[Update] Dark Souls 2: Seamless Co-op - Proximity Chat

Hi everyone

Development of the mod continues. And in this post I will further discuss some points I made in the previous development post

Proximity chat

Originally I wanted to eventually add proximity chat as a stretch goal after the mod was released and stable. Unfortunately my brain got stuck on this feature and I kept coming back to it. I was really enjoying reverse engineering this part of the game so I decided to just sent it and allocate a few days to implementing it.

Dark Souls II uses the FMODEX library to manage the game's audio. Reversing this was fun because the available documentation is very difficult to find as the version the game uses is almost 10 years old.

In the vanilla game, when creating player voice channels:

• It will create 4 channels (1 for the local player, 3 for co-operative players in the session

• These channels are set to 50% volume, and have a frequency of 11025Hz

• The channels are also responsible for 2D audio only

In seamless co-op I have completely removed the vanilla system and re-implemented a voice chat system of my own:

• 6 channels are created (1 for the local player, 5 for other players in the session with invaders included)

• The channels are set to 100% volume, and have a frequency of 48000Hz

• The channels have 3D spatial audio, meaning that you will hear the voice relative to where the player is in your world. If the player is dead or too far away you will not be able to hear them

For the most part - this feature is complete. However the only one thing that feels a bit strange is that because the game is a third-person game the listener audio position is relative to the player's camera - not the player model itself.

Other players who are talking have this positional audio set to their player character location in the world, however hearing from the camera's perspective can feel a bit strange. I could change this but it would also result in the game's audio changing in turn.

Map Entity Synchronisation

Previous post:

The next big hurdle I have to overcome is being able to request world information from the host for every map upon joining

Still in the testing phase but I think I've figured it out. Objects in all maps should be synced with the host as intended.

I may make a video as the next post to just explain a bit of how the development of the mod is going just to keep things interesting.

As always - thank you for your patience and a huge thank you to all of my supporters <3

Take care,

Yui