With the SecondLife viewer comes an executable named SLVoice.exe. This is the piece of software that is responsible for the “low level” voice communication, so while the viewer does the accounting (login information, UI), this part does all the heavy lifting of contacting the voice servers and of course translating the voice of the speaker to RTP packets and back.
voipforvw (voip for virtual worlds) is a replacement for this executable. The core of this application was originally developped by 3Di
The original SLVoice was developped for Linden Labs by a company named Vivox and has a proprietary license. The good news is, that it is insanely high quality (it runs on a couple of platforms and powers virtual worlds like SecondLife and games like EVE Online). It also has 3D positional audio.
The bad news is that it’s proprietary to the point that you are explicitly disallowed from using it for OpenSim. The FAQ on vivox’s home page explicitly says:
Can I distribute this to friends?
No, currently Vivox software and service is offered for individual, non-commercial use only.
Can I use this outside of SecondLife
No, the currently offered software is only available for the Second Life Viewer open source community.
Well, unfortunately there is a catch. The license of the SIP/RTP stack used in vopforvw is GPL. This has a simple effect on the whole project, that is, voipforvw automatically becomes GPL. Unfortunately currently there is no good library that comes with a BSD-like license, the closest we can get is LGPL. (If you happen to know of one, please do let me know in the comments). While I’m a fan of C#, there is basically no free SIP/SDP library of any license for C# either.
Second, at the moment noone is maintaining the Linux version: in theory it should compile just OK, but that is not something I’d personally guarantee. I will try to look into that later.
I’ve heard this argument for quite some time: it is probably my failure to not do much about it . Compiling the SLVoice replacement is not really that difficult. If you have problems with building, take a look at the screencast below and see if it can help fixing your problem. And of course, you can leave comments here
Please note: trunk contains a version that only works with SLViewer versions below 1.22 (1.19, 1.20 and 1.21 were tested). For 1.22, I started a branch named sl_1.22 that contains an updated version that - in turn - only works with 1.22. As I am not allowed to look at the viewer’s source code, many thanks go to yk, who described the major API changes to me. Unfortunately this also means, that I can’t guarantee that the 1.22 version works properly. At least I had success making conferences work with that branch, but further testing will be needed for it to be integrated back into trunk.
You will need voipforvw, that you can check out from sourceforge.net:
svn co https://voipforvw.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/voipforvw voipforvw
Next, you will need boost, curl and pjsip. The versions that I was using are 1.39, 7.19.4 and 1.0.2 respectively. For PjSIP, 1.x series will currently not work due to API changes.
For compiling on Windows, you will also need the Platform SDK and DirectX SDK. Voipforvw uses CMake for its configuration too.
Set up the platform SDK and DirectX SDK folders in Visual Studio.
Compile boost with bjam. To build bjam first, just run build.bat, which creates bjam.exe; use that in the boost directory with the following commandline:
$ bjam --toolset=msvc link=static runtime-link=static threading=multi --with-thread stageTo compile cURL, open the solution file, change the build type to Release and
set the Runtime Library to Multithreaded (/MT). These changes are necessary,
because we will be using multiple boost state machines from a multithreaded
environment. Build only libcurl.
PjSIP will need you to move the file pjlib/include/pj/config_site_sample.h
into config_site.h No changes are necessary to this file, the defaults will
work fine.
Open pjproject-vs8.sln (and convert it as needed) set it to Release and build the solution.
Next, go to the voipforvw trunk and edit CMakeLists.txt You will need to
change the paths for PJDIR, CURLDIR and BOOSTDIR. Don’t use backslashes,
replace them with forward slashes. The CURLLIBS variable needs to be changed
from curllib.lib to libcurl.lib.
Open up CMake-gui and set the source directory to the voipforvw trunk. The output directory can be the same. Hit Configure (it will probably complain about backwards compatibility, but just ignore it and hit Configure again). If configuring goes well, there will be no red lines in the config window. Hit Generate, which will ask for the format of the solution file, choose the Visual Studio version you have and click OK. This creates the main solution file.
After opening this solution, there are three things you will need to check:
first, set the build type to Release. Next check that the Runtime Library is
Multithreaded (/MT) to match the other libraries and finally, LIBCMT will have
to be removed from the libraries (because it conflicts with MSVCRT). Now you
can build SLVoice.exe that you can use as a replacement for the vivox
solution.
You probably noticed that we are building everything in Release mode. That’s
fine as long as it works, but sometimes you will want to debug (hopefully less
often). In this case you will need to change the Runtime Library to /MTd for
PjSIP and voipforvw. Then CMakeLists.txt needs to be updated to reflect this
by setting
SET (PJTARGET i386-win32-vc8-debug)
Where you remove the LIBCMT library, now you will have to do the same thing
for both LIBCMT and LIBCMTD and you can build SLVoice.exe in debug mode.
If you only need logging to see what’s going on inside, you can change the code:
// CHANGE FILE: main.h:37
#define LOG
#ifdef LOG
extern FILE *logfp;
#define VFVW_LOGINIT() logfp = fopen("test.log", "a")
#define VFVW_LOG(fmt, ...) fprintf(logfp, "[VFVW] %s:%d - ", __FILE__,__LINE__); \
fprintf(logfp, fmt, ## __VA_ARGS__); \
fprintf(logfp, "\r\n"); \
fflush(logfp)
#else
#define VFVW_LOGINIT() void()
#define VFVW_LOG(fmt, ...) void()
#endif//CHANGE FILE main.cpp:15
#ifdef LOG
FILE *logfp = NULL;
#endif