[quake3] About adding (VoIP) voice chat support

[Joerg Dietrich]

Ahmed MANSOUR schrieb:
> Hi guys,
> For quite some time i have been wondering if it is possible (and 
> useful) to add voice chat support to the engine.
> I think it would be a great enhancement to the game to add VoIP to the 
> client and server code, because I think it is more pratical to
> to speak than to chat using keyboard while playing. And it won't break 
> the backward compatibility, and we can use some GPL'd VoIP soft code 
> like OpenWengo in the game to do that.
> What do you think?
It would be quite difficult. An ingame voice chat system has different 
requirements
than a internet telephone, like "many to many" or "many to some" insteed 
of "one to one" conversations.
Additionally there exists no platform independent sound recording API 
like SDL for sound playback.
You would need to programm this separately for every supported OS.
Then you would need to open some side-channel(s) to the VOIP-server or 
your VOIP-peers, which is difficult
with the existing Quake3 networking code.
On the positive side, some time ago I played with the integrated Ogg 
Vorbis Codec
and it could be easily (mis)used as a VOIP-codec. It was even less 
CPU-hungry than the
dedicated SPEEX-codec and the sound quality was equal at the same bandwith.

Joerg