Is there any chance of implementing this, which would be very useful for teaching games, and also very pleasant for semi-social games with old friends? It could also help with dokbohm’s situation.
I have seen a number of discussions where people suggest using another service. That is obviously workable, but an integrated chat would have several advantages:
No need for an account elsewhere.
No need to agree on another service.
No need to switch screens to control it.
Automatic connection with your opponent.
Possibility to add spectators.
The first question would be where to tuck it away so that it is findable but does not clutter the UI: I would suggest that the chat mode button should get another line called “Audio chat settings”. Obviously we would not want the chat to go via the server, which would just be responsible for setting up a peer -to-peer connection. I imagine the idea stand or falls with the availability of suitable libraries.
Features I would expect or want:
Off when game starts, or a game option.
Only on while both players enable it.
Notify if opponent wants it on again.
Invite specific spectators or other users as listeners or participants, if both players agree.
Make public.
Turns off n seconds (a setting) after last move or when tab/window/app closed.
Option to prolong by m seconds.
Save the audio file, even a little while later.
Of course pretty much all of this could apply to a video chat, but I suspect the demand for that is less.
With the upcoming issues of security and web identification that have been pointed out recently in other topics, I find this prospect highly unlikely and hard to maintain both from a server standpoint and a moderation/legal standpoint.
Why not use dedicated free software like Discord instead, if people want to have a teaching game?
Yes, but doesn’t Discord offer those things? That’s what confused me a bit.
I am not sure if it has changed, but you do not really need an account to connect to a Discord web room. All you need is a web browser, so number 1 and number 2 are taken care off.
The person doing the review can stream their screen so there is no alternating between screen to control anything.
Any assortment of people can connect in a shared DS link and all of them can watch/spectate the game or review, even without having an OGS account or even the link to the game itself.
Push to talk buttons can take care of the specifications you require.
Another free software called OBS studio can be used at no cost to capture/record/store the video/stream and the sound.
Take my case, using a mobile phone. I have both on it, OGS in the browser and discord app. But switch from one to the other is far from being convenient.
Imagine that some voice recording would be directly integrated in the game chat. Bit like when you use voice in messaging. Awesome to me if I can listen or talk while I see the goban
I see the value, but I kind of think the maintenance burden (and moderation burden) isn’t worth it. If OGS had unlimited resources it would be a different story.
But couldn’t be possible to integrate discord, without re-creating it, behind the curtain? Discord or whatever else btw.
A bit like we use discourse system for the forum already.
Another example of integration is the OGS tv, I don’t need to register on twitch but I can just keep an eye on the running streams. It’s already pretty cool
As someone who’s built complex peer-to-peer audio/videochat before, it’s hard to overstate what a gigantic mess of complexity it is, even if you’re using a third-party provider that handles a lot of the complexity for you.
Unless Discord had an API integration that fully handled providing its own embeddable UI (and things like fetching AV streams from the web browser), this would be a TON of work. (I’m also 99% sure Discord does not offer such a thing, their APIs tend to be much more focused on letting you build a more complex deep integration yourself).
I think the best possible way to advocate for this would be to build up a culture of voice chat using Discord, so you can point to an active community of people who are actively clamoring for an integrated voice chat feature that solves specific pain points of Discord instead of it being a hypothetical idea. Especially since this feature literally already existed in OGS and was removed without huge outcry.
Thanks for explaining that; if that is the way it is, it is a shame, but we just have to accept it. I certainly do not want to see the devs overburdened with work that only benefits a few, and may even threaten the stability of the site.