I''m wondering if anyone knows how to do voice chat in a game. The type of voice chat that you can either have constantly on or just controlled by a key being held, and that streams to a game server, then to the clients when the user says something. I have never seen something like this asked before, and I''m wondering if anyone knows how to do this. And if so, how would you do something like this?

that''d probably take up a lot of bandwidth from the game, though I could be wrong, also, in my experience voice from a PC mic is not very understandable either.

but i''ll cease my ne saying now



-arsenius
'after three days without programming, life becomes meaningless' -The Tao of Programming

I think something like DirectChat is going to be introduced in future versions of DirectX.

This really wouldn''t be that hard, it would just need a helluva lot of bandwidth... however I know that some people have been trying to use a mp3 encoding algorithm to compress sound, with mixed results.

Yeah, DX8 will feature a voice over net component

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I don''t think that realtime voice chat will take much bandwith. Did anyone of you ever tried to play Counter-Strike over LAN with many people and a program like Battlecom running so everyone can chat with each other?
The ping only drops about 5-10... That''s not very much.
In fact, realtime compression of voice is much faster and the results are much faster than compresing music.

There are some SDK''s out there I think...

DX8 will include DirectVoice which will ease the developers work load (supposedly ) to integrate voice communicaitons in a multiplayer game. Some features:

1) Pick your compression codec.
2) Pick your server setup (I think this is coolest part) from peer-to-peer (small numbers of peeps), client-to-(game)server (bigger numbers), and (my favorite) client-to-(voice)server with another machine running the game (ain''t that purty! ).
3) Easy mic setup.

I just hope it can be used without DirectPlay and with your own UDP and/or TCP/IP network coding.

Mike Roberts
aka milo
mlbobs@telocity.com

Check http://www.rogerwilco.com/. Supposedly, Tribes 2 will even include voice chat capability but it remains to be seen how this performs over a 28.8k modem along with all the other game data. I imagine that it''s possible, since quality doesn''t have to be perfect and voice samples occupy a fairly tight frequency range compared to music.

I may be completely wrong on this, but here''s what I think it voice-over-net does. When you say something or hold down the key, it reads input from the microphone, compresses it (or reads it with low quality to take less bandwitdth), then sends a certain number of bytes per game cycle (the whole message would have to cover a couple game cycles because no one can talk that fast). The voice-over-net component would only take a certain amount of input, compress it, send it, then start inputting again in the next game cycle. If anyone thinks I''m wrong, or has any opinion on this, let me know. (I tried to take a stab..probably missed completely though)

I''d used a seperate thread for the network communications, buts thats just me .

Phone quality audio is something like 8KHz 16bit mono; most of the compression comes from removing silence and ''recreating'' the silence with white noise on the other end.