Has anyone used a VoIP plug-in for multiplayer gaming?

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We need to have voice chatting set up for an multiplayer educational Unity game. The VoIP system does not have to be synced with Unity, but it would be nice (It can run as a separate client if needed -- Team Speak or Skype, etc).

Has anyone experimented with either commercial or open source VoIP systems? Are there any concerns with network lag?

Answer 1

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Answer by jashan · Dec 17, 2009 at 12:28 AM

As a lot of people are using Skype / TeamSpeak with existing multiplayer games that shouldn't be a concern. I probably wouldn't recommend hosting a TeamSpeak server on the same machine you're hosting your game server on (that might give you trouble bandwidth-wise ... at least if you scale it way up with lots and lots of players).

IIRC, the API used to connect to Skype requires some sort of "native access", so in that case you couldn't use that for Web Players. Same most likely would be the case for TeamSpeak. But for standalones, I wouldn't see any problems.

Have you voted for Networking: VoIP support (e.g. RakVoice) on the Unity feedback forum? Having "native support for VoIP" inside of Unity certainly would be nice.

Btw: Not sure if you're aware of it or not - but TeamSpeak 3 will be going into public beta this Saturday (Dec, 19th) and I think that should a few nice features (I remember that with TeamSpeak 2 you could open a URL with the protocol "teamspeak:" and could directly access a channel that way which might be the easiest way to set something like that up).

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bowditch · Dec 17, 2009 at 02:26 PM 0

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Good Info. Thanks Jashan!

jashan · Jan 13, 2010 at 10:48 PM 0

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Just wanted to add to this that TeamSpeak 3 really rocks ;-) ... I'll look into integrating TeamSpeak 3 with my game almost definitely (but that's "for later" ;-) ).

Answer 2

Answer by runevision · Dec 16, 2009 at 10:12 AM

Not an answer as such, but have a look at the first comment on this blog post.

Apparently "A World For Us" build "Assemb'Live" using (among other things) Unity and Red5 as a server solution with VOIP.

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bowditch · Dec 17, 2009 at 02:27 PM 0

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Thanks for the help Rune!

Answer 3

Answer by hovu96 · May 07, 2012 at 08:57 AM

I tried the TeamSpeak 3 SDK which includes server and client samples. I compiled and installed the server sample program and included the C# client sample into my Unity game. It works! But you need Unity Pro to be able to call plugins (the TeamSpeak library).

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Answer 4

Answer by bowditch · Mar 09, 2010 at 10:07 PM

After reviewing your suggestions, I have also developed praise for RakNet 3. I think this will be a helpful tool as well.

From Website:

Real time voice communication

RakVoice is a feature of RakNet that allows real time voice communication at a cost of only ~2200 bytes per second at 8000 16 bit samples per second. It uses Speex to do the encoding. RakVoice is plugin class that makes it easier to encode, send, decode, and relay raw sound data.

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bowditch · Mar 09, 2010 at 10:08 PM 0

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If you want Unity to add support for something like this, vote here: http://unity.uservoice.com/forums/15792-unity/suggestions/166172-networking-voip-support-e-g-rakvoice-?ref=title

Answer 5

Answer by PhobicGunner · Oct 16, 2012 at 02:57 AM

[could somebody downvote those last three answers? I don't have enough posts to do so >.<]

If I may put forth a shameless plug, I've been working on an integrated voice chat system for Unity that'll work on pretty much all licenses and platforms. It should plug right into whatever network architecture you need.

Link: http://u3d.as/content/mo-pho-games/u-speak-voice-chat/3sR

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Has anyone used a VoIP plug-in for multiplayer gaming?

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