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I've always thought voice chat would be a great addition to bzflag ( especially for CTF). I just wanted to know how hard would it be to put into the game.

Something along the lines of adding support for a standard such as Roger Wilco? (please excuse the really outdated example).

What voice overlay standards are out there these days?, and are any of them free and/or open source? Another question would be if this would really cause lag with all the modem-using newbies out there attempting to use voice chat during the game?

Dervish wrote:Something along the lines of adding support for a standard such as Roger Wilco? (please excuse the really outdated example).

What voice overlay standards are out there these days?, and are any of them free and/or open source? Another question would be if this would really cause lag with all the modem-using newbies out there attempting to use voice chat during the game?

the idea of voice chat has been talked about before, and nixed.

There are plenty of 3rd party programs out there that work just fine. And IIRC, bzlfag network protocol is not "voice chat" friendly. it would tax the bandwith of the server, and in turn, create unplayable lag.

Figured. I vaguely remember chat about this on our old ezBoard forum.

On the lines of this topic, what free 3rd party voice programs are out there?

Teamspeak.

Dervish wrote:Figured. I vaguely remember chat about this on our old ezBoard forum.

yup, thats when they first introduced teamspeak. The Fruitloops were the first to use it I believe...

we'd all love to see voice chat but everyone would have to have broadband and not many do, imagine the lag!! it would only be worth it if everyone had broadband and that's only going to happen in 2007

I bet some people out in the mountains will still be using a modem and dial-up services even in 2010, lol. Of course those are the people who'll download BZFlag, experience disgusting lag, and then post here to ask what's wrong.

The majority of players use broadband as dialup is too slow to play and they will get lag kick anyway. Why should the majority suffer for the minority ? Maybe the voice could be developed in a way that would make it optional to recieve voice packets (not use bandwidth for dialup users) and an option to recieve voice packets (for fast internet users)

Dangit, now it's never gonna happen!

i dont think it would be that much of a problem. You could press diffrent keys to talk to diffrent people, F1 to broadcast to everyone, F2 to broadcast to your team, F3 to select who you want to talk tto and F4 to start talking.

Dial-up users can use VoIP (the quality is less than that of a phone, but it works).

Mabye a highly compressed format, that records your voice when you press F1-F4, than when you let go it sends your message at the next available time. Thus, you only hear one message at a time.

I can imagine the format of it like this:

User presses broadcast key. computer says to server "Add my message to the queue" and starts recording message. Once it is your turn (hopefully the same time you start recording), the server will ask you for what you have (so far, if time-shifted or live) and broadcast it.

at any time during this sequence, when the user releases the broadcast key, the message will stop recording.

Along with this, there should be a few options for the administrator, like if voice chat should be enabled (text chat can not be turned off globally), and the time limit or filesize limit for messages, like 10 seconds or somthing. (0 for unlimited)

10 seconds or somthing. (0 for unlimited)

Or, A certain amount of memmory.

Instead of 10 seconds 100KB (very compressed... a few seconds).

This would make it easyer to analize lag.
(because even though your sound might be simple it might be very "large")

So, you could make 10 seconds be 10MB if you wanted.
(laaaag)


Greate place for hackers to get servers bogged down.

Greate place for hackers to get servers bogged down.

And you are right, with this feature, it is a wonderful opertunity for hackers to take hold of servers.

You could only let globally/locally registered users talk, than log how much data they send on average. This could be used to identify a spammer/hacker.

And of course self-moderation, vote based kicking, and so on helps.

It would be very hackable, but it might be cool.

yay for voice support

Also people could cheat with it, other than that and hacks it sounds cool.

In contrast to the rest of you people, I don't want voice chat. I often play with the volume turned off, and sometimes am not allowed to use sound at all. I know the text would remain, but then I could not hear other people who were voice messaging.
I, personally, do not think voice chat would be productive. People would engage in way more smalltalk and interrupt too much.
I do have a bit of a bias: I can type faster than I can talk

What is great about voice chat is the ability to give you team commands while driving, such as " protect the flag", "im getting ready to plant" "whatch out for the geno" or "Damnit would you stop capturing your own flag".

I dont think you can decide what is a good idea or not just by looking at it from 1 perspective. For example voice may not be so necessary on the servers people go on just to pass time although on servers used for league matches this would be very usefull. I dont know about other players but i get distracted in matches when i constantly have to read what people type and have to type myself. Also precious time is lost when you are talking to a team mate on strategy etc...

Just another thought.


What about obs in the league servers?

They could make you get "side tracked".....



I think you should be able to disable global talking.
(like obs to players....)

Then some stupid obs couldn't cuss me out because I'm beating his favorite team.....


I think this would also be a good place for spammers too.
(some people can make stuff sound worse with sound than with text)


So, in contrast... I think voice chat should be extremly private.
(like team to team... and only on league servers.... not like hepcat)


I don't want somebody sitting there and cussing me out just because I killed him.

(example:)
You ****ing ******* You killed me.

(or tk:)
You ****ing *******

(even if the tk is not on purpose you'll still get cussed out...)

How would you filter out the bad words?