Would removing voice entirely from the grid actually be an overall upgrade to SL now?

Just like the poll says.

What do you think, residents?

The grid couldnt handle the data before voice no way will it be able to handle it now..cant wait till windlight and all the other junk Tales of Pirates its a ROCKING game and free and NO FREAKING lag like sl http://top.igg.com/ and ya dont need a top of the line puter to play at all

I want voice but there's no way to throttle it. or even tell who's talking.

What ever this problem is now its building to a critical mass here on the forums, and I think the next few weeks are going to be crucial for SL to pull out of this nosedive. With lots of students and teachers going back to school the numbers online will probably drop for the next few months.
Anyway you skewed the wording of your poll so I voted No. Removing voice wouldn’t be an upgrade. There are other things that LL could do to improve the stability of SL and have nothing to do with voice.

depends - if theres a definite hit to overall performance thats definitely becuase of voice, removing it would be an improvement.

If its just rollout performance woes and the grid will return to pre voice performance soon, then leaving Voice in would be the way to go.

If simply restricting it somehow will restore performance then that would be the best alternative.

No, simply.

Voice runs on an independent system to the rest of SL - separate servers, the works. The positional data presumably comes from the grid, but the grid overhead of this is negligible.

OTOH positional data seems pretty bloated and could be streamlined.

Edit: of course, the client already has the positional data; the voice server doesn't need it >.<

Someone make me some coffee.

sure as soon as you stop arguing with yourself ^^

but actually its looking to me like although voice is on another server etc its affected how things work. SL was working well mostly then they launched the voice and well here we are....

I've gone for no. The voice is on a totally different server to first look so has no effect on performance. I can see its many benefits and think it should stay, its not like LL are going to remove it now anyway.

I don't automaticly say "Voice is the cause of our recent troubles" BUT the Updates in which voice was a component Definately Is and there Were Other components to the Update. It could be the New communications system, It Could be a Bug Fix gone haywire. All we know is these issues began with the Update so that is it. Voice specificly? That's for the techs to find out.

Angel.

No, in fact I did not, and clearly that phrase does not mean what you think it means (to steal and paraphrase a movie line). A skewed poll would have had answers like, "Yes, I have common sense," and, "No, I love unstable platforms!"

The answers were phrased simply as "yes" or "no." The question means EXACTLY what it appears to mean and nothing more or less.

So no, it wasn't skewed. If you answered no, then you don't believe removing voice would improve SL. If you answered yes, you do, along with 70.91% of voters as of this posting.

Straightforward and simple.

I am not an expert on the matter, but I must say that the problems look worse since voice is here. So maybe there is a connection, who knows... I think not many here have complete insight on how all works and is installed at LL.

And to the person who wanted someone to make his coffee... go make your own .

Morwen.

yes, of course!

Like everyone else has said, voice is on its own seperate servers so its not voice itself causing problems. And dang it i like voice saves my typing thus less pain in my wrists ^^


But who knows it could of been a grid update that went splat, it could be just shotty issues but totally agree, it's something that was done in the last upgrade.

I have voice enabled, although I do not have a headset to be able to use it myself.

I have not yet found one person using voice.

Broccoli

Oh i agree it's rare but i talk to my friends etc since i know they have headsets and in some occasions at certain places I find like one or two others with it.

I've found LOADS.

I do notice tho that lots of people have voice enabled without actually being able to use it. The other thing is, if someone is in voice IM or conference (and that's the majority of users I suspect) then you won't see them using voice.

I don't like Voice and won't personally use it. I don't think that Voice will be good for SL's social interactions or culture in the Short run either, as it is already causing a rift in the community between those who love voice and those who refuse to use it. Yet I am not in favor if removing it entirely.

What they need to do is implement it in a rational manner that makes it have no impact on people who don't choose to use Voice. For example, I couldn't possibly care less about streaming audio on someone's parcel. I mute streaming audio (for that matter, all audio), unless I have a specific reason to hear something. And when I do that, I get no indication from SL that I juust walked onto a parcel that has streaming audio available.

Compare that to the current Voice implementation. I am saddled with the oversized, feature-bloated Chatterbox UI for my text and IM chat functions, which has a bunch of 'features' that are useless to me as a non-voice user. And I now have a stupid volume control on-screen, even when all audio options are muted in my preferences. That is piss-poor UI design.

They should give us back the previous text chat, IM and Friends list UI's, and make the Chatterbox a completely OPTIONAL UI for those who enable Voice in their Preferences.

They should also allow an option for NON-voice users to toggle visibility of the dots that indicate who is using Voice or voice-enabled. In that mode you still don't hear, but you at least know that the "rude person" who keeps stepping in front of you is trying to talk to you in Voice, and you can then Text chat to them that you are intentionally deaf and mute.

There should also be a way to choose to *hear* what others are saying in Voice Chat, without giving Voice users a false impression that you are willing or able to *speak* in Voice Chat. For example, a store owner may want to hear customer requests, while still choosing to reply only by text chat. The only way to do this now is to fully enable Voice Chat, and just refuse to turn on your mic.

You guys are hilarious.

Personally, I'd put more suspicion towards the Message Liberation/Heterogeneous Grid projects that Linden have supposedly been pursuing lately. Did you know that the programming nuts and bolts that hold the SL grid together have - apparently - been fundamentally changed over the last few weeks?

Thing is, all that stuff is invisible to the average user. To the av-on-the-street, the only thing that "seems" to have changed recently is the addition of voice comms - so voice comms cops the blame for everything...

Actually, that's not why. It's that the changes you're talking about took place a while back, to little ill effect. Things didn't explode until voice got put in.

Interesting.

Though I don't doubt voice is handled by different servers, I wonder where those servers are, in relation to the sim/asset/other servers that make up the grid. If they're near their bandwidth limit, I could see that voice might hurt the grid.

That said, there's been a bazillion bug fixes lately. Just as likely that some non-voice change is causing the latest round of unhappyness.

Voice also causes AIDS. Be careful!

actually it IS why the Grid is having issues now. The entire purpose of the project was to allow the Lab to upload and test changes to the server systems and the way the servers interact with the clients while the grid is still running and without too much need for a dedicated Beta Grid.

voice - by the by - was already a part of the server system well before the main client variant came along. Guess what? The Main Grid First Look for Voice worked fine! The standard client version however .... does not work in a very reliable manner.

That says that there was something ELSE that changed to cause this.

I'm aware of what the "project" was for. But the simple fact is, it's been running for a while without major hangup, until the voice client came along. Which says it's either voice, or something else IN the voice update.



It wasn't used on any large scale previously, however.