Microphone Input implementation.

Hey there, i’m only just starting out with UE4 and I appreciate that this might be the wrong place to ask this, so I apologise in advance if that’s the case.

Basically I have a project I’m trying to figure out the logistics for and come up with a rough design doc with a look to doing a sort of vertical slice prototype. I figured this would be a great project to get my UE4 chops, since it would require me to learn pretty much every aspect of the engine to a decent standard. The game is pretty much just dead space / system shock with more of a horror focus.

Anyway, the main hurdle I’ve reached is about capturing microphone input and playing it back. I had an idea for an enemy class that would parrot things back to the player; perhaps I’d create a jumpscare scenario and capture audio for a 500 frame window where (I hope) the player would be screaming or yelling or something. I could tie some logic on it to do with volume thresholds to make sure it didn’t just play back static.

The idea goes that this enemy would then proliferate the player yelping to all of the other enemies, that would then use it as a way to taunt the player for being scared. Kind of a Hal 3000 “It’s always listening” sort of spookiness.

The problem i’ve encountered is that, and forgive me if i’m wrong, UE4 doesn’t really seem have a dedicated method of capturing audio input and storing it on the fly. I was thinking I could somehow use the USoundWaveStreaming class, but that seems to be more for immediately echoing the input, not saving it as a .ogg/.mp3/.wav and then using that to fill in a variable.

So I guess the tl;dr of this is have any of you had any luck with using microphone input in UE4? I can think of a ton of ways to apply audio inputs, and I can’t help but feel there’s some huge obvious thing that I’m missing. Do you use microphone input in any of your projects? If so how did you get em to work?

I thought this’d be a good place for an open discussion about this topic.

Interesting game mechanic. Alas, I have no experience in the area.

The kinect plugin from opaquemedia has mic input… maybe you can start there

Hi Jackald,
I’m trying to figure that out for quite a while, cause I wan’t to design a “game” where people leave audio messages for other players and can comment on them as well. But because I’m doing this in my freetime and beeing from a totaly different profession I ran into the C++ wall. I found people who managed to get input from a microphone (search for speech recognition in the forum). I also found someone who wrote some code, so that he could replay ogg files from harddisc during gameplay. The “missing link” seems to be how to save the input from the mic during gameplay. Perhaps this post helps you more than me (I asked the guy the same question as you did).

If you find any solution, please post it!

cheers
andtheand