A:

There are two equally important subsystems when doing Internet voice chat. The first is the sound system - this subsystem captures the data, compresses, decompresses it, and then outputs it. This is the side of the problem that Miles solves: it has the input, voice chat codecs, and killer output side.

The other half of the problem is the network layer. This is usually a UDP-based network transport layer that your game also uses for communication. The key thing to remember is that Miles doesn't have any network layer! A good network layer is at least as big of a problem as sound itself, and it's way out of MSS's domain. There are, in fact, complete licensable products that just supply the network communication for a game.

So, the voice chat examples that we supply are just that - examples. You can use the examples to see how to call the input, codec, and output systems, but they won't help you on the network side. We just implemented the least complicated protocol possible to keep the rest of the example easy (it's already fairly complex).

So, the examples use the high-level TCP/IP protocol for communication - this works fine on a LAN with access to a DNS server, but it definitely will have trouble over the Internet unless you replace the network pieces.

We have extensive documentation on integrating the voice chat codecs with a generic network layer - see the "Implementing Voice Chat" Section for more details.