As the PC game industry rockets to new heights of social popularity and technical achievement so have third party add-ons that enable people to communicate across games. 

There are numerous programs that enable players to communicate with each other from text to VoIP.  Programs such as Xfire and Comrade try to corner the instant messaging community across game and operating systems.  While TeamSpeak, and Ventrilo, two of the most well known VOIP programs for gamers, struggle over dominance for gamer voice communications.  Then there are various overlay programs that attempt to half-heartily fuse these programs together, which at best can lag performance will likely result in a “hard-reboot”.

Then along comes playxpert, a software that is to dream of.  I strongly encourage any gamer who is not familiar with this software to take the time and read through what they offer.  This isn’t software that is in planning, it has been released to a small community of enthusiast throughout its various beta test.  Most recently they have taken the download off the site to do a final polish.  The developers seem to really stand behind the product and plan to publish I believe to be the ultimate software add-on to rule them all. 

PXP offers an in-game web browser, can you say no more alt-tab, a Tunes widget that will allow you to control your music in game, Chat support for multiple messengers (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, GoogleTalke, Xfire, and any XMPP protocol based chat program), and robust diagnostics functions.  However the coolest part of PXP is it provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) to develop your own widgets.  Currently there is a myriad of partners from Google, facebook, to Ventrilo/TeamSpeak and Wikia that are developing professional grade widgets for the software. 

Developers and forum admins claim that PXP is just around the corner, and I for one can’t wait to install this software on my gaming rigs. 

So what does this mean for FoE?  Well, PXP will help fuse together the larger gaming community across all games.  Now leaders will be reachable and the member community as a whole will gel across all game and OS platforms.  If PXP delivers what they claim it can do, all members and incoming PRs will be required to run the software.  PXP could be come a software standard for the guild, just like TeamSpeak.