What effect will new voice chat have on lag and bandwidth ?

No effect ? Some effect ? OK, IT pros, your turn. Sincere question here.

Steve

I have no idea about the technical effects, but it will certainly have a cultural effect. Get ready for a shift.

It's pretty trivial to squeeze large amounts of audio into a relatively tiny pipeline these days. It will really boil down to the specifics of the implementation. It could be done with negligable impact to performance.

I'm with Chosen, and quite a few others though, if this isn't implemented very cautiously, the social implications could be substantial. The only way I can see voice in SL working is if it's some form of text to speech. In any other case, it would have to be an opt-in system.. and the problem with that is that those who opt-in will not be typing, leaving those who haven't opted in wondering why everyone's so quiet. This is a big huge can of worms.

Oh we`re getting universal voice capability in SL now?

Guess i`ve been out of the loop.

Didn`t Philip say in one of the town halls he wasn`t wanting to do this?

I can't really see it succeeding..............I know I would mute the audio myself. Can't imagine listening to a bunch of chit chat with the constant silly talk at a club or something. And one time, just one time, I get the "hey, Babe.............." LOL

Yeah i`d definitely be muting all voice chat and only engage in this with my GF.


I was saying in the other thread- Im wondering if you just walk by the person and hear it or if you have to somehow connect to them.

And why wasn`t this mentioned in the blog.

LL fails again....at their own game.

Since I am now at work, there is noway i can use voice. Why is that they want us to be like there.com......? We were to have voice 1.8 client what happened? well.....
OMG the bw eating will rally stress everyone out! Forget it! With the amount of graphics etc in this game.........

They cannot reliabally do what they have on their plate right now.........why would they even think of adding something like that? Geeze LL, get your system working with what you have going on now before you even give a tiny thought to adding something else.

But one thought just hit me.........it all could be for their corporate folks and their teleconferrencing. Provide the bandwidth and pipeline. Now I feel better.........all it's going to do to us lowly residents is lag us a bit more.

this is a pretty good observation - Since its tied to the new, pricier islands, One of the big reasons could very well be for corporate reasons such as you mention.

A virtual meeting as you discribe.

*pulls out his TechnoDragon Orb and peers within*

I see.... bigger, longer-lasting red bars!!

You connect to SL at work?

Here's the blog post with detailed information on this upcoming feature.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/27/bringing-voice-to-second-life/

They have partnered with Vivox to provide this new feature. They say it shouldn't affect the grid performance because it will have its own servers from a 3rd party source. They say it will require a slight increase of bandwidth and processor power. I don't see a section that explains if you will be able to turn off the voice feature via personal avatar. It is supposed to be automatically activated on mainland sims, and private sim owners have the option to turn it on or off.

Personally, I don't see why this will cause a rift in the Second Life society. It would appear a lot of people are opposed to it in the forums and on the blog in the first place. I think it will be fun and will just take some getting used to after tests and tweaks. If someone is that demanding where they insist on hearing your voice or they won't interact with you; well, they probably aren't someone you want to role play with anyways.

It won't cause a rift because most people won't use it in everyday dealings. People using it outside of meetings, conferences, classes, etc... will be labeled "griefers" for being annoying. People won't use a system for very long when nobody responds to them because nobody has "Enable voices" turned on.

I can see this as being a plus actually. I play other games and we use ventrillo and similar programs to communicate. Some choose to use it, some choose not to, it really has no negative effect on game play, people still use text for chat. Many want to remain anon, and for that reason they opt out of voice chat as well. But, I can see this helping people to teach and learn. Let's face it typing is dang slow when you are trying to explain how to do something. Now everything does have a downside as well. Unwanted chat can be a pain. I hope (like in Ventrillo) you will be able to mute individual players. I will most likely have my sound muted for the most part. But, I will like to use it in certain situations.

I think a quick visit to the blog post about it answers most of the technical questions. It will have no effect on the grid performance, but those already struggling with performance due to the sluggishness of their own connections (as opposed to grid server and bandwidth issues) will most likely want to give it a skip.

