Direct Chat SHOUTING!!

[sidhellfire 0]

It's client side, standalone application.

What does that mean? Well everyone should have it up and running while on teamspeak. Whenever someone has a voice activation (which is pain), it constantly clicks. Annoying is fact, that noone hers own clicks, so if they start a message right away after pressing voice activation key, the click covers the message - when it's a short response like "yes/no" it makes it hard to understand. Well feel free to check it by your own. It's great addon, but the way it approaches subject is, well non-effective. I would rather look forward for a custom teamspeak codec for server.

Another note about the radio - whenever we chat in game via VOIP radio, the sound of machineguns, engines, other yells should be transmitted over radio. It is a great boost for gameplay, when you actually hear MG's, when another squad leader shouts trough radio "We're pinned by MG fire from the nest south from our position!"

[beita 10]

Direct VON's volume is changed by the EFFECTS slider, not the RADIO slider in ArmA.

I'd like to see it being louder and audible from a longer distance (like the graph above). But, the secondary talk generated by talking on the other channels (no sure if Vehicle does it ...) needs to also be louder, not the same volume as Direct, but an increase along the same lines.

I would REALLY like to see separate audio sliders for VON and game effects. I want to be able to directly control how loud the VON transmissions are, all of them with one slider and separately from other in-game effects. This would be help with the fact that really loud sounds (helicopters in particular) drown out all radio comms, if you turn Effects down, you can't hear Direct very well at all.

[KaiserPanda 0]

A related suggestion: a simple personal volume indicator would be great! A meathod of knowing how loud your mic input sounds to other people. You can only find out if your mic is too low to hear or too hot from other people. Sometimes you're muted and dont know it and headsets move around a lot. A little gauge or bar in the corner would do it.

[sidhellfire 0]

I've noticed another thing.

Whenever player is using VOIP Radio Channel, he is about to chat on a direct at the same time (not yelling, but just talking). It would be an usage of the stereo.

Another detail is that the radio sound should come from the headphone, thus if soldier has only a left earphone, he should be able to hear radio chatter only in left audio channel (ear).

Yet another detail - it would be cool, to have VOIP sending data, to the list of Radio receivers, not the players.

It would also be able to greatly affect AI in positive way (poor units without radio, would not have benefit of group awareness, if they're separated for a longer distance, than direct talk/shout. It would bring a real use of "radio operators" like in armies, where PMR Radios for each member are not common equipment.

Imagine "Radio Operator" which stays close to the Squad Leader. Whenever Headquarters sends message to this squad. The Radio Operator, and SL hear the HQ on a direct talk channel.

It just brings a tree of possibilities.

Also one thing about stereo - will the opposite ear to the direction of sound, hear it also, like the first ear, but with less volume, and "effects" like the sound would come from behind of building or so? Even maybe introduce a ~5ms lag between left, and right ear?

[cross 1]

I believe that this is worth looking at:....

I believe it is a matter of design issue for performance rather than inability.

You don't want to send 0.000001db of Direct chat that takes place at the other end of the runway (or island) over the network which will be hardly audible for you. ;)

[sidhellfire 0]

performance like CPU usage, or Network stress?

The demands of cpu resources are not huge in audio area.

In the second one then - well, whenever you do chat via side radio, you're sending data to everyone no matter how far is he. Since direct voice chat is useless now, it encourages people to use that more network traffic generating option. Still, the number of players receiving voice data wouldn't grow significantly - they're now getting getting those quite packets anyway, just they're quite useless.

[CarlGustaffa 4]

@sidhellfire: I might give it a try. Unfortunately we have some guys that doesn't want to switch to key activated, so this might not be a good solution to them.

About the radio, I completely agree. Transfer the perceived sounds within the radio message would add so much to immersion. Not sure how much resources a 'live sampler and mixer' would add to the equation though.

Also agreed on the direct voice. It's completely useless being controlled with the effects sound slider. BIS please give it a separate slider. Part of the problem is sound addons that seems to like very high sample volumes for vehicles (even beyond clipping), pluss a high positive db control in its config to allow the sound to travel further. Result: Direct chat is made useless. Never been able to try it in a pure infantry environment yet though, but I assume it might work better there.

[bravo 6 0]

At this stage I'm not quite sure how heavy and important is our "voice" weight for BIS in order to make this great idea prevail.

Would be very interesting and inspiring to have such implemented. :)