Linden Lab has announced that it is currently averaging one billion voice-minutes per month. That's time actively engaged in a voice session, not just time spent with voice support enabled. That's quite a statistic. That puts Second Life's voice service right up there among the top VoIP providers, and around 12% of Skype. That's very impressive.

In the 18 months since voice was introduced, roughly 15 billion voice-minutes have been served, through Vivox's voice services for Second Life. Additionally there are new products/services. Some available from today, and some scheduled for later this year.

Masthead Studios is a relative newcomer to the massively multiplayer online game industry and is presently developing the post-apocalyptic MMO Earthrise, a sandbox game where players will vie for control over finite resources in a large, open world. As players of another prominent sandbox MMO know very well, ensuring smooth operations in an unsharded game requires a substantial investment in server technology. To this end, Masthead Studios has partnered with server infrastructure provider GNi to host Earthrise.

GNi's 'Infrastructure as a Service' (IaaS) offers "dedicated storage, network, and server capacity on a pay-as-you-grow model." With this week's announcement, Masthead Studios joins companies like Vivox and Frogster Interactive Pictures AG as a GNi client.

[Via IGN]

There's a fair number of people out there blogging about their preferred massively multiplayer online games as well as the industry itself, and more all the time it seems. One area that isn't covered very often, however, is MMO operations, largely because it's something many bloggers have little direct experience with. However Bryant Durrell from Imaginary Cogs certainly does.

In the month since Durrell first started writing Imaginary Cogs he's offered up an industry insider's perspective on topics ranging from server technology to the ops that keep our games running, tapping his past work experience with Vivox and Turbine. Durrell's blog is a peek behind the curtain into how massively multiplayer online games operate. If you've ever been curious about the tech that powers massively multiplayer online games and how it's used, you might want to check out Imaginary Cogs.

[Via Zen of Design]

I'm not entirely sure what's going on with All Points Bulletin and the only reason I'm bothered enough to consider worrying about a game that we know only fractions of is because those fractions are amazingly potent pieces of excitement. The depth of customization, the level-less progression wrapped around a GTA style game make for powerful appeal.

I was hoping that because it'd been a year since the last GDC, when All Points Bulletin was first revealed to a dumbstruck media, we would be treated with a delightful updated look at the game. That just wasn't the case at GDC 2009, and frankly it has me slightly worried.

If you're a fan of GTA-style urban crime games, you might be interested in what Realtime Worlds is cooking up for the MMO space: All Points Bulletin, which could very well prove to be the online evolution of single-player games like Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown. While new details on this title are still light, Vivox announced today that they'll be providing voice solutions for APB.

The integration of Vivox with the All Points Bulletin client will include voice fonts, where players will be able to alter their voices to better fit their character. Vivox has already established its presence in EVE Online and Second Life, and recently announced plans to extend gaming VOIP to web browsers as well. There could be interesting times ahead with this agreement between Vivox and Realtime Worlds in All Points Bulletin.

Vivox, already firmly entrenched as the in-game voice over IP option for EVE Online, several of SOE's games, and Second Life, is now upping the ante by announcing that they intend to take their service cross-platform - and potentially cross-game, if the developers allow it. If they manage to do that, it means you could play EverQuest II and still hang out and talk smack with your friends flying through space in EVE Online, or checking out the latest in Second Life. Not only are those options interesting, but in releasing it as a browser plugin, they open up the option for guilds to potentially use it on their own sites; allowing people not logged in to still talk to those playing. Depending on cost and scalability, this could potentially take a bite out of the market Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are in, as we'd bet 99.9% of gamers already have browsers on their machines, and many run them while gaming anyway.

Add to that Vivox's plan to allow users to eventually call in to the chat from cell phones (late to the raid - call ahead) and you can see where this is definitely an interesting development to those playing MMOs. They'll be discussing the specifics at GDC, so hopefully we'll get more details on just how this will happen, if players will have to (or be able to) host their own servers, and the potential roll-out dates for this new service.

Just recently, Voon entered its beta for Windows and Mac users, which means almost anyone can download it and give it a go. Although, you may be wondering, "What the heck is Voon?" Simply put, Voon is a sort of online community system that can work like a chat room or like Ventrilo. You just download it and use it, no sever or vast knowledge of VoIP technology needed.

Its users can interact for the sake of argument or they can all discuss a event that's being broadcast through Voon itself. Eventually, Voon users may be able to talk between the Voon client and other Vivox in-game clients such as EVE Online or any Sony Online Entertainment title. Each company will be choosing how such a system might work.

For instance, right now Voon users can listen to daily re-airings of Massively Speaking and comment vocally or textually in real-time with one another as the podcast is being aired to them. It's all very cool and meta -- but in a good way that doesn't make everyone feel a bit uncomfortable. So check it out!

Update: Noted that communication between Voon and in-game clients is something companies get to decide for themselves.

EVE Fanfest 2008 is in full swing in Reykjavik, but fans of the game who can't make that trek to Iceland this year have let out a collective grumble that EVE TV isn't streaming live content, as they have in prior years. Rather, the EVE TV team is recording the events and interviewing players, with the aim to make the video footage available to everyone after Fanfest. But for those who really want to connect with what's happening in Reykjavik now, CCP Fallout announced another way for players to listen in:

"For those pilots who are unable to warp to Fanfest this year, we are please to announce that we will broacast t0rfifrans's and Oveur's keynote addresses live in-game. Those of you who would like to listen in should join the 'Live Dev Blog' in-game channel on Saturday, 8 November at 13:00 GMT."

