After some stunning late-night revelations about the true nature of icon arithmetic, and the peculiarities of the .dmi format, I came up with an idea for a BYOND project that might sound ambitious, but actually proved to be quite simple to make.

You see, in order to conserve memory, the BYOND programs actually store some icon information on your monitor, instead of inside the computer, whenever possible. If you have an object currently being displayed, any reference to that object's icon will reference the pixels currently in use at that object's location instead of the stored version of that image. A neat but seemingly trivial bit of information, right? Wrong! Because, you see, whenever you, sitting in front of your computer, make a sound, this sets up a series of vibrations in the monitor screen (and everything else around you, for that matter)... these vibrations distort the images being displayed to a degree undetectable to us humans... but obvious to even the slowest modern PC.

So what my program does is place a "microphone" object in the center of the screen (it's not really a microphone, of course, just a microphone icon... you don't even need a microphone for this program to work!), and every server tick, this object's (potentially distorted) icon is stored into a variable. The default, stored version of the microphone icon is subtracted from this icon via icon arithmetic, resulting in an "icon" consisting only of the changes made to the original icon by the sound of your voice... in effect, a recording of any sounds made during that server tick! A little behind-the-scenes file manipulation changes the new "icon" extension from .dmi to .wav, which is all you need to do to get the computer to accept the sound and play it. That .wav can then be shared with other users on the system, and voila! Instant voice chat.

I'm in the process of adapting this project into a library format, so it can be added to any game being made or currently in existence... there are a few issues to work out, some of them have me stupmed, so if anyone has any idea, don't hesitate to shout them out:

1) The differences between the original icon and the distorted one are so tiny that the sound ends up being really faint... you have to turn your speakers all the way up to hear it. This isn't an issue, unless there's other sound (music, sound effects) in the game, which would end up being super-loud. I'm thinking this could maybe be fixed with multiplying the sound file by a high number, or maybe with more icon arithmetic, but these things aren't really my forte.

2) Monitors with speakers mounted on their side tend to create a feedback loop, both because of the proximity of the sound, and the magnetic distortion effect of the speakers "pulling" on the screen.

3) If your monitor has a 'degauss' button, pressing it while using the voice chat will cause a deafening bomb that will most likely blow out your speakers.

Since some of these bugs are potentially destructive, I'm not going to release this project until I've got them ironed out, and also until I've put in some failsafes to prevent the program from being used for evil. There are some serious privacy issues here, as this technique could be used to set up remote listening stations on any computer, anywhere.