dot-voice

Voice chat for Godot — microphone capture with push-to-talk or voice activation, a pluggable codec, one jitter buffer per speaker, and server-side routing to everybody, a team or a radius.

dot-voice is voice chat: capture, a pluggable codec, a jitter buffer per speaker, and routing decided on the server.

Requires dot-core. It works with dot-moderation and dot-server without importing either.
Capture Push-to-talk, or voice activation with hysteresis and a hangover so words are not clipped.
Codecs pcm16 (exact) and adpcm (a quarter of the bandwidth). Register your own and nothing else changes.
Wire A ten-byte header carrying speaker, sequence, frame length, channel and codec. Every field bounds-checked, because a voice packet arrives before its sender has done anything trustworthy.
Playback A jitter buffer per speaker that reorders, drops duplicates, caps its own growth, and fades over a lost frame rather than cutting to silence.
Routing All, team, proximity, or a filter you write. Decided on the server.
Muting A moderator’s mute is enforced on the server. A player’s own mute list is applied on their machine. Those are different features and it matters.

Three things worth knowing first

Nothing opens a microphone on its own. Not on ready, not because a config flag was true in an exported default. start_capture() is an explicit call you make after the player has agreed, and it returns a failure you can put on screen.

The devices are behind an interface, which is why there is a test suite at all. DotVoiceSource and DotVoiceSink have a real implementation and a buffer implementation, so the suite writes samples in one end and reads audio out of the other with no audio device in the process — the gate, the codec, the packet, the router and the jitter buffer all run the code a player runs.

Both ends must agree on the format. Sample rate, frame length and codec. DotVoiceConfig.format_fingerprint() is one number to exchange at handshake, because a mismatch is not an error — it is noise, or speech at the wrong speed.

Where a game plugs in

To change Where
Where bytes go DotVoiceManager.send_fn, DotVoiceRouter.send_fn
Where audio comes from DotVoiceSource subclass
Where audio goes DotVoiceSink subclass, or DotVoiceManager.sink_factory
The codec DotVoiceCodec subclass plus DotVoiceCodec.register
Who hears whom DotVoiceRouter.team_fn / position_fn / listener_filter
Who may be heard at all Anything with is_voice_muted(peer) registered as dot_mute_source
Feel and bandwidth DotVoiceConfig
DotVoiceCodec subclass

id(), encode(), decode(), bytes_for(), is_stateful(), reset(), duplicate_codec(). Then DotVoiceCodec.register(...). This is the seam an Opus GDExtension drops into — Godot exposes no Opus encoder to GDScript, and the two shipped codecs are what the language can do.

DotVoiceSource / DotVoiceSink subclass

start, stop, has_frame / can_accept, read_frame / write_frame, is_running, describe.

Signals

talking_changed, speaker_changed, frame_sent, speech_relayed, speech_refused, capture_failed. Those plus input_level() are what a voice HUD needs; drawing it is your game’s or dot-ui’s.

What is deliberately not here

  • Opus. The codec interface exists so a GDExtension can be dropped in.
  • Echo cancellation and noise suppression. Both are real signal processing and belong in a GDExtension. Push-to-talk is the reason this is usable without them.
  • A voice UI.
  • A transport. send_fn takes bytes, exactly as in dot-net.
  • Proof that the microphone works. The device layer needs an audio device, so the headless suite cannot cover it and says so rather than leaving you to find out.
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