Ideas for communication
 

What I think HL is missing, is a multi-channe radio, so you can talk with the entire team, just your fire squad, or everybody in the entire game, rather than there being a serverside variable that gives you only one option. You could use the numpad as a sort of advanced radio control.

Possible keypad bindings
enter - talk, but can be bound to another, more convienient key if nessecary, but useful for right handed users, as numpad enter is closest to the mouse. (I have voice_grenade boud to it for that very reason, along with voice_sniper and MG on numpad + and -)
0~9 - select channel to talk to using 0
Num - mute
/ - Whole team
* - entire game
+/- - add/remove from channel: put crosshair/sights on someone, press +/- then number, that person is added to that channel. press twice to cancel. *or* hold + or - and press number to add to channel
. - admin channel, with respond-to-last-user function for actual admin - players registered as admins on the server will automatically be added to this channel, to allow discussion of TKers, possible cheaters, map changes etc.

Of course, this is mainly for WASD users. anyone who uses arrows & six-block for normal gameplay will have to find 17 new buttons if they want to use every option.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

Day of Defeat.

Hand signals.

Nuff' said.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

yeah, but unless you add lots of habd signals, you can't get across detailed messages. (Yeah, there is such a system, see Band Of Brothers, when the sniper in the bell tower tells the commander the size of the German force, but thats a lot of animations.)

For example how would you say, using hand signals, "sniper, white house, second floor middle window". Usign voice to the whole team adds extra words, or confuses other fire teams, if they've got a white house near them. Extra words and/or confusion = casulties.

Of course, you could just use two modes: shortrange 'voice' and radio, voice works within normal hearing range for the vloume you say it at range, but everyone in range can hear it, including enemies, and radio works like in HL. then you just need two buttons: either 'speak' and 'radio', or 'talk' and toggle radio. For ultimate realism on the communication front, add handsfree capability for the voice, and activate voice when using the radio.

Why is it that I think best at 7:30 in the morning?

Re: Ideas for communication
 

Wolfenstien:Enemy Territory has something like you describe - it has chats that can be sent to your team as a whole, or to your fire team.

I don't know the HL SDK very well, but in the Q3/RTCW SDK, its pretty easy to configure a chat string to only be broadcast to a selected client(s).

Re: Ideas for communication
 

what about voice, rather than a chat string?
Could an opensource VoIP, or any other voice comm app, be modified to do the things I mentioned, without using excessive bandwidth and/or cpu power?

Remember that we're (well, they're) not planning on using the HL engine, but instead modifying and combining some opensource components.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

battlefield2 got an intresting system..
called flower something.. you can point to a vehicle and set a position of it at the same time as you give an order..
they still test it.. but its looking good.. for what ive seen you pressa button.. the mouse like in cs (buy menu).. becomes movable.. and while walking you can select "common orders" (well i dont know..) and then orders show up and you press "take position".. maybe "take point" and if you look at another soldior he gets that order..

Re: Ideas for communication
 

I think I see what you mean. But that relies on being able to see the position you want to tell them about, and if you can see the sniper, the sniper can see you, which isn't a good position to be in. If you were to add something like a mirror tho, which you can select like a weapon, and poke out round the corner... It could work.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

The thing we need before all is hand signs. A nice palette of hand signs...

Re: Ideas for communication
 

the problem with hand signs imo is that the opther players have to be LOOKing at you to receive them.......which could be problematic if some players who nee to be informed are not in your area.......say you are in a building looking over things from the second floor and 2 of your men are outside alongside the building.......how are you going to tell them they have 4 enemy coming in a 2 o'clock with hand signals?

Re: Ideas for communication
 

easy SoUlFaThEr .. you just give them your hand before you depart.. ;)

Re: Ideas for communication
 

well... in DoD, the hand signs are sent to the chat area, as well as being animated, so you get:
Brainz (Handsignal): Go Go Go!

AFAICT it only sends to teammates with LOS, even if they're not looking at you. And for the sort of situation described by Soul IRL, you'd use either radio, or shout. Hand signals are only used when stealth or long distance LOS communication is needed.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

anyways sound files are cheaper on space than animations :)

Re: Ideas for communication
 

actually I think a few animation codes would be smaller than loading a sound file.. but I think I agree to combine sound and motion..
makes it seem more real like..

Re: Ideas for communication
 

That depends. Are you using key frame or skeletal animation? How many polygons are on the model? Also, how long is the sound file?

If you are using skeletal animation, it would most likely take up less space. I don't know about key frame animation. It would depend on the number of points and the number of frames. For example, 20 frames*800 points=16,000 bytes. It would be even higher since you had to store headers, frame information, and vertex grouping information (for accurate interpolation). Also, you might not be using bytes, increasing the size. This size could be compressed, though, by only moving what changes and gzipping the data.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

im not using anythingat the monet so i cant answer of course :)

Re: Ideas for communication
 

Actually, if you had a very good skeleton with many bones, all you'd have to do is give X joint move to XYZ where XYZ is the origin of the model, wherever that is.

So in all, it could be a very minor amount of data.

If you have ~64 joints (quite a few, for a model) you can store it as 6 to 7 bits (or just a byte if you want to round it off and support 'higher res' models) then you do each xyz as a few bytes. 2 or 3 ought to do it, after all if you do 3 bytes you get 16,777,216 points along each axis.

So assume you use 2 bytes (65536 points along each axis)

A hand signal could consist of:
[2 bytes for 'transition time' for each joing][1 byte reference to joint][2 bytes of X][2 bytes of Y][2 bytes of Z]

So all in all, you've got very, very little data. And you can use multiple bone references between each transition time by specifying transition time as having extra bits, or using indicators at the beginning of each 'frame' or what-not.

Sound on the other hand is more complicated.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

that only moves one joint tho. To give a 'go go go' signal, more than one movement is needed. Three, minimum:
Prepare (get hand into position), perform and recover (put hand back to weapon), and lets not forget that most human motions are actually viariations on a number of combined circles, which take more work than a simple straight line.

Sounds: how many different ways are there of playing a sound? (don't answer that, its rhetorical...) All you need is to trigger all users to play the sound, with a volume equal to k/d^2 where k is a (sound specific?) constant, and d the distance to the speaker, with a minimum values below which the sound is not played. That surely is just a "for..next" loop, and an if statement calling, for eg, WMP. Am I missing something, or is sound simpler than anims?

But IMO the player should have the option of just using a hand signal, just 'speaking', or doing both... Maybe thats something to add in: Attitudes. I'll explain in a new thread to avoid taking this one off topic.

Re: Ideas for communication
 

If you are going for realism, then having to look at the person giving the handsignal would make it more realistic...as you probably know, you must look at someone in "Real life" if they are giving you a hand signal...

Re: Ideas for communication
 

Do these hand actions include "The Finger" cause i'd like that one :D

anyway, in all seriousness, Hand gestures are great for close range tactics, but as has already been mentioned, you need LOS on the player. I suggested in another thread that maybe we should be able to make it possible for an enemy to 'tap' into communications from the other team, if this was included, hand signals would become a vital part of the game. VoIP would be a nice option as well, i find it easier to press a button and talk that stand around and find buttons (maybe even an 'automatic mic activation' would be nice. It transmits when the volume gets to a certain height)

Just a few things to concider i suppose ;)