Hi everyone and happy new year,

I've been doing some google searching to find people asking about using Skype for Online Gaming and logged in to reply to this thread: topic117956.html, but it was closed. So please forgive me creating a new thread, but I hope this will interest some of you.

In reply to some of the questions in the previous thread:

Kazi asked: "I was wondering which would be better, Ventrilo or Skype?"

* Voice quality: Ventrilo isn't even close to Skype. Not remotely.
* Memory usage: Skype is going to use more. Average is about 30MB-45MB
* CPU usage: Skype is pretty mild and very well threaded, especially since Skype 4.1. It will probably use a little more than Ventrilo, but we have over 100 online gamers in our beta S4PG.Server VoIP rooms and only the people with P4 single core class machines have reported any noticeable slowdown in their game when on a conference with lots of people.
* Bandwidth usage: With Skype's new SILK codec (Search Wiki for Skype SILK )the bandwidth usage is lower than any other codec for the equivalent sample rate. And here is the good part, it's intelligently dynamic based on what is available. In other words, if your game is slamming your connection - Skype will notice the jitter and packet loss and adjust its sample rate and bitrate to offer the best quality it can for what you have available.

Mike02x wrote: "Skype is more for personal use, while Ventrilo works great for games."

We are working to change that public misconception. The product my company is developing is called "Skype for Power Gamers". It is a Skype Add-on that will turn as many Skype instances as you want into Ventrilo-like auto-conferencing servers.

We will have a free basic version of S4PG.Server that will meet many gamers needs. For those needing the capacity to handle large clans and many rooms, we expect our price to be $3/mo +/-. Compare that with renting a high capacity Ventrilo server and I think you'll see that is pretty attractive.

S4PG.Client is the Push-To-Talk (PTT) and Skype interface product that overlays on top of a full screen DirectX game. It also allows you to do the normal things you do in Skype like chat, call friends, call S4PG.Server rooms, etc - all without Alt-Tab'ing back to your desktop. S4PG.Client is available for download from our website and is currently in alpha release.

We are changing our website around right now so there is actually more information located out on Wikipedia.

Oops, looks like I can't post links yet until I've made 5 posts. So I'll have to settle with just telling you to google for S4PG and you'll find our site and the wiki page.

I'm happy to answer any questions or take any feedback anyone has.

Thanks