Hello 

We made a game using Unity 5.5.4p4 that contains a multiplayer component. For this purpose we used Photon Realtime engine (with PlayFab backend platform).

We are interested in integrating a VOIP service so the players could chat in real time during the game.
A quick look at the Asset Store gives me only 2 possible plug-ins:

 - Photon Voice
 - Dissonance

The problem with Photon Voice, although at first it would seem as a natural choice, but it only supports PUN engine, not Realtime, and we don't know how much changes would be needed to integrate it with the current code.

Dissonance is a bit costly, and I also can't find references to Photon Realtime (no idea if they would work together).

What are your experiences with this problem, what would be your suggestions?
Are there some other plugins that could be imported into Unity to solve this problem?

Thanks

What targets do you use in Unity? Something that supports all of the targets (desktop, mobile, web, consoles) would be quite hard to build and integrate (and the consoles have their own that you have to use, anyway.)

Depending on your targets, you could integrate third party libraries that aren't Unity specific. There are a number, ranging from "codec plus UDP" all the way up to complete services with support for NAT punch-through, peer-to-peer, and even routing to the PSTN.

However, exactly how strapped for cash are you when you consider $65/seat to be too pricey? If it just works, and have great ratings, why wouldn't you go with that?

Our primary concern (for reasons I'm not sure I can discuss, so let's just leave it at that) is XBox One, although the game is developed for PC/PlayStation 4/XBox One platforms. 

Regarding the 65$ price per seat - it is not out of our financial reach, but the problem is that there is no trial version (as far as I've seen), and I have no idea how Dissonance would work with our current network infrastructure, so if we pay 65$ just to see that we would have to overhaul a huge portion of the networking scripts, that would prove to be much more expensive than the price seems to be at first glance.

Probably the biggest problem is that this is our first encounter with in game VOIP service, and we really don't know what to expect when implementing one, so I'm looking for as much input from people who delt with it before as I can get.

Thank you for your reply.

On Xbox One, you're supposed to use the Xbox Live voice chat services.

Do you have a contact at Microsoft already? Dev kit?

Ditto for me. Chat on the consoles is provided by the consoles. There is a small amount of effort in making it work for each, but that is expected on each platform. 

It is also important because in many areas of the world there are a mix of wiretap laws and privacy laws which much be enforced for voice chat. Using the official systems for each of the consoles is the easiest and least risky solution.

Of course that still leaves you with your issue of chat on the PC.  I'd consider an external solution like Discord, or if you're launching on Steam to use Steam's voice chat.  This route also gets around the legal issue as you are not the one providing the voice chat services.

Separately, if you pay $65 for the module, and it turns out that "all" you get out of it is a lot of learning about how voice chat integration works, that seems like very cheap education and a good deal to me :-)

We downloaded XDK, and I supposed that Microsoft has some sort of a system in the XDK itself, just doing the research before we start integrating this option in our game. 

One interesting thing - when I googled "Voice chat for XBox" or "Unity voice chat for XBox" (and other variations of those searches), XBox Live voice chat didn't appear once on the first page of the search. 

I noticed that all examples and references to XDK's GameChat2 (the name of the voice service) are written in C++, does anyone know if there are any examples made in Unity with C#? 

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when I googled "Voice chat for XBox" or "Unity voice chat for XBox" (and other variations of those searches), XBox Live voice chat didn't appear once

 

 

Most of the Xbox SDK is behind the Microsoft NDA, so obviously it can't be public Google hits.
 

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I noticed that all examples and references to XDK's GameChat2 (the name of the voice service) are written in C++, does anyone know if there are any examples made in Unity with C#? 

 

You might want to ask your Unity support contact about what they recommend (assuming you're using Unity Pro.) Again, the Xbox SDK is under NDA which means you can't talk about specifics in public forums.

3 hours ago, hplus0603 said:

 

Most of the Xbox SDK is behind the Microsoft NDA, so obviously it can't be public Google hits.
You might want to ask your Unity support contact about what they recommend (assuming you're using Unity Pro.) Again, the Xbox SDK is under NDA which means you can't talk about specifics in public forums.

 

Yeah, I know, that's why I'm trying to get information from various forums (including Microsoft's), just to be prepared before we go straight to Microsoft't or Unity's tech support. I know that people can't really talk about the specifics of the integration, I'm just trying to find out if Microsoft made some plug-in for Unity that would help us integrate it into our game.