We've also gotten word that CCP Games CEO Hilmar V. Pétursson, (aka CCP Hellmar) will be delivering a keynote at 15:00 GMT on November 8th, which will also be broadcast live. As with all of the Live Dev Blogs, players need only activate audio via the right click menu to listen in on the keynote presentations.

Among all the current Second Life kerfuffle and protests going on about unexpected price-rises and policy changes surrounding certain categories of virtual land, it might have been forgotten that Vivox is preparing to release the SLim lightweight instant messenger system, and Linden Lab is preparing a Second Life viewer that is able to communicate with it.

The release of the former, and the first-look version of the latter appears to be very close now. We got our hands on both (as they appear to be available for download now), and took them for a bit of a spin to see how they might have improved over the demonstration versions that were temporarily available earlier this year.

Announced today at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Vivox has struck a deal with 38 Studios to provide all of their voice services for the studio's upcoming MMO. You may remember 38 Studios as the powerhouse that employs such rockstar names as Curt Schilling, R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane. Their current MMO project, codenamed Copernicus, will use the same in-game voice technology of EVE Online, Second Life and upcoming titles from SOE, Icarus Studios and NCsoft.

Check out the complete press release after the jump for more information on how Vivox plans to work with 38 Studios, and what 38 Studios says about the collaboration.

In a lot of ways, we've got a bit of a traditional streak here at Massively. We like the good, solid, family values like "Kill a monster. Steal it's treasure". One tradition that we hold particularly dear is "Announce the software and then make it available". Yes, we know that makes us awfully old-fashioned in the modern, cool, vaporware world of the kids these days.

In the wake of our announcement and hands-on piece with the new Second Life SLim VoIP/IM client, Linden Lab has in turn announced it, stamped it "coming soon" and yanked the availability of the web-page and associated setup process. This all seems a bit backwards, to be honest.

Granted, the software doesn't actually work very well at all, and appears to be little more than a stripped down copy of Vivox Connector with most of the features removed (we think that it is exactly that, in fact), but still, it is supposed to be a Beta.

Perhaps it's the little details like the fact that Lindens can't hide their online status from it that have caused it to be pulled, rather than any other inherent kind of breakage. Since Linden Lab's PR people won't answer any queries about the product, all we can do is speculate.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

EverQuest players rejoice! You now have the ability to use Station Voice for your in-game communications, thereby saving you typing -- or your own Vent or TS server costs. Eventually, this will also include the ability to get in-game voice mail, allow players to receive external voice connections (like phone calls) and even offer voice synthesizing. This should help players change their voice for role-playing their characters. Best of all, Station Voice is completely free to current EverQuest players with accounts in good standing.

Aside from that, all EQ players will be glad to know that SOE has removed the weights on EverQuest's coinage. No longer will you have to stop and run to the bank to change out all those pesky coins that like to pile up. This particular change may not seem like it would be all that large a thing to other MMO players. However, EQ players who have ever had their run speed decreased because they spent a little too long out playing and landed bags heavy with coin weight will understand why we're cheering for this particular (no pun intended) change.

If you're curious what else changed in today's update, join us past the break for the full update notes!

Linden Lab's unannounced SLim lightweight Second Life client is available now. We grabbed it out of the starting gate and took it for a bit of a spin for an hour or so. It looks a great deal like Linden Lab needed some new feature or API in the SLS-1.24 server deployment to support this. As a result, preparation of the SLim software for release prior to an announcement at this year's Virtual Worlds -2008 conference in Los Angeles must have been awfully rushed.

We expected this to be the first purpose-designed client for Second Life to come out of Linden Lab since the original in 2002, but actually ... it isn't. The real story is rather more surprising.

SLim is a Vivox product and it connects to Vivox servers. Connection with Second Life and its grid and servers is only very peripheral. How much involvement Linden Lab actually had with any of this is debatable.

The short version: It does a lot less than you'd hope, and setup of the whole show is far clunkier than you'd like. On with the show...

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Back in February, we reported on EverQuest II's announcement of built-in chat coming to the game. Today, Sony Online Entertainment officially announced that Station Voice has arrived not only in EQ2, but also in Star Wars Galaxies and is coming to EverQuest next month.

What's included in the Vivox technology? Along with the usual controls you'd expect (moderation, private channels, etc.) you can set the levels of each person in group. Always good to have when dealing with the serial shouter that inevitably ends up in your group/raid. Other features are planned including the ability to mask your voice in different ways and to talk to your friends in-game without having the game loaded up yourself.

More information can be found on the new Station Voice page.

The EQ2Players community site has a short preview of EverQuest II's next major patch, Game Update 47, the "Storm Break". As we already knew, GU47 is the patch that will finally bring Vivox voice integration to EQII. Here's the list of features that will be available straight away:

• Create your own password-protected custom channels
• Automatic channels for Guilds, Raids and Groups
• Group and Raid windows have speaking indicators
• Leaders can invite any other players into Guild, Group and Raid channels
• Moderator controls (kick, ban, mute, etc.)
• Logitech G15 keyboard integration
• Ability to individually mute and set volume per user that you can hear
• Troubleshooting tools to get you chatting instantly