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With the maintenance yesterday, Linden Labs brought voice to the main grid in the First Look client. This is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while now. Although there’s a lot of anti-voice sentiment out there, I believe this will take Second Life to the next level. If you don’t believe me try it for yourself - it completely changes the feel of the Second Life experience.

Having said all that, it’s good that it’s still in First Look and not on the main client. There are a lot of bugs to be worked out. Notably, last night the client was having problems reconnecting to the sim spatial voice server after being in group or I’m voice chat. Disabling and reenabling voice in the settings worked sometimes but other times a client restart was necessary. In another case, someone we were chatting with teleported to a non-voice sim to do some work and yet remained connected to our voice server.

From a UI perspective I’d like to see a few improvements. The biggest is that there is no way I can find to switch between multiple simultaneous voice streams. It would be nice to be able to go from a private or group IM back to spatial IM without disconnecting, just to listen in for a moment. Also I find that the Music channel of the volume mixer seems to have gradation problems. I wanted to have the parcel music stream playing softly in the background but still be able to hear voices, however I had to move the slider all the way down to one “notch” above mute to get it to be any softer and then it was still slightly too loud; even with voice set to the max.

Complaints aside, voice chat on the main grid is a great thing. It changes and improves the entire Second Life experience and if you haven’t tried it out I suggest you download the First Look client and give it a go.

To see which regions are voice enabled and which are not, check out the voice map.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Let me first say that starting a new group blog to cover Second Life right as I was starting a new job was perhaps not the best timing.  I posted my first post, and then I have been totally buried in other work for the past few weeks.  Ah well, timing was never my strong suit.

One of the things I’m hoping to explore more on this web site is the notion of Second Life as a “platform”.  What draws me to Second Life is its open user generated nature.  Traditional MMORPG “games” such as World of Warcraft, while very popular and commercially successful, are not particularly appealing to me because they are one organization’s vision and not an amalgamation of their community.

As it stands today, Linden Labs enables this community of creation with their IP policies (you own what you create), the integrated building tools (you can’t get the Second Life client without them), and the liquidity provided by the currency exchanges (Linden Labs operated and otherwise).

This is a great first step, but it seems that there are a lot more to be done.  I’ve heard several residents say that they’d really like to see a version of the Open Source client that integrates their modeling tool of choice.  Scripters seem to want a better IDE than what’s available in the window in-client.

This raises the question of where the line should be between Second Life client and external content creation software.  Currently it’s monolithic.  In theory this puts everyone on equal footing in that we all have the same tool set.  On the other hand, many residents aren’t interested in sophisticated building and it may clutter the UI to have all of the building tools.  Die hard content creators have external modeling tools or coding IDEs that they already enjoy.

I’m interested to hear reader comments on whether it makes sense to keep the content creation tools in the viewer client, or if splitting the functionality out makes more sense.

What do you think?

Welcome to the newest addition to the blogosphere focusing on virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular.  I’m hoping this group blog will ultimately become a podcast.  This is a forum for the friends I’ve made in SL and myself to voice our opinions on all things virtual.

I’m not sure in what direction this site will go, but stay tuned to find out.