Environment embedded VoN?

Blorgon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 29, 2014
Messages
363
I've got a whole folder of ideas for games in Drive, from small details like interactive crafting (which I just found out is a thing via TekSyndicate!), to combat systems, to entire games.

Lately, I've been working on a game idea, and was toying with figuring out how to make VoN more immersive/interesting. I know we'll never be able to keep the trolls from screeching or blasting awful pop music into their mics, so that's not exactly what I'm after.

For modern shooter games, it makes plenty of sense to have VoN in your headset, as if your character is actually wearing a headset—but for games set in different universes, like TES, or Red Dead Redemption, obviously that kind of technology doesn't exist. So my idea is to embed VoN in the environment. Now, ARMA sort of has this with proximity chat, but you have to select that channel, which is obviously not what I'm going for.

Here's what I'm thinking:

Imagine you're playing a character who's tracking a person of interest (being played by another person online) through a slot canyon deep in some far-gone desert canyon maze. If that person speaks, or yells, his or her voice will actually emanate from his/her player-character in the game environment. So their voice will carry in the direction it's being projected, at the volume it's being projected at. Their voice will bounce off canyon walls, et cetera.

So, the only way to actually speak to other players in your server is to be within ear-shot of them. In addition to being just plain freaking cool and immersive, there would be less of an incentive for the trolls, because in order for their taunts to be heard, they'd have to be within ear-shot of other players capable of killing them.

The big problem I can see right away with this kind of system is lack of microphone quality, and having to depend on network connections.
 
I've often wondered why something like this wasn't already a feature in (mostly modern/scifi) games. Seems like we should have plenty of horsepower to drive it.
 
I've often wondered why something like this wasn't already a feature in (mostly modern/scifi) games. Seems like we should have plenty of horsepower to drive it.

Seriously. And how freaking cool would it be?!
 
It's been done. In a game recently, actually, whose name I can't recall (it's a team-based FPS in which you can play dead). It's not particularly challenging from an implementation perspective: all voice chat is implemented as though the emitter is the listener, and all you need to do is attach each emitter to its respective player in world space.
 
It's been done. In a game recently, actually, whose name I can't recall (it's a team-based FPS in which you can play dead). It's not particularly challenging from an implementation perspective: all voice chat is implemented as though the emitter is the listener, and all you need to do is attach each emitter to its respective player in world space.

Does it integrate into the environment (echoes and stuff) too, or does it work like ARMA's proximity chat?
 
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