TeamSwitch
This page describes TeamSwitch, a program designed to make it easier
to use TeamSpeak while playing America's Army Operations.
News
2005 January 4th: New version 0.96 available.
The problem
America's Army Operations (AAO for short) encourages team work, but the
means present within the game to communicate between players are not
convenient to use. Players must use complex combinations of key presses
to send predefined messages to other players (commo messages) or type
short sentences with the keyboard. Needless to say, this is hard to do
when under fire. A solution to this problem is to use separate
voice-chat software, such as TeamSpeak (TS, in short)
This solution could be more convenient to use. Players must use
channels corresponding to their team in the game. When they move to
another team, which can happen automatically when the AAO server
balances teams, players must manually move to the right channel in TS.
Moreover, ghosting is made possible. Ghosting consists of dead players
communicating with live players to give information about ennemies.
This is considered to be cheating, and accusations of ghosting are
easily thrown when a group of players performs surprisingly well.
The solution
TeamSwitch addresses some of these issues, though not perfectly. It
automatically moves players to a special channel, named GHOSTS, when it
detects their death. It also moves them to the channel matching their
team every time a new round starts. It does not prevent ghosting, but
it removes the temptation. Dead players usually like to comment what's
happening in the game. If they do so using the same channels as the
live players, they are ghosting, even if they did not intend to cheat
in the first place.
How it works
TeamSwitch is a fairly simple Perl
script that queries an AAO server at regular intervals to know what
players are alive, and in what teams. When it detects a change, it
connects to a TS server to move players to the right channels. The AAO
server, the TS server an TeamSwitch need not run on the same computer.
Using TeamSwitch
TeamSwitch is available for free under the BSD license, which allows
you to distribute and modify TeamSwitch as you wish. The requirements
for running this software are the following:
- An AAO server.
- A TS server Get it there.
- Perl 5. It is commonly found in Linux systems, but it is
available for many other platforms, including MS Windows.
Download TeamSwitch here.
Last words
You are welcome to make suggestions, criticize or tell me how wonderful
TeamSpeak is by sending a mail to jdeneux AT this domain.
That's all folks. Have fun.
Johann "JohDex" Deneux