OpenAudioMc — A new direction

Mats
4 min readAug 29, 2019

OpenAudioMc’s next release (6.0) is right on the horizon, releasing soon. This update will be an important one with amazing new features! Let’s talk about that.

A little bit of back story

Ever since the initial release of OpenAudioMc in October of 2016, we’ve set the goal to make the best Minecraft audio-system there is.
There was a specific need for a project like this within a specific set of server communities. For the last few years OpenAudioMc has been the go-to audio solution for those with a theme park server and we where always aiming to provide everything to make experiences like those better and more immerse, while also working in the background and requiring little to no attention or effort from the user so they can focus on what matters.

A new era

Up until the release of 5.0, there was a constant focus to add new features and experiment with user feedback.
Many features where added, a lot got removed and those that got left in got perfected in our 5.0 series of builds to be the version you all love today.

To expand the project and grow towards new communities we’ve partnered up with popular Minecraft YouTuber a6d and lead of the Fallen server to negotiate their vision of the ultimate platform for game servers. The concept was to make a voice chat solution where you can make group calls with teams or friend lists and immediately start talking, without the user having to make any accounts or downloading anything.
A system like this would be perfect for game modes/minigames.

Spoiler alert! That’s exactly what we did, and made it even more awesome than that!

What we’ve been working on

  • The OpenAudioMc partner program
  • Seamless cross-server support for large scale game networks.
  • A new modern looking and feeling client, making navigation a lot easier for new users.
  • A voice call solution without downloads or registration, just a one-click link integrated into the OpenAudioMc web client.
  • A notification system to share important in-game information.
  • A new version of the plugin that supports other platforms than Spigot.
  • A completely new backend service set up to allow for our rapid growth, even with this extra target audience.
  • A scalable private hosting solution for OpenAudioMc Partners (docker based).

For current and new servers

We’ve set out to build the next generation of the OpenAudioMc software set to be future-ready but not lose the functionality of our previous versions, keep everything backward compatible and still feel trusted by our current users.

This was such a success, that current users of OpenAudioMc can enjoy the new experience just by updating their plugin. All their settings, data and commands will work just like expected without any more work required. Same goes for new regular users, they can set up the plugin and use it just like everyone did before.

For networks

For networks is where it just starts to get interesting.
They can now make use of our Bungeecord version to provide one client for their entire server.

Voice Chat

Starting this launch, OpenAudioMc partners will have access to the Voice Chat feature for their community.

With this, player’s with permissions (or via the API integration) can create high quality and low latency group calls with up to 16 players.
A voice chat is completely contained within the WebClient and doesn’t require any downloads or manual registration or linking by the player, all they have to do is open the WebClient (via a command in-game that’ll provide them with a unique URL) and keep the tab open in the background, just like any other OpenAudioMc session.

But yeah, that’s right. Voice Chat (currently) only is available for partners. Although we do have plans to make it available for public use in the near future, our current server capacity won’t hold up. Since OpenAudioMc is a free service we cant just upgrade our servers or add new ones to the pool, that budget would have to come from somewhere, but as of yet, we’re not sure how.

Partner Program

Also, new starting this launch is the OpenAudioMc Partner Program.

We understand that for bigger servers and networks control can be of great importance.
For partners we can offer extra features, these are (but not limited to)

  • Dedicated (and scalable) private hosting solutions
  • Dedicated Voice Chat servers
  • Custom build addon’s and API’s
  • Listed on the official Spigot page, website, and discord
  • Discord role and access to special chats for announcements and discussion

For more information about (applying for) partnerships, you may contact me (Mindgamesnl) in private via Discord.
(please note that these partnerships are not for everyone and only intended for bigger servers who have specific questions or requests to implement OpenAudioMc on the larger scale. Failing to meet the requirements will simply get you denied, or no response at all)

Originally published at http://blog.openaudiomc.net.

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