A meeting of the Hypergrid Entrepreneur Group, with Vivox voice, on the old Hyperica grid.
OpenSim grids are moving to WebRTC voice servers that they run themselves, after an outage last week took down Vivox, the free voice service that many grids have relied on for more than a decade.
The outage lasted about three days, Hosting4OpenSim CEO Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business.
Vivox came back on October 24, according to Friends Grid, one of the grids hosted by Hosting4OpenSim. But by then, several grids had already switched to alternative voice servers created by the OpenSim community.
Many of those grids are using WolfVoice, an open source voice server that Wolf Territories Grid released in August, or a version of it.
“I did say, hey everyone grab it… but no one did of course until Vivox went down,” Wolf Territories Grid owner Paul Clevett, who is known in-world as Lone Wolf, told Hypergrid Business.
I’ve also contacted Virtual Life Brasil and the Casperia grid about their voice plans. I haven’t heard back yet, but I’ll update this story when I do.
WolfVoice spreads
Wolf Territories Grid first announced WolfVoice on OpenSimWorld in August, describing it as a complete WebRTC setup that any grid could use to switch off Vivox. The code is free and open source on GitHub.
It’s a voice server that plugs into the WebRTC module originally created by OpenSim core developer Robert Adams, and it calculates a separate audio mix for each listener so that voices come from the right direction, according to the project’s documentation.
Clevett doesn’t know how many grids are using it now, he said.
Hosting4OpenSim, the hosting company that also owns the AviWorlds grid, picked WolfVoice during the Vivox outage, Boam said.
The company had experimented with WebRTC voice years ago, but put the project on hold when Vivox didn’t disappear, he said.
“I set it up, and it works much better than our first version,” he said. “We now have the familiar voice dots and green waves when avatars are talking. Even better, we successfully tested private hypergrid voice calls between grids that weren’t even using the same voice server.”
AviWorlds and TwiztidTimez are now fully on WebRTC voice, and anyone who wants to try it out can visit either grid, he said.
Hypergrid address: login.aviworlds.com:8002
Hypergrid address: login.twiztidtimez.com:8002
Hosting4OpenSim’s other grids are staying on Vivox for now, but can be switched to WebRTC with a simple toggle, he added.
Boam doesn’t expect Vivox to last. Vivox hasn’t issued new codes to OpenSim grids in years, he said, and now that Second Life has switched to WebRTC, it may drop OpenSim, too.
“This is why it’s important to have a fallback,” he said.
BloodMoon fixes the sound
The French-speaking BloodMoon grid also built its voice service on WolfVoice, and was among the first to post about it, announcing on OpenSimWorld last week that it had officially moved away from Vivox.
The grid had started preparing an alternative shortly before the outage, BloodMoon sysadmin Vlad Helsing told Hypergrid Business.
“The situation reinforced our decision to move to a voice service we could host and manage ourselves,” he said.
Several of the fixes BloodMoon found during testing — for speaking indicators, individual volume controls, and private calls — were later folded into WolfVoice updates by Clevett, Helsing said.
And yesterday, BloodMoon released another fix, for a bug where “someone directly ahead could be heard almost entirely in the right ear,” he said. He has asked for that fix to be included in WolfVoice, too.
Four other French-speaking grids now use BloodMoon’s voice server, he said.
Proximity voice, speaking indicators, per-user volume controls, and private one-on-one calls all work, he said, and so does voice for hypergrid visitors who use a recent version of Firestorm. Ad-hoc conferences — where more people are invited into a private chat — don’t work yet.
Other grids, other code
WolfVoice isn’t the only option.
New Life Italy is moving to Hexivia Voice, a voice system developed in-house that offers spatial audio, speaking indicators, and individual mute and volume controls, grid owner Adry said in a post on OpenSimWorld last week.
“It is not derived from other community voice projects and does not reuse their code or design solutions,” Adry said.
Alternate Metaverse also has spatial WebRTC voice working, including private calls, according to a status update on OpenSimWorld.
The grid’s voice originally didn’t work with the latest Firestorm, version 7.2.4. But “Cliff’s talents” fixed that, AMV events manager Debbie Phoenix said in a comment on the post. The AMV Main Landing is the perfect place to test it, she said.
The problem was possibly that Firestorm had Second Life’s servers hard-coded for one of the steps that sets up a voice connection, OpenSimWorld user Fiona Sweet said in another comment.
Hypergrid address: alternatemetaverse.com:8002
Sciattisi Grid also posted that it has WebRTC voice running, and the Ignis Fatuus grid took its grid down for maintenance last week to update OpenSim and change its voice system.
Meanwhile, the OpenSim-NGC developers merged a large set of voice changes into their development code last week, adding avatar-to-avatar calls, group voice, ad-hoc conferences, and moderation. Some of those features need a separate voice mixer to work.
And ThinkVox offers a hosted, paid voice service for grids that don’t want to run a voice server themselves.
Kitely goes its own way
Kitely, the commercial grid that was one of the first in OpenSim to offer Vivox voice, rolled out its own WebRTC-based spatial voice yesterday, the company announced.
Kitely lost its dedicated Vivox server a few months ago, according to the announcement.
Regular OpenSim supports WebRTC “only in a very rudimentary form,” Kitely said in its announcement. “For example, it doesn’t support spatial voice.”
So Kitely built its own, more complete version, the company said.
Voice now works in parcels, in avatar-to-avatar calls, and in group calls, and users can turn down or mute individual avatars, according to the announcement. Voices are at full volume up to 10 meters away, fade out between 10 and 60 meters, and can’t be heard at all beyond that.
Users can also choose to listen from their camera position instead of their avatar’s — but not if the camera is more than 50 meters away, to keep people from eavesdropping.
Hypergrid visitors get most of these features, but they can’t make private one-on-one calls to Kitely residents, the company said. Users need Firestorm 7.1.10 or later.
“I think that grids that still rely on Vivox support should consider whether they feel safe using a free service that has occasional availability problems and has very little incentive to continue supporting OpenSim,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.
Kitely has turned off Vivox completely, Tochner said.
Other grids won’t be able to use Kitely’s code, though.
“The Kitely system has become highly integrated, making it difficult for us to contribute most of our improvements back to OpenSim,” he said. “People who want to experience all the great improvements Kitely develops can do so for free by creating a Kitely account or hypergrid teleporting into Kitely.”
Still on Vivox
Not every grid is in a hurry to switch.
Friends Grid is still on Vivox, and is taking its time with the move to WebRTC, grid owner Safine Mahoe told Hypergrid Business.
“We personally have very few who use voice,” she said.
The new voice systems need a viewer that supports WebRTC, such as Firestorm 7.1.10 or later. Older viewers, like the Firestorm 6.6 versions that some OpenSim users still prefer, won’t work with them.
Grids that run some regions on WebRTC and others on Vivox can also run into a Firestorm quirk where the viewer’s Vivox voice stops working after a visit to a WebRTC region, according to the developer of Confluence-Voice, a Windows version of WolfVoice used on the Casperia grid.
Vivox stopped accepting new OpenSim grids in 2021.
If you have anything to say about the move to WebRTC voice, please share it in the comments below, or email me directly at [email protected].
