Big Walk – Voice Chat Volume

A BepInEx plugin for Big Walk that adds a separate VOICE VOLUME slider to the audio settings, controlling proximity voice chat independently of the master volume — with the ability to boost voice up to 200%.

The base game has a single master volume slider. Voice chat is heavily distance-attenuated, so friends are often hard to hear even with everything maxed out. This mod gives voice chat its own slider that goes past vanilla maximum.

Features

• A native VOICE VOLUME row in Settings → Audio, directly under VOLUME. It behaves like a built-in setting: mouse and controller navigation work, and the value is saved by the game's own settings system.
• Range 0–200, where 100 = vanilla loudness. Above 100, quiet and distant voices get boosted while someone talking right next to you stays capped at normal full volume (the boost multiplies into the game's per-source volume chain, which is clamped at the end).
• Affects only player voice: proximity chat, megaphone, walkie-talkie, radio, voice echo, and self-voice monitoring. Music, SFX, ambience, and UI sounds are untouched.
• No config file needed — the value persists in the game's own settings storage (PlayerPrefs key settings_voice_volume).

Requirements

• Big Walk on PC (IL2CPP build, tested against Unity 6000.3.17f1, August 2026)
• BepInEx 6 (Unity IL2CPP, win-x64) bleeding edge — tested with 6.0.0-be.785

Install

1. Download the BepInEx 6 IL2CPP win-x64 zip and extract it into the game folder (the one containing Big Walk.exe), so that winhttp.dll and the BepInEx folder sit next to the exe.
2. Launch the game once and quit. The first launch takes a minute longer while BepInEx generates interop assemblies into BepInEx/interop.
3. Copy VoiceVolume.dll into BepInEx/plugins.
4. Launch the game — the slider appears under Settings → Audio.

Uninstall

• Remove the slider only: delete BepInEx/plugins/VoiceVolume.dll.
• Remove everything: also delete winhttp.dll, doorstop_config.ini, the BepInEx and dotnet folders from the game directory.

Troubleshooting

Check BepInEx/LogOutput.log. A healthy session contains:

[Info   :Voice Chat Volume] Voice Chat Volume 1.0.0 loaded
[Info   :Voice Chat Volume] Voice volume hanger registered, value=...
[Info   :Voice Chat Volume] Voice volume row injected into audio settings

The vanilla game logs settingstype: NotSet has no hanger. will not refresh on its own (it comes from the stock reset-button row) — that line is unrelated to this mod.

How it works

Big Walk uses Dissonance VoIP for voice capture/transport, but pipes playback through the game's in-house audio engine (AudioSystem.dll). Every sound routes through an AudioBus that belongs to a settings group (SFX, Music, VO, UI, …), and it turns out the VO group is used exclusively by voice chat buses — the game shipped with a per-voice volume control that was never exposed in the UI.

The plugin (three Harmony postfixes):

• SettingsWardrobe.Initialize — registers a real SettingsHanger (the game's own settings-binding class) for the new slider, mirroring how the master volume hanger is built.
• AudioManager.Initialize — re-applies the saved value whenever the audio engine (re)creates its volume objects.
• SettingsMenu.SwapToCatagory — when the audio tab opens, clones the master volume row, rebinds the clone to the new hanger, retitles it, inserts it into the category's row array, rewires controller navigation, and slightly compresses the row heights so the list still fits the fixed-height container (the menu has no scrolling).

Applying the volume writes AudioManager.Instance.VOVolume.Value directly rather than going through AudioManager.ChangeAudioSettingsVolume, because the latter clamps to 1.0 and this mod allows up to 2.0.

Building from source

1. Install BepInEx into the game and run it once (the build references the generated BepInEx/interop assemblies).
2. Adjust the <GameDir> property in VoiceVolume/VoiceVolume.csproj if your game isn't at D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Big Walk.
3. dotnet build VoiceVolume/VoiceVolume.csproj -c Release (.NET SDK 6 or newer).
4. Copy VoiceVolume/bin/Release/VoiceVolume.dll to BepInEx/plugins.

Repository layout

• VoiceVolume/ — the plugin source.
• tools/ — Python scripts used during development to reverse engineer the game (IL2CPP disassembly annotated with dumped method names, call/data cross-reference scanners, and UnityPy-based asset dumps of the audio buses and settings menu layout). They are dev-only utilities with hardcoded local paths — not needed to build or use the mod, but essential when a game update changes offsets. They expect an Il2CppInspectorRedux dump of the game in dump/ (ignored by git) and use capstone, pefile, and UnityPy.

Roadmap

• Publish on Thunderstore once a Big Walk community exists there.