In usage and culture terms, I don't see it being widely adopted in social settings by those that treat Second Life as a fantasy outlet. Voice is too revealing, and LL have already indicated they will not be providing any kind of masking or modulation technology-so the many bored guys playing as hot strippers will be in serious trouble Besides the implications of destroying the fantasy, voice communication doesn't suit the IRC-like chaos that surrounds social SL conversations. This is not an action game where the odd bit of trash talking is thrown in now and again, it's all about conversation and communication.
Two areas I do see it being widely adopted is in educational/conference settings, where clearer communication is required between speakers and audiences, and between individuals in IM conversations. Provided individuals know each other's RL details well enough, there will be no reason to not communicate in voice. In fact, thinking of the 'sleaze' industry, I can see the price of 'escorts' that really are female going up substantially-especially if they have sexy voices

One HUGELY MASSIVE lag maker in SL they cant get the lag and crashes under control now with more data it will become....well ok I cant use those words here LOL...

I hope they dont they need to work the CURRENT bugs instead of lame updates

Not everyone has headphones or a headset.

You're at a class, which the teacher decides to use voice.

You're on your PC in the living room, the rest of the family are watching TV. You can't turn on your speakers to listen in.

How can you follow a conversation that's half voice, half text anyway?

I'd love to know their statistics for "most people want voice"... because I don't recall it ever being a greatly wanted feature. Was there a feature vote requesting it? Is this really more important than fixing existing broken stuff?

I'm guessing it's simply a case of the 'love machine' working again, so what Lindens want, we get, because it's more fun than trying to figure out things like the disappearing water bug.

Broccoli

From working with VoIP equipment, the bandwidth use for this should be about the same as a music stream from a shoutcast server if not less. The actual bandwidth used will depend on the encoding sampling rate. The other total overhead will be determined by how much crap that will be in the packet headers. The CPU use will be primarily determined if the provider is using a decently written API for the encoding/decoding of the voice packets and how closely the code is implemented into the SL viewer. If a simple basic phone base no bigger than a regular home base can have enough CPU power to handle the encoding/decoding then I am sure the overhead on a local machine will be minimal.

As for turning it off, that would be easy enough, just do an active network connection check using netstat (Windows) and locate a long running IP connection that gets connected with the SL client, that should be the connection for the 3rd party VoIP server and disconnect/block it, hopefully it will be using a custom port so all one would need to do is configure a firewall to prevent that port from connecting.

Going to introduce voice capability?

I have been in voice contact with my sl friends for over a year now. We all use Skype.

What's the big deal?

Rock

The 'big deal' is that this isn't just voice as if you were using Skype, TeamSpeak, GTalk, etc. This is gameworld controlled 3D positional voice. In other words the voice attributes will vary depending on where the speaker is relative to you. This is supposed to make speech in a conversation setting more natural. In reality, as I said above, I don't see it being used much in group conversations where it has the greatest benefit.

My guess is, by 'most residents', LL is referring to the kind of residents that will benefit from this addition-those hosting events centered around discussion and speaker presentations.

How does one pronounce 'LOLZ,' 'hehe,' and 'ROFL?" These three make up about 80% of SL chat.

this will be concerining, theres so many different cultures out there, i for one already struggle wiht it [im a new zealander [not maori but a new zealander lol] i get confused for being from the uk but im not, but i have noticed some other languages, and i for one find it hard to listen sometimes,
i bet the new common word would be REPEAT,
i think many wd break up cos they cant understand people lol.

If people want to use voice-chat they probably already do by using Teamspeak, Ventrilo or w/e. SL is already a major bandwidth hogger - when I log into ventrilo to chat to friends, my already LAGGY SL becomes unbearable. I say if ppl want to use voice chat then let it be their choice and if it's going to affect the game even more so then leave it alone SL. Look how bad it gets at peak times when you can't even teleport! Imagine what it'll be like if several thousand ppl are all using voice-chat too? major drain on servers I think. Some nights my packet loss is so bad my game not only freezes up for minutes at a time but I lose my music for ages too

It's just a box they can tick to say they have it. I doubt that anyone working on it is involved in fixing all the other problems (or removing all the other features which seems to be the current trend). Nobody wanted it though, and as long as there's an option to kill it, I'll be doing that. I've already had warning emails from my ISP about download volumes despite paying for a greater monthly capacity, and that's also why I don't stream music 99% of the time.

I experienced the joy of open voice in There. It was a racket.

Yes I did a few years ago..........And I be starting when the office system comes in.