Virtual Party Space Devlog #4: Audio spatialization

Today I tried to make audio spatialization work, and looked into Jitsi features and how to properly render isometric tiles.

Log

Calla

Calla as a library seems to be more usable than expected
- Tutorial exists in sub-project’s doc directory
- “broken” UI is the minimal client implementation from tutorial

Notes for Calla implementation

spatializer distance is in “meters”, may need to play around with math on this?
uses omnitone preferred, but has a number of different spatializers, depending what browser supports
library handles interpolation of audio over time and assumes you’re using that for avatar movement, need to think how to integrate with sprite movement
audio sources set their own max distance (so players can control how far people can hear them, but not vice versa)
- except Calla user messages don’t include audio properties? So this would be a universal setting for all users in their world
- can add mute flag to user array to allow people to mute individuals?
- environmental sound can be set to whatever I like

Jitsi

Jitsi includes text chat, need to examine that for use/abuse cases
Jitsi Videobridge last-N feature may be hackable to only show nearest-N video streams
- locations are sent peer-to-peer by Calla, so clients would have to request specific list of streams with each update
- all audio streams will always be sent, most likely

UI/Game

How to do appropriate layering in isometric view?
Phaser isometric sample seems to use at minimum a different layer for every grid-Y, and change sprite layer based on y value

About this series

Back in mid-December I started an ambitious project to create a custom platform for a virtual birthday party in February. I kept notes on my progress, both for personal reference and to turn into a series of blog posts. It quickly became apparent that I did not have time to both do the project and blog about the project. I have retroactively decided to post my raw notes as a dev log.