Voice problems

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Arton Tripsa
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Arton Tripsa »

No. Here are the places they are connecting from: Rochester, New York, Pokemoke; Maryland, Kettering, Ohio; and Melbourne, Australia (myself). None of these people have the same ISP. None are on the same network.
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Your Teacher
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Your Teacher »

Hi Ilan,

As I mentioned before I use my computer (I'm so old-fashioned) for sessions. I will be getting a whizzy phone contract today, with tethering (whoohoo!) so maybe I can surf on 4G and see what happens.

I will let you know.

@Arton Tripsa - I'm so glad it's not just me. :)
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Kitely uses Vivox for voice (the same provider that Second Life uses). The way it works is that when a viewer connects to a region it asks the simulator it is connected to (running OpenSim in our case) for the URL where that region's voice server is located. It may do so again when you move between parcels as some parcels may disable voice (note, I'm not sure whether or not Vivox implemented that disconnecting/reconnecting functionality). For details see: https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-ne ... vox-voice/

The point being that after OpenSim sends the voice server URL to the viewer it is no longer involved with the voice session until the next time the viewer connects to a new region and gets an updated voice server URL from OpenSim. This means that if you entered a region and got voice then any interruptions of that voice session can't have anything to do with the simulator running your world but rather with either the voice plugin your viewer uses, the Vivox servers, or your network connection to the Vivox servers.

What is worth investigating is whether this happens when you are standing still or whether it is triggered by you moving between parcels (for the aforementioned suspected reason). Assuming that voice works at all in high coordinates of big VarRegions, then the problem isn't with the high coordinates themselves. It is then worth testing whether two groups of people can all use voice when they are each at a far end of a big Kitely world. What we'd want to test here is whether Vivox can handle a session when there is communication between avatars that are next to each other while there are other avatars more than 256m away from each other on the same world (ideally you'd test this on the diagonal edges of a 4x4 Kitely world).
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Selby Evans
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Your Teacher
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Your Teacher »

Okay. I think I get it. Ref moving around, that's not it. We were roleplaying last night (8pm my time), when I logged in at 7:55 (CET) I had voice, but 20 minutes later the white dot disappeared. Luckily it didn't interfere with the session because we are now using Skype for voice. The students are logging into Skype on their tablets and smartphones, and Kitely on their laptops. :o It would be nice to have a solution though. @Arton - this might be a temporary solution for your group too.

@Ilan - I was planning to upload the Evergreen island over Easter, so I will set it up early, as a 1x1 and test it next week.
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Thank you Your Teacher, please keep me updated.
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Arton Tripsa
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Arton Tripsa »

HI Your Teacher, thanks for the heads up. No, unfortunately Skype won't be a solution because it is not part of a formal event where we can set this up as default.

Ok voice went out again on March 12th from 19:29 to 19:39 at approx. (563,853, 21). Changed parcels, and it made no difference. It almost invariably happens when folks are standing still in the same spot. I will try and test the last situation, that you mention, Ilan, but it is going to involve more Avatars than we usually have on all at once - cos it is part of a casual meet up not an event :-)

Thanks for your help :-) I appreciate it.
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Okay, please let me know once you have the results.

If you can, please check if you encounter this problem when you have your meeting at world coordinates lower than (256, 256).
Graham Mills
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Graham Mills »

It's no consolation but I was watching a VWBPE session on SL this Friday and they had a 5 min Vivox outage across all their venues. The OpenSim sessions used Teamspeak (which caused some initial confusion but worked OK afaik).
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Thank you Graham.

I think your experience in Second Life supports our hyphotothis that this problem has nothing to do with OpenSim and Kitely per say and is instead the result of general service problems at Vivox.
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Alexander Zoltai
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Re: Voice problems

Post by Alexander Zoltai »

Ilan Tochner wrote:Thank you Graham.

I think your experience in Second Life supports our hyphotothis that this problem has nothing to do with OpenSim and Kitely per say and is instead the result of general service problems at Vivox.
Well, Ilan, I doubt that Graham's experience absolves Kitely from connection to the issue that Arton began this topic with.

I spent 6 years in Second Life with Arton---working with her---running public events and using Voice regularly...

I never experienced what Arton has been describing (and, every example she's given you included me as a participant...).

Also, in the nearly year we've been working together in Kitely (using Voice every time for at least 3 hours per session and being in-world nearly every day of the week), we've never experienced this intermittent, weird Voice problem until Var-regions were established...

I'm certainly not a technical wizard, concerning Kitely or Vivox, yet, considering the experience I have in using Voice for nearly 7 years, this is not, to me, a completely Vivox problem---I believe I've experienced every purely-Vivox problem there is.........

As far as the issue Arton originally raise in this thread:

For instance, take Person A and Person B...

A may not hear B but B can hear A---then, their situations can reverse...

Also, it can happen that A & B can hear each other but C can hear neither A nor B and A & B can't hear C...

And, your asking about location seems to indicate it isn't a purely-Vivox issue...

When I found this document --- http://www.vivox.com/_docs/collateral/v ... 072307.pdf -- I noticed that it appears Kitely needs to configure an SDK to work with Vivox...

Could this Unprecedented Voice Anomaly be happening because of the interaction of the Var-configurations and the SDK?
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