Good day,
I would like to suggest a change to the audio system regarding Handheld Transceiver and Field Transceiver.
Why the change is needed?
In my opinion, transceivers are not fun and encouraging enough to be used in the vanilla experience. There are 3 main problems with them:
- As a listener, it is really hard to tell when you hear somebody talking over radio or just next to you. There is no typical radio noise or little distortion of the speaker's voice (only generic hum from the object itself), that could help the player to distinguish between two sources of voice. Of course, the voice volume over radio is lower, but it really depends on the microphone quality of the speaker (also the lower volume does not help, sometimes it's also hard to hear what person is speaking).
- There is a problem that you can't speak to people around you, once radio is turned on, because you will expose all the information over the chosen frequency. Turning radio constantly on and off is not fun at all and I think it also drains battery faster.
- The other thing is that radio also picks up the voices of everyone around, so it is hard to maintain a conversation.
What could be done to improve the situation?
- Firstly, we need a new trigger that would enable or disable communication over the radio.
How it could work? Two different keys are needed or one key that reacts differently to single/double tap or pressing down the button. No matter which option, there would be 2 different actions.
First action let us talk over the radio only when we hold that button. In that case our voice is heard around us and over the desired frequency. It would work as a push to talk.
But when we want to speak only locally and not over the radio, we just speak without holding that special key.
Example 1 (radio turned on, speak over radio): I want to speak over radio, I hold down N button and I'm hearable locally and also on the radio.
Example 2 (radio turned on, speak only locally): I want to speak to my friend walking with me, having radio turned on, I just hold the Capslock button and I'm hearable only locally.
Second action let us toggle on and off speaking over radio.
In that scenario, if this option is turned on, everytime we speak with Capslock, we can be heard both locally and over the frequency (this is how it works now) if option is toggled on.
- Secondly, add distortion of the speaker's voice to make it more immersive and easier to distinguish the voice over radio, from people talking around you.
How to deal with more people speaking over one radio or more people listening to the one radio?
I think that if the radio is in the hands or equipment of a player, only owner of this radio should be able to talk or hear over that device.
If the device would be dropped on the floor turned on, people sitting around it should be able to hear what is being transmitted over it. But I think they shouldn't be able to talk with the device on a ground.
Eventually, it could be possible to add a special interaction to the radio lying on the floor. For example, if turned on radio is on the floor, the player can interact with it by pressing F or mouse button (prompt like "Hold F to speak through this device.) and everyone within specified range around this device would be able to speak through this radio as long as someone is holding that special button (with regular Capslock button). During this action, the player could have an animation of extending his hand forward, as if he were pressing a button responsible for transmitting (similar to animation of pointing out). If player that activates a transmissions moves, then interaction is cancelled. Alternatively, player that activates it wouldn't be able to move while holding down the button.
Visual identification
When player holds down the push to talk button for speaking on radio, there would be a radio icon showing up next to the icon indicating that we are talking.
When player toggles on talking over radio, the radio icon is visible until it's toggled off. When player wants to speak, another icon indicating that we are talking appears.
For reference: There is already a mod for that which gives us an option to talk locally with radio being turned on (both options available, push to talk or toggling on/off constant talk over radio):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2580952791