Voice chat? Any info on this?

[D'karr]

Well, to be clear the voice chat system was working during DDXP. What they were not sure of was what specific additional functionality would ship with it at launch and what would be added after launch.

They ran a demo and the DM and player were using the voice-chat the whole time. So the basic functionality is there already.

 

[Khaalis]

I could be wrong, but I doubt that this is done by the in-house WoTC programming team (if such a thing even exists). Developing a decent chat module for DDI that is relatively painless to setup with a microphone and works well isn't a trivial task. This is probably the team that is developing DDI, which is better suited for a company that develops software for a living, rather than a company like WoTC that focuses mainly on card, PnP and board games.

The only issue here is that we have not heard anything in the wind, rumor or otherwise of a business partnership between WotC and a coding house. When the 3E PC generator was being done, we knew months ahead of time exactly who had been contracted to do it. If anything, a contract for this big a release should have been something we heard about on the grapevine, especially from any of those of us in the software industry (there are quite a few members here in the industry, myself included). So far, we have not heard a peep about an outside house doing the digital projects. In fact WotC has been advertising for a fair number of IT and graphics arts positions, which leads me to believe they are building the team in house. JMHO.