This is an idea I've had for a while for this game, ever since I played ArmA2 MilSim with ACRE (Advanced Combat Radio Environment) and later ArmA3 with Task Force Radio. If you want examples of this in action, check out ShackTactical on YouTube. It's in many ways much like Squad's VOIP.
These are both plugins for Teamspeak 3 and have the following features for the games they were made for.
- The basic feature is that it splits Teamspeak into at least two modes. The 'normal' mode is normal speech for all in-game characters with positional audio. If someone shouts for a medic from far behind me, then I will hear his voice from where his character is currently at in-game. Then there's the 'radio' mode, of which a character can have more than one. When the player presses a different key, this activates the radio and he can now communicate with all the members of his squad or the other commanders etc.
- All radios' signals are influenced by distance and obstacles. All this is done through Teamspeak 3. The plugin basically receives in-game info on the characters' location and distorts or fades out the sound in Teamspeak accordingly.
- Other cooler features include users getting silently moved out of the channel if their character dies and they are muted if they fall unconscious or get severely injured.
- As everyone can talk to anyone in the ArmA3 mission environment, this means all users need to be in the same Teamspeak channel for it to work. But they can only hear the characters in their immediate vicinity (including enemy) or voices over the radio their character is carrying in-game. This also means that if you pick up an enemy's radio in-game, you can listen in (and talk) to the enemy's conversations.
It's a really cool plugin that adds loads of immersion to the game.
All this gave me a raging boner when I thought about something along these lines for CloD and our Campaign Missions.
Speaking of possibilities here are some features that could work in CloD very nicely, adding that extra something to our campaign nights.
- Voice Distortion over distance, altitude and obstacles. This would of course have to be backed up with historical research.
- Plugin receives character and aircraft information. For instance if character is dead, mortally wounded, bailed out, crash landed in land or water or just has a damaged radio set, as well information on it's position.
Player joins game -> client moved silently from Ready Room to Mission Channel
Pilot dies -> client moved silently to other channel
Pilot heavily wounded -> client muted in mission channel (?)
Pilot bailed out -> client moved silently to other channel
Pilot crash lands in water -> client moved silently to other channel
Destroyed radio set -> client muted in mission channel
Pleayer leaves game -> client moved silently to other channel
These can of course be set differently depending on the requirement of whatever mission is running.
Other things that somehing like this would need is:
- Squadron interface set before the mission, for squadron members to talk to eachother as we do now.
- Option for full real historical radio. Everyone hears everyone else on the same frequency, just like in real life.
Now I don't have the technical or coding knowledge to make any of this a reality, but I will try to find out how the plugin works and maybe someone else with the necessary knowledge will also get a raging boner thinking about such an idea and maybe do something about it. That being said I don't expect this to come to fruition ever, but I thought I'd just put it out there.
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The main question here is of course if CloD and the server the mission running on, provides such information at all? Is this even possible?
tl;dr a dream for better radios.
What do you think?
W.
But I will look into it.