[ioquake3] VoIP support for ioquake3...

[monk at rq3.com]

> Ryan C. Gordon schrieb:
>
>>> As an aside: when transmitting to the team over the radio, what about
>>> adding a slight static or distortion either to all transmissions or
>>> based on general location throughout the map?
>>
>> I think you get that by default with Speex.   :)
>>
>> --ryan.
>
> IMHO this is a good idea. So you can differentiate between an
> opponent "shouting" at you or a teammate on the "radio".
>
> Joerg


Just as long as it's something that can easily be toggled off or is off by
default.  Most of my experience with VOIP with games (be it fps or mmo) is
that the quality is bad enough without artifically inducing more
distortion and volume issues.  For Ventrilo as an example, you can set
people up to +800% or -800% volume individually, i.e. if someone is
speaking too close to the mic, you can manually adjust that person so he's
not blasting you with sound in relation to everyone else.  On the other
hand, I have often had to pump people up to +800% and I STILL can barely
hear them.  Vent seemed to save the settings per user in a config file
somewhere and I suppose if something similar was implemented in ioq3, you
could go by guid so the settings would be persistent if you encountered
that person elsewhere?

I hope good thought is put into what the defaults of this implementation
will be.  Server ops are lazy.  There, I said it!  Lazy lazy lazy.  Once
they get a server up and going, they often don't want to futz with things
or try to stay away from administration until enough people complain about
banning a certain player or changing the map rotation.  Players are lazy
too.  If the serverside and clientside cvars have a default such that VOIP
is for many people a poor implementation, then the whole thing is just
going to get turned off.

I think it would be better to use conservative, "best quality" settings
enabled by default and let servers and players enable more aggressive
settings like volume ramp by relative position or adding static or
distortion.

I know you're still discussing even implementing these types of features,
but I just wanted to throw this concern out early.  In theory, I agree
that some of these features would be awesome.  However, my concern is that
in practice it might turn into a mess for people who are expecting the
in-game VOIP to work the same as other games and they will just disable it
entirely than give it a fair shake.  Especially after all this work to
implement it !

Monk.