Voice Support

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There are two ways to use VoIP in ioquake3. You can either use Mumble as an external program, for which ioq3 now supplies some basic hooks, or you can use the new built-in VoIP support.

Mumble is here: http://mumble.sourceforge.net/ … ioquake3 can supply it with your in-game position, but everything else is whatever features Mumble offers outside of the game. To use it, start Mumble before you start ioq3, and run the game with +set cl_useMumble 1. This should work on at least Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and probably other platforms Mumble supports in the future.

The built-in stuff offers tighter in-game integration, works on any platform that ioquake3 supports, and doesn’t require anything more than a recent build of the game. The rest of this document is concerned with the built-in VoIP support.

THE EASY WAY:

The simple way to get voip up in running is to use the system default method which is the ingame support using push to talk. There are two settings to set this up.

1) First enable Voice/Voip by entering SETUP->GAME OPTIONS and make sure Voice/Voip is enabled.

2) Next choose a key to use as your Push to Talk key by entering SETUP->CONTROLS->MISC. The default key is V.

The Long Version

Quick start for servers:

  • run a recent build of ioquake3.
  • Make sure your network settings are set to broadband.

Quick start for clients:

  • run a recent build of ioquake3.
  • Make sure your network settings are set to broadband.
  • +set snd_useOpenAL 1
  • \bind q “+voiprecord”
  • Hook up a microphone, connect to a VoIP-supporting server.
  • hold down ‘q’ key and talk.


Cvars you can set:

sv_voip: set to “1″ (the default) to enable server-side VoIP support. Set to “0″ to disable. Without this, all VoIP packets are refused by the server, which means no one gets to use in-game VoIP.

cl_voip: set to “1″ (the default) to enable client-side VoIP support. Set to “0″ to disable. Without this, you will neither be able to transmit voice nor hear other people.

s_alCapture: set to “1″ (the default) to have the audio layer open an OpenAL capture device. Without this set on sound startup, you’ll never get bits from the microphone. This means you won’t transmit, but you can still hear other people.

cl_voipSendTarget: a string: “all” to broadcast to everyone, “none” to send to no one, “attacker” to send to the last person that hit you, “crosshair” to send to the people currently in your crosshair, or a comma-separated list of client numbers, like “0,7,2,23″ … an empty string is treated like “all”. This is reset to “all” when connecting to a new server. Presumably mods will manage this cvar, not people, but keybind could be useful for the general cases. To send to just your team, or the opposing team, or a buddy list, you have to set a list of numbers.

cl_voipUseVAD: set to “1″ to automatically send audio when the game thinks you are talking, “0″ (the default) to require the user to manually start transmitting, presumably with a keybind.

cl_voipVADThreshold: only used if cl_voipUseVAD is “1″ … a value between 0.0 and 1.0 that signifies the volume of recorded audio that the game considers to be speech. You can use this to trim out breathing or perhaps the sound of your fingers tapping the keyboard and only transmit audio louder than that. You will have to experiment to find the value that works best for your hardware and play style. The default is “0.25″, with “0.0″ being silence and “1.0″ being pretty-darn-loud.

cl_voipSend: when set to “1″, the game will capture audio from the microphone and transmit it, when “0″, the game will not. The game can optimize for the “0″ case (perhaps turning off audio recording). Lots of things set this on and off, including cl_voipUseVAD, so you probably should not touch this directly without knowing what you’re doing, but perhaps mods can make use of it.

cl_voipGainDuringCapture: This is the volume (“gain”) of audio coming out of your speakers while you are recording sound for transmission. This is a value between 0.0 and 1.0, zero being silence and one being no reduction in volume. This prevents audio feedback and echo and such, but if you’re listening in headphones that your mic won’t pick up, you don’t need to turn down the gain. Default is 0.2 (20% of normal volume). You ABSOLUTELY want to make your speakers quiet when you record, if the microphone might pick it up!

cl_voipShowMeter: Set to “1″ (the default) to show a volume meter as you are recording from the microphone, so you can see how well the game can “hear” you. Set to “0″ to disable the display of the meter.

cl_voipCaptureMult: Multiply recorded audio by this value after denoising. Defaults to 2.0 to _double_ the volume of your voice. This is to make you more audible if denoising eats away too much data. Set this to 1.0 to get no change, less to be quieter.

Console commands:

voip ignore Turn off incoming voice from player number . This will refuse to play any incoming audio from that player, and instruct the server to stop sending it, to save bandwidth. Use unignore to reenable. This is reset to unignored when (re)connecting to a server.

voip gain unignore Turn on incoming voice from player number . This will start playing audio from this player again if you’ve previously done a “voip ignore”, and instruct the server to start sending her voice packets to you again.

voip gain muteall Turn off all incoming voice. This will refuse to play any incoming audio, and instruct the server to stop sending it, to save bandwidth. Use unmuteall to reenable. This is reset to unmuted when (re)connecting to a server.

voip gain unmuteall Turn on incoming voice. This will start playing audio again if you’ve previously done a “voip muteall”, and instruct the server to start sending voice packets to you again.

voip gain Sets the volume (“gain”) for player number to … A gain of 0.0 is silence, and 2.0 doubles the volume. Use this if someone is too quiet or too loud.

Actions:

+voiprecord: The action you should bind to a key to record. This basically toggles cl_voipSend on and off. You don’t need this if you’re using cl_voipUseVAD, since that’ll just record all the time and decide what parts of the recording are worth sending.

More detailed/technical info:

By default, all of this is enabled. You can build with or without VoIP support explicitly with USE_VOIP=[1|0] on the make command line.

You currently must use OpenAL to speak, as we have ALC_EXT_capture support in place to pull data from the microphone. If you are using the SDL backend, you can still hear people, but not speak.

There is no in-game UI to speak of: we encourage mods to add some. Largely they will just need to set cvars and run console commands for choosing voice targets and ignoring people, etc.

This requires patched builds to be useful, but remains network compatible with legacy quake3 clients and servers. Clients and servers both report in their info strings whether they support VoIP, and won’t send VoIP data to those not reporting support. If a stray VoIP packet makes it to a legacy build, it will be ignored without incident.

VoIP packets are saved in demo files! You will be able to playback what you heard and what you said on VoIP-compatible clients. Legacy clients can also play demo files with VoIP packets in them, but just won’t play the voice track. For VoIP-supported builds, it’s nice to have a record of the trash-talk.

Data is processed using the Speex narrowband codec, and is cross-platform. Bigendian and littleendian systems can speak to each other, as can 32 and 64-bit platforms.

Bandwidth: VoIP data is broken up into 20 millisecond frames (this is a Speex requirement), and we try to push up to 12 Speex frames in one UDP packet (about a quarter of a second of audio)…we’re using the narrowband codec: 8000Hz sample rate. In practice, a client should send about 2 kilobytes per second more when speaking, spread over about four bursts per second, plus a few bytes of state information. For comparison, this is less than the server sends when downloading files to the client without an http redirect. The server needs to rebroadcast the packet to all clients that should receive it (which may be less than the total connected players), so servers should assume they’ll need to push (number of players speaking at once times number of people that should hear it) * 2 kilobytes per second. It shouldn’t be a problem for any client or server on a broadband connection, although it may be painful for dialup users (but then again, everything is. They can just disable the cvar). The game will refuse to enable VoIP support if your have your network settings lower than “Cable/xDSL/LAN”, just in case.

The initial VoIP work was done by Ryan C. Gordon , and he can be contacted with technical questions, if the ioq3 mailing list or forums aren’t helpful.