UniVoice 4.7.0: Client Tags

UniVoice 4.7.0 has been released and has a major new feature: Client Tags

Overview

Last year, a team using UniVoice had a question. They had 3 scenes in their Unity app that users could travel between. The app used mono (non positional) audio. But they didn't want people in two different scenes to be able to hear or speak to each other.

Similarly, a project I'm consulting on has a unique requirement. It's an academic VR application with a speaker and teachers/judges. The judges should be able to hear the speaker and talk to each other, but the speaker should not hear them so that they don't get interrupted.

Similarly, if I were thinking of making a 5v5 game or something similar, I would have to make sure only people on the same team can hear each other so that they can discuss strategies secretly.

VoiceSettings until 4.6.0

Until version 4.6.0 VoiceSettings only allowed to define the following:
  • muteAll : bool
  • mutedPeers : List<int>
  • deafenAll : List<int>
  • deafenedPeers : List<int>

Consider the example of the 3 scenes unity app. If you wanted to use those 4 fields to limit voice chat based on the scene they're in, a client would need to know which peer is in which room to add to deafenedPeers.

Doing this would require you to write some custom networking code. Maybe a synchronized variable that the server updates. Or some RPCs. There are many ways to do this but it would never be seamless.

The 4 fields above are suitable for only simple scenarios, such as a group voice call app. As soon as you need to group people together based on some criteria, it gets too cumbersome.

Since the VoiceSettings of all peers is stored on the server, so you could write some server code. But one of the core goals of UniVoice is to be very easy to integrate. As soon as you're having to write server code that's unrelated to gameplay UniVoice starts to become increasingly intrusive.

VoiceSettings introduces Tags in 4.7.0

In version 4.7.0, some new fields are introduced
  • myTags : List<string>
  • mutedTags : List<string>
  • deafenedTags : List<string>
Each client gets to add a List<string> tags that it wants to be associated with. mutedTags and deafenedTags allow you to define the tags that you don't want to talk to

 For the 3 scene unity app example, let's say the scenes are "Lobby", "Waiting Room" and "Match".

Using the tags feature, you can program your client code such that when you enter the Lobby, you set myTags = {"lobby"} and mutedTags = deafenedTags = {"waiting-room", "match"}

Similarly, when you enter the Waiting Room, myTags = {"waiting-room"} and mutedTags = deafenedTags = {"lobby", "match"}

Note: The tags cannot have a comma. Currently, if you attempt to set a tag with a comma, it will not stop you but you will run into runtime errors. I'll have some API enhancements that introduce some guardrails and provide ways of settings values with more concise code.

Closing Thoughts

Tags are very client code friendly way of creating subgroups of users for both transmission and reception of audio.

One thing to note is that now deafenedPeers and defeanedTags are cumalative. Suppose ClientA and ClientB are IDs 1 and 2 and have tags "abc" and "xyz". ClientB needs to have 1 in deafenedPeers or/and "abc" in deafenedTags for ClientA to not receive ClientB audio.

My advice would be to use either IDs or tags, not both, unless you really need it.

As always, if you have questions feel free to reach me via email, Discord (my ID is adrenak#1934) or join the Discord server that you can find in the "My Links" section on the side bar of this page.


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