Positional audio questions

[thejtrain]

New to Mumble (from Ventrilo & Teamspeak) and it looks fantastic! Well done, all.

Does volume attenuate over in-game distance? Directionality itself is awesome, but if I can't hear a squadmate at all because he's on the other side of the map from me (or for that matter, dead/respawning), that'd kind of defeat the purpose. If it does attenuate, is that adjustable (even down to maybe "zero attenuation")? I haven't tried it out yet but am trying to set up a buddy of mine to test it in BF2142/CoD4/L4D/TF2 with me.

What we're really playing right now though is Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - any chance there's a plugin being worked on for that one? If there I could see my buddies & I renting a Mumble server starting tonight in advance of the plugin being released. Our (casual) clan's TS server has fallen by the wayside so we're evaluating what we're going to replace it with.

EDIT: in the FAQ article on Supported Games there's a distinction between "Yes" (meaning "extended support") and "Basic" (meaning "no extended support but still positional"), but no description as to the difference between Basic & Extended. A search turned up very little - wondering what "better stuff" will be experienced in an "Extended" game like BF2142 that you'll be missing in a "Basic" game like L4D.

Thanks!

JT

[kissaki]

New to Mumble (from Ventrilo & Teamspeak) and it looks fantastic! Well done, all.

Does volume attenuate over in-game distance? Directionality itself is awesome, but if I can't hear a squadmate at all because he's on the other side of the map from me (or for that matter, dead/respawning), that'd kind of defeat the purpose. If it does attenuate, is that adjustable (even down to maybe "zero attenuation")? I haven't tried it out yet but am trying to set up a buddy of mine to test it in BF2142/CoD4/L4D/TF2 with me.

 

Yes, minimal volume is adjustable.

 

What we're really playing right now though is Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - any chance there's a plugin being worked on for that one? If there I could see my buddies & I renting a Mumble server starting tonight in advance of the plugin being released. Our (casual) clan's TS server has fallen by the wayside so we're evaluating what we're going to replace it with.

 

I did not hear of anyone doing that yet.

Maybe you want to help out and do it,

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Positional-Audio

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/HackPositionalAudio

As mentioned there be careful about cheat protection.

 

EDIT: in the FAQ article on Supported Games there's a distinction between "Yes" (meaning "extended support") and "Basic" (meaning "no extended support but still positional"), but no description as to the difference between Basic & Extended. A search turned up very little - wondering what "better stuff" will be experienced in an "Extended" game like BF2142 that you'll be missing in a "Basic" game like L4D.

 

Extended features things like the team you're in and such meta information one can use.

It may not be distinguishable for a user with client only yet but the servers admin can mess around with ice (put players in specific channels and the like).

It's mainly the protocol, what is transferred, that's extended. No out of the box extra features I think.

Positional Audio works with both the same.

[hacst]

Actually a plugin for BC2 is being worked on by Snares at the moment. And since it seems like most of the devs actually have that game I guess we'll be "testing" it a lot :lol:

And about the Basic/Extended stuff. For the 1.2.X series we extended our plugin architecture to be able to transmit some additional player information to the server. Besides an extension for 3rd person camera support there are now so called identity and context fields. These can be used to expose additional information about the ingame status of a player to the mumble server. The server itself just uses the context fields, which will be equal for players in the same game, to prevent ppl. in different games/servers from hearing each other, but additional information can be used by external scripts connecting to our RPC interface. Meaning you can write functionality like: If player joins team/squad X place him in channel Y and rewire his whisper to squad to actually whisper to the squad_blue he just joined into.

[thejtrain]

I did not hear of anyone doing that yet.

Maybe you want to help out and do it,

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Positional-Audio

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/HackPositionalAudio

As mentioned there be careful about cheat protection.

Yikes! I checked that page and was immediately in over my head. My non-tech-savvy family think I'm The PC God but I know how much I don't know, and trust me, no one wants me going anywhere near memory locations and code and the like.

 

Actually a plugin for BC2 is being worked on by Snares at the moment. And since it seems like most of the devs actually have that game I guess we'll be "testing" it a lot :lol:

And about the Basic/Extended stuff. For the 1.2.X series we extended our plugin architecture to be able to transmit some additional player information to the server. Besides an extension for 3rd person camera support there are now so called identity and context fields. These can be used to expose additional information about the ingame status of a player to the mumble server. The server itself just uses the context fields, which will be equal for players in the same game, to prevent ppl. in different games/servers from hearing each other, but additional information can be used by external scripts connecting to our RPC interface. Meaning you can write functionality like: If player joins team/squad X place him in channel Y and rewire his whisper to squad to actually whisper to the squad_blue he just joined into.

Very cool to hear! Can't wait to check it out this weekend in another game, so I can be suitably itching for the BC2 plugin release!