1.Background
Game voice tools have evolved with the development of the internet. The last 20+ years have witnessed huge leaps in game voice technology, from support for a single platform to cross-platform interoperability, from one-to-one chat to interactive voice chat in a room with tens of thousands of online users, from third-party voice communication SaaS tools to PaaS SDKs, and from monotonous voice chat to immersive voice experiences.
Game voice technology has gone through several stages, starting from the most basic voice chat to immersive voice experiences and beyond. As breakthroughs in sensors, computing power, audio algorithms, IoT, and other technologies are on the horizon, all-real voice will eventually become a reality, delivering the ultimate voice experience the metaverse demands.
2.Game voice v1.0: Third-party voice chat tools
At this stage, players use third-party voice chat tools to communicate with each other in the process of gaming. Whether the game itself offers a voice communication feature or not, using third-party tools allows players to quickly create chat channels and communicate with each other through voice chat.
3.Game voice v2.0: In-game voice
In-game voice solutions mainly take the form of game developers connecting SDKs developed by voice communication PaaS providers. The basic APIs that come with the SDKs are used to implement various in-game voice scenarios, such as channel voice between teammates (teammates can have a voice chat at any position coordinates in the game), range voice between different teams (players of different teams can hear each other only when their position coordinates in the game are within a specified range), as well as blocklist/allowlist.
4.Game voice v2.5: Upgraded version of in-game voice
To further improve players' game voice experiences, voice SDKs like GME offer voice processing capabilities such as voice changing and virtual 3D sound field. With these features, players can change their voice in real time based on their selected voice type, which adds fun to gaming and allows a vast design space for game voice features.
Through the 3D virtualization technology, voice processing and gaming scenarios are combined, which, however, is are limited to position and distance information in gaming scenarios. For a truly immersive experience, voice processing should cover all aspects of gaming scenarios. A voice SDK is unlikely to provide a dedicated API for every potential factor; otherwise, the SDK would be extremely complicated and bulky, and that's not really necessary. To take the game voice experiences up a notch, we need a new solution, namely the immersive game voice solution.
5.Game voice v3.0: Immersive voice
An immersive voice solution means that players' voice effects are rendered in real time based entirely on the game process. All players' voices are processed through digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, and then played back in the headphones to simulate voice communication in real-world settings. Voice chat processed in this way can deliver a more immersive game voice experience, allowing players to communicate in a natural way.
Then, how is an immersive voice solution implemented? As mentioned above, it is not advisable to have a single voice SDK packed with all sorts of APIs. Moreover, voice service providers are generally not experts in audio processing algorithms compared with specialist audio technology companies. Therefore, to develop an all-encompassing voice SDK is virtually unviable.
In view of this, a combination approach will work best, just as with the Wwise + GME solution. Tencent Cloud Game Multimedia Engine (GME) is dedicated to end-to-end real-time voice communication, and the Wwise interactive audio engine is adopted by many game developers as a tool for game sound design. The Wwise plugin acts as a bridge for data interactions between GME and the Wwise engine, and GME voice streams are seamlessly connected to the Wwise audio pipeline, so Wwise's rich sound effects processing and control features can be used in voice chat. Such a design makes it possible to deliver an immersive game voice experience.
As an interactive audio authoring tool, Wwise is generally used to create high-quality audio content for games, and GME complements Wwise in the field of game voice. Now sound engineers can also use Wwise to create immersive and interesting voice features, opening up new gameplay possibilities.
Immersive voice, however, is definitely not the acme of game voice experiences – all-real voice takes it further.
6.Game voice v4.0: All-real voice
With the advances in AR, VR, and MR technologies, the metaverse has become a hot button topic. Many technology giants are expanding into the metaverse, which is considered the next biggest opportunity in the realm of the internet in the coming decade. The metaverse refers to a parallel virtual world that is both independent of and interconnected with the real world, where people can interact, work, and do much more realistically.
To make virtual worlds more lifelike, software and hardware technologies need to be integrated to simulate human senses. As voice communication is an important form of human interaction, metaverse scenarios have higher requirements for voice, that is, all-real voice. Currently, the metaverse is still more of a concept than reality, and we'll see what the future holds.
Gaming is inherently a social activity in the internet age. Although voice chat is not a core feature for most game genres, it makes gaming more enjoyable and thus increases player retention. Therefore, it has become a common feature of online games.
Game voice technology has evolved in response to players' growing demand for better experiences and gameplay. The development of game voice technology can be divided into four stages based on the improvements in game voice experiences. As players have higher expectations of gaming experiences, voice is bound to hold greater weight in gaming.
Read more at: https://www.tencentcloud.com/dynamic/blogs/sample-article/100361
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