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Mubashar Bilal avatar image
Mubashar Bilal asked

Voice Chat

I am currently working on a Unity game and using Playfab as a backend including matchmaking and multiplayer servers, now i want to implement real time voice chat to my game but i have two questions regaqrding this:

1. Why should i user Party for this purpose as i can get the IP's of players in a match so i can connect directly with other players without using Party. What are the drawbacks in this approach?

2. As i am building the game with unity for Android and IOS but the Party doesnt support Unity yet so can i implement a separate Android and IOS plugin and then import that plugin in Unity? Will it work?

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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

The Party service is both a data relay and chat service, with voice services (transcription and translation) on the latter.

So to completely answer 1: We chose to not build Party as p2p in order to help protect player privacy. Exposure of IP Addresses is something developers should take seriously, as it does have PII implications. That said, if there's enough demand for it, we will look at enabling p2p in a future release. Also though, the voice services are there to help give your players what they need, whether it's in order to be compliant with the CVAA (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/21st-century-communications-and-video-accessibility-act-cvaa) or to let players who don't share a common language play and chat together.

For Unity, we will be providing a library for that engine by the time we get to general availability. Keep an eye on our roadmap page (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/roadmap/), as we'll be providing more details there as the schedule for that locks.

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brandon@uprootstudios.com avatar image
brandon@uprootstudios.com answered

@Mubashar Bilal I don't have much experience with Party, so I'm not sure if it fits your use-case. Also, since there is no native Unity support for Party yet, I'd imagine it would be a significant undertaking to implement your own cross-platform plugin support for the iOS and Android libraries for Party. Another alternative could be Vivox which seems reasonably cheap (I have no experience with it personally, but I've heard it's good).

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Mubashar Bilal avatar image Mubashar Bilal commented ·

Ok i will look into that

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