VOIP

[Paradox]

This has probably been asked before, but could we get VOIP? Voice over Internet Proticol. This would make gameplay much better!

[Silverius]

There's teamspeak. But as far as I know it can't be integrated with Trem (Trem is GPL which tends to be highly incompatible with proprietary software like teamspeak).

At this moment there isn't a good FOSS equivalent to teamspeak. In theory it should be well doable to build such an application on top of Google's Jingle VoIP protocol (aka the thing Google Talk uses). However nobody has done so yet.

It's also possible to build a conferencing system using Asterisk, but as Asterisk is more of a traditional business oriented PBX (telephone server system) it tends to miss a lot of desirable features (especially in the moderation department).

[Shafe]

I really have not played a game that I really liked the voip... I think teamspeak is way too easy to use and setup...  The only issue is a teamspeak server...

Like I said elsewhere... everyone is welcome at the beer garden ts... it's pretty unused and there are plenty of channels...   There's also a ventrillo server but I think it's messed up.. here's the info for the TS server along with the who's online list

http://bg.tnlsoft.com/bg/ts2.php

[Julius]

I think the voiceIP stuff from Tribes2 (and their Network engine too) was released under the GPL some time ago, and could maybe integrated into Trem (if it isn't too tightly intervowen with the network code).

[Paradox]

If at all posible, the teamspeak system in Halo 2 was the best ever made. If this could be re-produced, it would be great.

[Pat AfterMoon]

I think the voiceIP stuff from Tribes2 (and their Network engine too) was released under the GPL some time ago, and could maybe integrated into Trem (if it isn't too tightly intervowen with the network code).

The Torque Network Library used for Tribe2 and released by GarageGames under GPL is here :
http://www.opentnl.org/

But I see nothing dedicated to voice chat. The game ZAP is the "demo" provided with TNL and has voice chat. It doesn't seem to be very efficient, I just tested it and even the echo of my own speaking is very bad. It use it's network layer for sending voice, but doesn't seem to be tuned for that, like teamspeak does.

[Shafe]

isn't TNL not open source?

[Silverius]

It's released under both a Free license (GPL) and closed source licenses.

[raph]

OpenTNL isn't ANSI c.
I also think using thirdparty libs in trem is a very hard task as there are some restrictions from the game engine (only ansi c, bytecode, etc).
Too bad  

[Silverius]

Make a small wrapper that's perfect ANSI C from the users point of view but connects with the other lib. Problem solved.

The bigger problem is that TNL doesn't have voice functionality and thus it's fairly useless for Trem.

[raph]

Make a small wrapper that's perfect ANSI C from the users point of view but connects with the other lib. Problem solved.

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think its that easy.
I don't think, that you can make a wrapper (within a qvm) that can load extern libs.
Reason one would be that the avaible functions are very limited, but I think quake would have to load the libs with os dependend functions (like LoadLibrary in Windows) which aren't avaible
so follows reason two: trem would loose its os independency.

The bigger problem is that TNL doesn't have voice functionality and thus it's fairly useless for Trem.

Thats right, but I think this problem will also exist with other libraries.

I'm just starting with Trem's (Quake's) code, so correct me if I'm wrong.

[Silverius]

Well you can't do it at the QVM level, that's right. However the cross platform compatibility problem is one that can and has been fixed many times (it's the reason so many programs use autohell). Of course using autohell would be a fairly major and complex change.

[Paradox]

Another way that VOIP could be achieved is if trem were to interface with Xfire. Xfire is great, and it has voip.

[testian]

xfire is even worse than team speak because:

1. also proprietary
2. it is windows software (only)

Take a look at the player lists

the game-server should not provide voip services, but an information protocol the client understands to find such a voip server would be enough. (like http-downloads where the gameserver just links to an http-server and the clients download required game-files automatically)

Is it possible to create server-based group-chats with SIP? (even for users behind firewall)