What is your current involvement in VoIP? Is it in your realm, or in the realm of other game system designers?

Yeah, it's part of VoIP, I suppose FOIP, Face over IP. It was kind of folded into that. It started off as pretty much a VoIP thing and slightly bloomed out. It's still an ongoing thing. It's slightly out of our hands, because there's interdependencies with other systems and other in-game applications that we're not working on directly. So we're supporting as much as we can and trying to push it through as much as we can from our end. And a lot of our tech is in place. There's other sort of gnarly stuff, I suppose, that we can't necessarily do directly. That's kind of what we're waiting on.

It's just a bit of a beast. Because the voice is the main player interaction with it, people assume it's audio-owned, but there's so much going into it which is on so many different teams and so many different systems. Obviously the voice interacts with the system, but there's so much under the hood that takes into account different disciplines. But I think it'd be a great feature to be able to fully flesh out: to be able to speak in the world, in the game, and have your voice sound as if it's propagating in that space. We've got a tannoy system. We could have a microphone in your ship on the bridge, and you could press a button and then your voice could be propagated through different PA speakers in the ship, like an Idris or something. And you can communicate directly with engineering and get your engineer to do something. That's the dream. That'd be amazing.

There's some other system bits that have come recently that allow a lot more of that stuff, and you can see how it will all join together, and I think we'll hit some sort of tipping point with it, and suddenly a lot of that will roll out at once, and it'll be almost like a sport, the stuff you can do with it all.