What Are These Experiences and Their Enablers in The Viewer?

[Sassy Romano]

There does need to be an element of trust, I agree but I don't believe that describing every action that will happen is the right solution. An experience should be just that, including an element of surprise. If you knew everything that was about to happen, that aspect is destroyed.

 

A bit like having someone tell you what's about to happen next in a film.

 

As for the mesh issue though, that's a non issue, easy to set up to avoid that and the problem exists for system layer clothing just the same.

[Qie Niangao]

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

Eventually, some urban lore may form around this, who knows. I'm all ears when someone wants to tell me what Tweetie Bird's gizmo does. lalalalalalal. 

---

Okay, finally, after all those tangents (talk of "overly complexifying" things: The Two Cultures -- really?) maybe I understand what you're on about: A landlord could be presented by a tenant with an Experience they want to have available on their parcel, and that landlord will face the Experiences tab of About Land and have no idea whether to allow their tenant to run that Experience, and no practical means of finding out.

I honestly don't know how a landlord would decide that, if they want to decide which Experiences to permit. I'm not sure this is different from deciding what scripts a tenant can run on their parcel, but maybe it is. That's legitimately a policy question.

Otherwise, landowners would rarely need to administer any Experiences they didn't buy nor commission to be used on their own land. It may not be easy to figure out what those do from, say, a Marketplace description, but again, that seems the same as scripts in general.

Also, querying for an Experience may return a scary long list (try all matches for a single vowel) when 99.9% of those will only ever run on (at most) one parcel -- the Experience owner's own. Certainly, the vast, vast majority of Experences will never be documented by anybody, and nobody (ordinarily) needs to see all those, but there's no way for the Experience owner to prevent it showing up on that list (and that's a good thing if it ever needs to be blocked). Maybe that user experience could be refined somehow.

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

Eventually, some urban lore may form around this, who knows. I'm all ears when someone wants to tell me what Tweetie Bird's gizmo does. lalalalalalal. 

---

Okay, finally, after all those tangents (talk of "overly complexifying" things:

The Two Cultures

 -- really?)

maybe

I understand what you're on about: A landlord could be presented by a tenant with an Experience they want to have available on their parcel, and that landlord will face the Experiences tab of About Land and have no idea whether to allow their tenant to run that Experience, and no practical means of finding out.

I honestly don't know how a landlord would decide that, if they want to decide which Experiences to permit. I'm not sure this is different from deciding what scripts a tenant can run on their parcel, but maybe it is. That's legitimately a

policy

question.

Otherwise, landowners would rarely need to administer any Experiences they didn't buy nor commission to be used on their own land. It may not be easy to figure out what those do from, say, a Marketplace description, but again, that seems the same as scripts in general.

Also, querying for an Experience may return a scary long list (try all matches for a single vowel) when

99.9% of those will only ever run on (at most) one parcel

-- the Experience owner's own. Certainly, the vast,

vast

majority of Experences will never be documented by anybody, and nobody (ordinarily) needs to see all those, but there's no way for the Experience owner to prevent it showing up on that list (and that's a good thing if it ever needs to be blocked). Maybe that user experience could be refined somehow.

---

I'd be more willing to say that 99.8% of them will never run at all... every Premium member gets their own Experience key which allows them to create an experience, which is easily done from the menu. However, there's no way to undo this which means that every premium member who decided to experiment with the New Thing will now have an "experience" that will be appear in the list whether or not any scripting was ever done to take advantage of it. Given that Tweetie Bird's experience has the default naming structure this is probably exactly what happened. The only way anyone else will ever have any sort of encounter with an "experience" like this is if they go all terrier and look for random experiences, which will cause it to appear in a listing (or "be loaded into the viewer" by a certain type of logic)(or be loaded into our BRAINS!!! ZOMG!!!!111 by the logical extension of this "logic.")

Meanwhile, functional experiences have profiles that can be filled in and which can be accessed from the menu - for example, the AvSitter experience itself, created by Code Violet of AvSitter and running on their land. Information is available if the creator isn't being a slackabones.

Any experience has a limited number of things it can possibly do to you, not including making you bow to anyone because it doesn't involve animation permissions. A "wayward scripter" can do far more with an invisible prim set to "sit on click" than they could ever do with an experience.

[Prokofy Neva]

Qie, why can't Experience makers be required to register in a registry? Then we could look and see the names of the Experience, what they do, and the name of the Experience creator. 

[Prokofy Neva]

Just because Tweetie Bird has the generic naming convention doesn't mean that it's an accident or default and "not a thing".

It's not about users being lazy; it's about coders being lazy. They should submit names and descriptions to a registry which the Lab keeps. Now why is that so hard???

[Sassy Romano]

Probably because a registry has no real value unless it's a) maintained and b) accessed.

 

I would guess that over 99% of people involved in being on the receiving end of an experience, wouldn't have the slightest interest in looking it up.

 

Pretty much for the same reason that there's no registry for the action of every other script out there in SL.

[Qie Niangao]

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

Qie, why can't Experience makers be required to register in a registry? Then we could look and see the names of the Experience, what they do, and the name of the Experience creator. 

---

I'm not sure how that could be enforced. I mean, each Experience already has a Profile, so that's already a built-in place for the registry information to be stored. But how to require every Experience owner to populate those Profiles satisfactorily, to some standard?

(Incidentally, we can pop-up an Experience Profile in the viewer from a browser or the chat line; for example, my little "VRC's Rail Ring Around the Atoll" Experience.)

The practical problem, though, as already mentioned, is that one should never have occasion to encounter the huge majority of Experiences. Maybe it's not clear just how huge a majority that is. The most apt analogy is the "Choose Resident" picker -- as when inviting a group member, or specifying a single buyer for a parcel. There are millions of possible choices there, but you really only care about the one you're trying to choose. They all have profiles, mostly blank, and we don't require them to be more complete. We may expect more information about those residents we'll choose for our group or whatever, yet any of their names can load into the viewer from a query.

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

Just because Tweetie Bird has the generic naming convention doesn't mean that it's an accident or default and "not a thing".

It's not about users being lazy; it's about coders being lazy. They should submit names and descriptions to a registry which the Lab keeps. Now why is that so hard???

---

Q: How did you know that the Tweetie Bird experience existed?

A: You looked it up. In a listing that's automatically created whenever someone creates an Experience. AKA - the registry.

Q: How do you know what it does?

A: You don't, because the owner didn't put in a description.

Q: How could you be sure what does even if there was a description?

A: You can't, because the humans behind our avatars are capable of both telling untruths and committing errors.