Like many of you, I read Maria’s article last December saying that Vivox was giving free voice service to small OpenSim worlds. I thought that was a nice gesture, but I confess I found it hard to believe, so I didn’t act on it. Until yesterday.
I decided to give it shot, because my projects could really use inworld voice, and I had nothing to loose just for asking. Yesterday was Sunday. To my surprise, I got a reply within 1 hour of my request. I filled out the license agreement. This morning an email was waiting for me with the precise instructions, down to the lines that I needed to add to my .ini, and a link to the blog post that Kitely wrote on how to enable voice. I just had to copy-and-paste the config, and I had voice working in 10 minutes! — 9 of which were spent figuring out which buttons to press on the viewer to enable voice all over.
I couldn’t believe it! Someone at Vivox must really like OpenSim! Wow.
D2-ers, don’t miss out on this fantastic opportunity! See Maria’s article and take it from there. No need for complicated and costly licenses. No need for horribly complicated and fail-ful Freeswitch installations. Small worlds just got as powerful as the big ones — or even more powerful, because big, commercial worlds need to pay for the service, and the small ones don’t. At least for the time being.
Just wrote them to give this a try.
I had seen it on Maria blog as well. Given that I’m just some nobody with a sim, I didn’t go for it yet.
Some of the projects I forsee spinning in the future would do great with this tool.
So I think it would be real nifty if even the likes of me got access to the cool voice tools.
Wow! That was quick. I now have Vivox voice enabled for my Sim. Thanks Diva for inspiring me to just ask.
Yes, I was shocked at how fast and easy the whole thing was.
Now that I think about it, I understand better what’s going on, and I don’t feel like I’m abusing their service. Getting a Vivox account is not that different from getting, say, a Skype account. Skype is also free for basic use. OK, it’s a little different, because these Vivox accounts enable conversations between people who don’t have Vivox accounts, but that’s just a technicality.
This is such a nice gesture, that if ever they want to turn me into a paying costumer, I’ll gladly do it (for a reasonable fee).
I highly encourage everyone with a small world to get in touch with them and get an account.
I have seen it suggested that one main reason for offering voicechat to small opensim grids all over for free might be to make sure no other rival voicechat system comes in and sews up the opensim world first, they went to be entrenched in opensim to make sure no other voicechat service else gets entrenched in opensim.
Congrats!
There is a downside to this, however — a lot of the steam has gone out of the Whisper/Mumble effort.
Whisper sounds and works about as nice as Vivox does — except that it’s missing a couple of key pieces. Those include easy viewer integration and an automatic disconnect when speakers leave a region (otherwise, they can hear what people say about them behind their backs!). These two fixes — which were promised about a year and half ago — still haven’t materialized (the devs were working on other, more pressing issues).
Now, with Vivox, there’s even less motivation for anyone to finish that work up.
Plus, both Whisper and Freeswitch require that you run your own voice servers — not something everyone is willing to do!
Where it would become an issue is for large corporate and educational deployments where the institutions would prefer to run their own servers (to save money, or for regulatory compliance reasons, or to ensure maximum security, etc…).
Whisper would have been perfect for them. The sound quality is clear, there’s speaker indications, attenuation with distance, etc… it’s really nice.
Oh, I love this idea. I was visiting HypergridBusiness’ vednor list and I think it was OpenSimSpot or one but the site had a header image of a sign from the Hypergrid Adventurers Club and its message. I really loved the whole concept. Whoever founded it, excellent use of your time! Unable to join full fledged just yet but would love to as soon as its feasible (RL biz in the way) but it’s definitely a philosophy I can get behind and would probably have done on my own just out of good will. For now, I’ve bookmarked the site/blog and will keep up with it all. Kudos to you guys awesome idea!
Christine If you know the name of an OSGrid region, its’ hyrrpgeid address would be:hg.osgrid.org:80:Region NameSo if you forget to grab a landmark, you can still jump in directly. All hyrrpgeid addresses work the same way. If you know the hyrrpgeid address of any region on a grid, you can figure out the addresses of any other region.For example, all regions on German Grid start with login.germangrid.de:8002: Like: login.germangrid.de:8002:Airport Maria