In game voice immersion

Hello Keen and Community!

When I was a young boy, I heard the news.. Space Engineers implemented in game voice chat. I was ecstatic! I was beyond myself! But then I found that people rarely used the in game voice.. if ever. In fact, I have yet to hear a person speak to me in Space Engineers. This makes me sad. I would like to list a few ideas that could improve the in game voice chat and thus, make people more tempted to use it.

Think for a moment how much sounds impact the quality of your game play. Especially when you are using voice comms. Most games require a low latency, crisp clear voice communication system and it should be stated that I dont think Space Engineers falls in that category. Two examples come to mind, Elite dangerous and Arma 3.

Arma 3 has built in voice chat. No one uses it. Its too simple, its badly designed and performs poorly. Some use it for recruitment purposes on some community public servers. But! Arma 3 has a mod called TFAR, this mod uses teamspeak and items in game to create a fantastic infrastructure that enables any and all kinds of radio communication you could ever need. Im talking encryption, sub channels, channel monitoring and the ability to eavesdrop on your enemies if you manage to steal their radios.

But perhaps most importantly it adds immersive sound effects to the voice chat. Subtle static noises in the background when the radios are within good range of eachother, quickly decreasing in quality as the terrain inbetween becomes worse and the distance increases. And at worse case it becomes a painful screeching sound that is completely undecipherable but you still know that someone is trying to contact you and they might have important information so you immediately seek out high ground and try to contact them back. TFAR basically adds its own minigame in to ARMA 3. There isnt an active community today that doesent use either TFAR or ACRE(another excellent radio mod for arma 3)

Elite dangerous also did a good job on their in game voice chat. But all they did was they added a radio static sound into the voice comms, but that combined with the fantastic sounds of Elite dangerous made the in game voice comms immersive and fun to use.

I strongly believe that Space Engineers should strive for a more immersive in game voice chat. I will list here in order of (imo)highest priority first.

1. There are many types of players. I understand that some might just want to talk without complications, I think the following suggestion should be toggle..able? Not sure if thats a word but I hope you get my meaning. Server setting. Simple Voice comms or the super awesome immersion increasing realistic voice comms as listed below. Also, a setting to disable all global chats and voice comms is needed(not sure if it is already).

2. Radio sound effect. Static in background. Voice quality decreasing with distance. Simple thing, adds tons of immersion. Should be self explanatory but I am willing to provide video examples.

3. Radio channels.. either a phone type system or multiple channels.. Here I would draw a lot of inspiration from TFAR. The deeper you go with this idea, the more complicated the system becomes but hey, thats what we are here for. Engineer in the space engineers. I think being able to talk to another player should be more of an challenge than just setting up an antenna.

4. PVP element, ability to eavesdrop or steal enemy frequencies. Needs to be a more complicated system than simply setting up your own antenna within the enemy antennas range. Need to steal antenna owned by the player maybe? Need to guess their channel?

Thats all for now.

PS.

I dream of hearing a bad quality, barely understandable "Out of @#hyd%rogen, sui&^%t energy run%ning out.. plea(@se help.."

You could even add the feature to text chat... with distance the text becomes more corrupted