[absol89]

Why?

Other voip solutions were either a) not allowed in this fork, b) not preferred after mumble investigation. So: c) Opus integrated

Built-in proximity voice chat

Players can talk to each other in game over the existing game connection. There's no Mumble, no separate program and no extra port, so it works the same on VPS-hosted servers and on servers players host themselves.

How it works

• Client: the microphone is captured with miniaudio (48 kHz mono, 20 ms frames), scaled by the mic volume, put through the noise gate and Opus-encoded at 24 kbit/s. Frames are sent unreliably (kUnreliableNoNagle), about 3 KB/s per player while talking.
• Server: relays each frame to players in cell range of the speaker who have voip on and whose channel (Everyone, Party or Strangers) includes the speaker. It never decodes audio. Each speaker is rate-limited to 75 frames per second.
• Playback: each remote player has an Opus decoder (packet loss concealment covers up to 3 missing frames) and a 60–200 ms jitter buffer. Voices are mixed on the voip output device.
• Distance: a voice is full volume up to the fade start, falls off linearly, and is silent at twice that distance, measured from the camera. Voices are panned left and right with constant power (at most 70%) by direction from the camera.
• Who is talking: a player counts as talking while their frames arrive. The UI shows one speaker wave (below their gate) or two (talking).

Settings

All voice settings are in [Voice] of Data/SkyrimTogetherReborn/config/STServer.ini. bVoip is one switch: for a server it allows voip, for a player it is the Connect to voip checkbox. Voice runs only when both the server's and the player's bVoip are on.

Key	Default	Notes
bVoip	false	Server: allow voice. Player: Connect to voip
sInputDevice	empty (None)	Nothing is captured or sent until a device is picked. default follows Windows
sOutputDevice	empty	The Windows default device, which the game normally uses
sVoipChannel	everyone	everyone, party or strangers
fVoipFadeStart	2500	Game units. Silent at twice this
fMicVolume	1.0	0 to 1
fNoiseGate	0.10	0 to 1 peak level, the same scale as the Windows "Test your microphone" bar, held open 300 ms

• Per-player volumes: these are saved in the UI store as playerUi_voiceVolumes, keyed by username, so they carry across servers and sessions.
• Saving STServer.ini: SaveSettingsToIni now starts from the file on disk, so the server keeps keys it doesn't own (the player's [Voice] keys) instead of rewriting the file from scratch.

UI

• Settings: a new Voice chat section under Audio with input device, Connect to voip, output device, channel and fade start.
• Player List and Party Menu tabs: a Voip column. The header mic opens Your microphone volume and a Noise gate slider with a live level meter and the gate marked on it. Each player's speaker opens <Name> volume.
• Speaker icons: crossed out and grey when voip is off or the channel excludes that player, crossed out and red at 0, one wave when quiet, two waves while talking. Party members use the party colour.
• F2 menu: unchanged.
• Mockup: https://claude.ai/artifact/1nRX7H2SXCw1SewTpAb8Gj (v14)

Protocol

• New messages: VoiceDataRequest, VoiceStateRequest and NotifyVoiceData. Frame data is capped at 512 bytes when reading.
• Server settings: ServerSettings.VoipEnabled is new.
• Compatibility: opcodes are appended, and the build-commit check already rejects mismatched clients.

Dependencies and licences

• libopus 1.5.2 (BSD-3-Clause), Windows client only. THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt has its notice and is copied next to SkyrimTogether.exe on install, so it ends up in the release zip.
• miniaudio 0.11.22 (public domain / MIT-0), Windows client only, header-only.

Reverse engineering (Ghidra)

• Verified in Ghidra on SkyrimSE 1.7.104:
  • NiAVObject world transform: rotate at 0x7C, translate at 0xA0 (NiAVObject::UpdateWorldData).
  • TESCamera::cameraNode at +0x20 (camera position getter, ID 50785).
  • The world rotate's Y column is the camera's forward (audio listener update, ID 40449).
• Assumed: the same offsets on 1.6.1170. Not checked; AGENTS.md says that database should be checked first.
• No new hooks or address IDs: the code uses the existing PlayerCamera::Get, PlayerCharacter::Get and actor positions. If the camera node can't be read, the player's position and heading are used instead.

CEF and the Skyrim Together UI

• Already used in the UI: FontAwesome icons, range and number inputs, app-dropdown and the existing slider styling.
• New to the app: CDK Overlay for the popups (@angular/cdk was already a dependency). cdk/overlay-prebuilt.css is now imported in styles.scss.
• Font sizes: all sizes are in rem/em, so the new parts follow the Settings font size (it sets the root font size). Checked at XS and XL in the browser mock.
• Text: new strings are in en.json under COMPONENT.SETTINGS.VOICE and COMPONENT.VOIP. Other languages fall back to English. Device names come from Windows and aren't translated.
• Mockups: the HTML mockups followed the menu's look but were drawn at a fixed size. They were not checked against the font size setting; the implementation was.
• In-game CEF: not tested yet (see below).

Tested

• Unit tests: the encoding round trip for the 3 new messages, oversize frames rejected, and the noise gate, falloff, panning, sequence wrap and jitter buffer (TPTests, built and run with g++ on Linux)
• Server, encoding and console changes compile with g++ (Linux)
• VoiceAudio.cpp (miniaudio and Opus) compiles with g++ against the real headers
• UI production build (ng build --configuration=production)
• UI in the browser mock: the Settings section, dropdowns, Connect, the Voip column on both tabs, mic popup meter and gate, per-player volume saved by name, party colour, one or two waves, font sizes XS and XL
• Windows client build (MSVC), 1.7.104 and 1.6.1170: CI
• In game, two clients and a local server: hearing each other, falloff and panning, channels, noise gate, mic and player volumes
• In game, with the server's bVoip=false: no audio is captured or relayed
• The UI in the in-game CEF overlay: popups, meter and dropdowns
• Device changes: unplugging a device, a device missing at startup, a non-ASCII device name
• Editing STServer.ini by hand while the game runs (it is re-read when Settings opens)

Known limitations and follow-ups

• Output device: "Game audio device" is the Windows default output device. If someone moved the game to another device, voices still go to the default.
• Server switch in the UI: the UI doesn't know the server's bVoip, so speakers can look on when the server has voip off.
• No push-to-talk yet: the noise gate is the only trigger.
• Volume range: 0–100%, no boost above 100%.
• Shared ini: a server started from the game folder rewrites STServer.ini on shutdown with the values it loaded at startup. A bVoip change made in game while that server runs can be lost.

[absol89]

Testing in game 2 Nov:

default non selected device makes my laptop on 1.7.104 not send voice, it received noise gated voip from my 1.6.1170 pc.
laptop had the stranger setting, and after joining the party, the 1.6.1170 PC could hear them if they selected a mic. That player was on Everyone setting. So the settings and filters check out. After partying the laptop didnt send to the party channel, only to strangers. The max range was tested with the same range the 5000 unit nametags fade out at.

[absol89]

Follow ups from testing: Need a volume slider scalar from other people's voip. default 100% and between 0 to 500%?

Push to talk still deferred as it gets a bit frantic in combat and people would forget to use it, or not set it up properly.