Massively^™

Ryan McDougall has announced the formation of a new Sourceforge project, called VoIP for Virtual Worlds. The long-term goal is to create an interoperable open-source standard for all virtual worlds.

To help the project find its feet, the initial short-term goal is to create an open-source replacement for the existing Vivox component (SLvoice) that is used for voice in Second Life that can communicate with a SIP-based backend server. Developers who are interested in the effort can start with the project's new mailing list.

We don't presently know if an open-source solution could be fully compatible with the existing voice system in Second Life as the existing system relies heavily on Vivox servers and backend software.

We can't speak for you, but one of the things that will pretty well guaranteed cause us to twitch is repeated glaring spelling errors. (We're writers. Who'd have figured that!) However, judging from the people we've met in many different communities, this isn't just something writers are prone to. We've heard language like "zomg i pwnzorz u" or "gimme ur muneyz" being decried across many different game communities.

So the question today we ask you is this: Do you avoid grouping or playing with people because they can't spell or because they use 1337 5p33k? (Note: We're specifically making the distinction between someone who makes the odd typo because they need more coffee, and someone who commonly uses "ur" or "-zorz" on the end of everything.) Do you think that keeping with proper spelling is more of an antiquated thing, considering the need to communicate quickly and effectively? (Thus "LFM" "PST" etc.) Or is it all for nothing, as VOIP will take over any need for typing soon?

For you World of Warcraft players who are dealing with patch-related downtime and for others who find themselves with nothing to do, let me remind you of something. If you use Ventrilo for in-game voice chat for whatever game you play, and your Ventrilo host has made the upgrade to version 3.0 today, you'd better get into upgrading mode.

Although information seems to be sparse on the actual Ventrilo site (other than this changelog), I found a fair amount of information on the site of the Ventrilo provider that my guild uses.

From my understanding of the semi-cryptic explanation offered, version 2.3 clients will not communicate properly with version 3.0 servers, and version 3.0 clients will not communicate properly with version 2.3 servers. It would therefore be in your best interest to find out which version your host is running and act accordingly!

You can find the updated Windows client here, and the updated Mac client here.