UniVoice 4+: Now a mono repo

UniVoice has been around since Jan 2019 and has been evolving towards becoming a robust VoIP solution for Unity. Recently I released version 4.x, which is a big upgrade from v3. One of the things that's changed is that UniVoice is now a mono repo.

Why mono repo

Previously the main repository only housed the interfaces and implementations for them were separate repositories.

This caused a lot of pain for both me and any users of UniVoice.

For me because if I wanted to change something in, let's say, the univoice-unimic-input repository. I would need to open UniVoice, change the manifest to point to a local copy of the univoice-unimic-input repo so that I can test the changes locally. 

For users because when they'd install the univoice package, it wouldn't really have anything usable. They'd need to install implementation packages separately. In v3, to get UniVoice to work you needed at implementations of at least three interfaces: IAudioInput, IAudioOutput and IChatroomNetwork

This isn't readily obvious. The first reason is that there just isn't enough documentation (something I'll be working on soon). The second is that unless you know how UniVoice works or examine the inner workings of a sample project (again a separate repository), you probably wouldn't know UniVoice mainly works using those three interfaces.

So simplification and ease of maintenance were the major motivations for moving all the implementations to the main repository. 

Inbuilt implementations 

Instead of importing packages of implementations, the implementations are now included in the main repository. You can find them here

Working out of the box

First, UniVoice now has package dependencies. They include 
* brw the binary reader and writer for network messages
* unimic for easily reading Microphone data at runtime. 
* concentus-unity which is a pure C# port of Opus for encoding and decoding audio

Worth noting is that all the above dependencies are pure C# and themselves only dependent on Unity or standard C#

Using the dependencies above, the following implementations have been written and included in the univoice package out of the box:
* StreamedAudioSourceOutput that implements IAudioOutput to play peer audio. Note that this uses StreamedAudioOutput, which is included in unimic.
* UniMicInput that implements IAudioInput to capture microphone input for sending. This uses the Mic class in unimic
* Concentus Filters that implement IAudioFilter for encoding and decoding audio. This uses concentus-unity

Requiring some setup

UniVoice can also have inbuilt implementations that depend on code that's not included as a package dependencies. Right now, this is the Mirror network implementation

Observe that each file uses the compilation symbol UNIVOICE_MIRROR_NETWORK

The reason for this is that univoice doesn't include Mirror by default. 

So if you want voice chat in a Mirror game, you have to import Mirror and add that compilation symbol.

All future network implementations, let's say FishNet, Netcode would be added as inbuilt implementations this way. You'd need the supported network solution in your project and add a compilation symbol.

Note that the Mirror implementation also uses brw, which is a package dependency as mentioned above. Chances are all future network implementations would use it to read and write network messages.

What this means

Say you want an implementation that depends on external code. Let's say it's an IAudioFilter for removing noise from mic input before sending it.

You have a package called com.denoise which has some native library for removing noise from audio data. You add it to your manifest.json as a dependency. Then write DenoiseFilter which would be an implementation of IAudioFilter which uses the code in com.denoise to achieve the filter's capabilities.

Contact

Get in touch using the "My Links" section on this page.

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