Proximity voice

Voice

Hear the players around you and lose them as they wander off. It carries about sixty metres, straight from your browser, and one button sets how far you are heard: whisper, normal or shout. There is nothing to install.

The channel Island proximity

Your browser will ask to use the microphone.

Voice uses your Steam sign-in, the same one as the rest of the site.

Quick fix · Windows

Keep the game at full volume

Windows ducks the game by about 80% the moment any app uses your microphone. One setting stops it — for this voice, for Discord and for everything else. Thirty seconds, once.

  1. 1
    Right-click the speaker icon in the taskbar, open Sound settings, scroll to the bottom and open More sound settings.
  2. 2
    Communications tab → pick “Do nothing” → OK. This is the one that matters.
  3. 3
    Playback tab: right-click your headphones, Properties, Advanced, and untick Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device.
  4. 4
    Still under Playback: set your headphones as the Default Device and the Default Communication Device.
Within earshot -

Nobody within earshot.

Get within about sixty metres of another player to hear them. The list fills in on its own.

Voice settings

Microphone mode

Noise suppression

Noise suppression: standard

Audio devices

Hear yourself as others do

Records five seconds and plays it back exactly as it leaves for other players. Sound tests in Windows or Discord never pass through this voice, so they can sound different. This one is the truth.

Ready

Shortcuts

Click a key and press the one you want instead. Escape cancels, and always leaves the voice room.

A key already in use here is refused rather than quietly moved, so nothing you set earlier changes behind your back.

Spatial audio

Pulls voices in closer for you only. It can quieten the far edge of a crowd; it cannot let you hear further than the person talking chose to be heard - that is their Speaking range, and only they can widen it.