In a recent message to the IOQuake 3 Mailing List, Ryan C. Gordon (a.ka. Icculus, famous for helping port many popular games to Linux/Alternative OSes) mentioned that he submitted his final patches towards VOiP on IOQuake3. He was the one to first submit the patches for VOiP suport on IOQuake3. Maintaining compatibility with the vanilla distributions of Quake 3 was the developers’ goal, and it’s been fulfilled.
Voice over IP is now available in IOQuake3 and there are no conflicts with the vanilla Quake 3 engine. The support for it is there at the core, but it hasn’t been polished out completely due to concerns of compatibility, as stated above. For this reason, it is difficult to create a User Interface for the settings, but this could be left to individiual mod or game developers.
There are still things worth doing: adding a real UI (including controls, config menus, VoIP field in the server browser, a real recording meter, and displays of who is saying what), blacklist support, recording support outside OpenAL, fix audio streams when saving a demo to an AVI, figure out where that echo is coming from, positional audio, "QuakeRadio", etc...I don't think I'll have time to work on any of these in the near future, but I'm happy to advise any volunteers that want to take a shot at them.
Of the many things that Icculus included in his final patches include:
documentation in voip-readme.txt (anyone can feel free to improve or reformat that, if they like), a cheesy VoIP meter to show how well the game "hears" you when recording (best I could do without changing the UI or cgame code: +set cl_voipShowMeter 1), and support for transmitting to just the people in your crosshair or the last person that attacked you (+set cl_voipSendTarget "crosshair" or "attacker").
He also included a scrolling credits screen (Product of him trying to familiarize himself with the Q3 UI) which so rightly credits the great developers and maintainers of the engine.
Comments
One response to “Final Burst of VoIP Stuff from Ryan “Icculus” Gordon”
I wish it were 2 years before, when quake 3 was still popular and hot. However, I have to admit it … it is a new cool feature. Maybe it will increase its popularity again, who knows. Ryan have been good at implementing the most useful stuff