for.