Voice chat

[ChristienChapman]

Minetest should have voice chat so players can talk to each other with mics. Maybe there can be functions in lua to enable or disable mics at times or for certain players and various commands to mute players, etc. The thing that made the Wii U version of Mincraft so awesome is that all Wii U's had built-in mics and you either had it on or off. Most people used it so it made communication unique and personal whereas PS3 users had to buy mics and most did not have one. This feature would be great for Minetest. Just like the Wii U, many laptops have built-in mics. Although not the best quality, I would take that over no communication. Of course this feature would best be implemented by the server by enacting some code into their lua scripts calling for mics to be enabled since you can't have 100 people using the sane channel at the same time.

[Mantar]

Mumble works well, and I think there's a CSM that can do positional audio with it.

[Linuxdirk]

... but why should an engine for voxel-based games implement voice chat? This is completely out of the scope of it.

As Mantar said, simply use Mumble.

[AmyMoriyama]

Mumble works well, and I think there's a CSM that can do positional audio with it.

Have a link to that CSM?

[Mantar]

It's here: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=21586

[SurviveX]

I absolutely agree. Minetest client (luanti) must have its own voice chat or api for it. Installing client mods on the player side is not the right approach. Not all players want to engage in modding and are not required to understand the mod system. Is it possible to push the chat implementation into the main development branch of the client? In my opinion, this is one of the most important things that will increase the audience of players

[Kostivar]

... but why should an engine for voxel-based games implement voice chat? This is completely out of the scope of it.

As Mantar said, simply use Mumble.

How is that completely out of scope, voice chat implementation is something relevant to a multiplayer game engine.

[Linuxdirk]

How is that completely out of scope, voice chat implementation is something relevant to a multiplayer game engine.

Luanti is no “multiplayer game engine” – whatever that is supposed to be.

[Astrobe]

But it is. This argument doesn't support well the scope argument anyway.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is no trivial task and is better left to dedicated applications and their specialists.

Even if there's a library somewhere that could help with the implementation, the impact on "customer support" requests could be significant; VoIP combines the problems of networking and audio processing. Multiply that by 10 because Luanti is multi-OS.

[real_mineplayer]

Maybe just add something to mute / unmute the mic to the engine so it‘s easier to set keyboard commands for this

[TX Miner]

Personaly, I think that adding a player live player sound (voice/effects) API is a MUST in the long term. Should be somethin servers can enable. I agree with SurviveX 100%

[kuboid]

I'd agree that when you are playing as a team on some multiplayer server, then Mumble will do the trick. In the end, Luanti is very lightweight _because_ it does not re-implement all kinds of metaservices around it. I don't see much benefit here in creating redundant functionality in Luanti.

But: positional voice chat would be a thing that needs including in the engine, and would be really cool. Think of social games, kind of an "Oasis", Metaverse, or better: Fediverse, where people can meet, talk, listen to others, have party together, exchange items, ... etc. Sure you don't want to listen to all 400 participants on an event at once, but only the bunch of 5 or 6 people around you. Mods could implement items like megaphones which increase voice range.

[real_mineplayer]

Maybe just add something to mute / unmute the mic to the engine so it‘s easier to set keyboard commands for this

Is it possible to add shortcuts for actions which can be changed to the shortcut list by a mod? With the shortcut list I mean the one when you press Esc on a server and then choose Shortcuts (or whatever name is there).

[yw05]

Maybe just add something to mute / unmute the mic to the engine so it‘s easier to set keyboard commands for this

Is it possible to add shortcuts for actions which can be changed to the shortcut list by a mod? With the shortcut list I mean the one when you press Esc on a server and then choose Shortcuts (or whatever name is there).

Not yet. There is an open issue about this (the issue is about action keys sent to the server, but I assume this can be extended to (SS/SR/CP)CSMs as well), but IMO we should first focus on improvements on the input handler system.

Keyboard controls are a secondary issue though; the primary one is whether we want to implement voice chat ourselves when Mumble is already an available option.