On Apr 3, 2008, at 7:01 PM, James Cameron wrote: > Now is the time. We can probably afford the bandwidth. The last > player > I know on dialup has finally upgraded. Let's look into what it will > take to augment the most popular clients with audio, routed via the > server. I'm happy to program the server side. > > In a game, each team would have audio of themselves, perhaps with > 3dB of > impedence added per rank below Admiral. > > In a clue pre-game, before and during a draft, the audio would be > shared > across all teams. > > Out of t-mode, shared across all teams. > > During conquer parade, shared again. > > I've learned what I need to know about audio on the Linux side, I > think, > but I'd appreciate anyone else piping up. What can we build upon, and > what open source code is available? Hey, finally a bit of signal amongst all the noise I've basically paged past on this list in the past few weeks. This may be a good idea. More consideration has to be taken into account with regards to contention between users. 8 players cannot speak at once, and using rank is not a very good differentiator in my opinion. Many people who probably should not have priority to speak have scummed rank, and many people who should have priority to speak do not have rank or are playing as guests. I would say that a combination of carried armies, offense, and perhaps other stats could be used to give priority. I want the 2.0 offense player on my team to be able to speak. I also want the guy with 6 armies to be able to speak, even if he is a low offense twink. Though, I would probably want the 2.0 offense player to be able to speak over the guy who only has 4 armies and has been running around for 10 minutes without getting near an enemy planet. The standard "Be Quiet" logic can be applied as well in some form. I also would want a "mute" vote that quiets a given IP for some length of time, and the ability to set your threshold for receiving chatter. All of the above gets pretty complicated, so it probably needs to be reduced to a simpler equation for who can speak when, and what their priorities become for a simple threshold setting without a huge amount of granuarlity. (E.g., let players select "none", "important", or "all" as their receiving preferences. Not something like setting a threshold from 0 - 9.) If we can come up with an intelligent equation as to who can speak and when, I'm happy to work on the server side as well, and have pickled serve as a testbed.