Peer-to-Peer Voice Communication for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

We present an approach for integrating voice communication into massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). The currently available third-party software solutions involve additional fees and are not connected to the game logic. Other approaches use the game servers directly for mixing and transmitting speech. Doing so allows for a tight coupling of speech and in-game events but consumes large amounts of bandwidth and computational power on the servers. Our novel idea is a mix between server-based signaling and peer-to-peer data transmission. While the entire game context resides on the server, audio streams are transmitted in a peer-to-peer fashion and processed at the peer nodes only. This technique splits up the workload among all machines while still allowing to relate speech processing to game events. We further improve the processing performance on the clients by using SOUND, a novel technique for distance based resampling.