We have the power to make SL a "big thing" again (really) and tip the ongoing narrative, let's do this! c= let's do our part (for our sake)

[Prokofy Neva]

5 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I don't know about all the other games but I have to look no further than IMVU for a good example of a Graphical UI Inventory system that that just blows S/L's text based UI out of the water. With it's Categories, Undo, Redo, scrolling window interface, one can put outfits together in less than 30 seconds where the same would take upwards of 10 minutes in S/L's text based explorer style window. S/L is a quarter century behind in that aspect alone and it is one of the top reasons why new people consider S/L to have a steep learning curve. We could go a long way at flattening that curve by converting it to a graphical UI instead like IMVU has done. There are plenty of studies out there that have tested this and found that graphic UI's done properly are much more user friendly, user satisfying, less prone to errors and significantly speeds up workflows. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10730600/

As you can see from the screenshot, in one glance you can see 100 different hairs with more just a scroll away. Can quickly and easily try a number of them in quick succession or revert to a previous one without having to having to search. There are more potential selections then one has available in the S/L UI window without scrolling and can almost immediately see which hair I would want to try on next. The tiles for the entire inventory must be in cache so even selecting a new category window shows them all very quickly. Pictures are worth a thousand lines of the typical inventory text.

 

Is that user-generated content? Or the company's?

[Coffee Pancake]

32 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Is that user-generated content? Or the company's?

IMVU's content ecosystem is so tight that it wouldn't matter either way.

If SL just had the one avatar and all products could be neatly categorized then generating nice thumbnails in engine is pretty easy.

As I said, we have prototype code to do this in SL with system avatar assets in real time. It never got past explorative development because we felt that on it's own it was insufficient and set a further expectation that we couldn't meet; attachments.

There is no way for the viewer to know an object is an attachment or not, no information about an attachment without attempting to rez it in world some way, attempting to do that (even in sneaky off screen ways) would trigger scripts, no context once rezzed to aid in capturing a picture (is this a hud, a house, a fancy dress, hair, or invisible body part), and no way to guarantee the resulting image would even be worth looking at.

In short, it was always easier, faster and more useful to wear or rez a thing and look at it, than try and have the viewer do all kinds of weird magic.

All of this lead what we felt was the next best thing. If a folder has a picture in it .. show that when moussing over the thumbnail in inventory.

We stopped short of a pictorial inventory view based on the first image in a folder as .. most products don't ship with a product picture in the box, and expecting people to L$10 upload pictures for everything they own isn't realistic.

[animats]

36 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If a folder has a picture in it .. show that when mousing over the thumbnail in inventory.

There's already the Outfit Gallery, which does something like that. But you have to upload a picture of the outfit yourself.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

20 minutes ago, animats said:

There's already the Outfit Gallery, which does something like that. But you have to upload a picture of the outfit yourself.

 

We actually remove that entire tab !

Outfits, in our experience at least, tend not to be static. They get updated and modified over time. They also consist of many sub parts so it really only makes sense if you're taking pictures yourself and putting them in the folders .. which we found didn't really convey a huge amount of useful information  - the folders are pretty small on screen, even making them bigger didn't make sense in the context of a whole avatar - it also truncates the folder name.

To use Ardy's image as example ... that's a lot of small pictures that look mostly the same.

  (Sorry Ardy, please don't think I'm being judgmental of your avatar or photography skills)

3 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

 

[Sid Nagy]

I'm very happy with my outfit gallery.
And yes, sometimes one changes a bit on an outfit, but it is no big deal if the picture doesn't match 100%.

I don't care that my tux package now has a red tie instead of the blue one on the picture.
As long as I know where that tux avatar is when Christmas is near, I'm fine.

Edited June 8, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Jaylinbridges]

I am sorting my partner's out of control inventory, dating back to 2007.  A graphical picture as a thumbnail would surely save me some time.  Which one is the July 4th flag bikini box?

Edited June 8, 2021 by Jaylinbridges

[ChinRey]

15 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

If you're like most of us, I'm sure you must have attached a random plywood cube

Important to remember. If you want to wear a plywood cube, make sure it's a fitmesh plywood cube!

 

15 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

It assumes you are smarter than that.

That's a dangerous assumption and the big fundamental mistake programmers tend to make when they are working on user interfaces.

If you're a programmer, do not assume the users are as smart as you! Most aren't and even those who are still have to grok the underlying logic before they can use the interface effectively.

Edited June 8, 2021 by ChinRey

[cunomar]

Define "smart" ?

If you enjoy an obsession with binary code then good luck to you but for me its right up there with licking windows .

Speaking of windows i can't ever remember seeing an update that improved anything .

[Rolig Loon]

20 minutes ago, cunomar said:

Define "smart" ?

Scroll back to where I said that:

"I'm sure you must have attached a random plywood cube, or sailboat or outhouse to your av at some time.  The inventory system doesn't know that you are trying to attach something that's a non-dress.  It assumes you are smarter than that."

"Smart", in this context, is the ability to tell that an outhouse is not a dress and probably shouldn't be attached to your body.  You can tell that in an instant. The inventory system has no way to tell, so it treats an outhouse the same way it treats a dress, no matter how dumb you look.  😎

[Theresa Tennyson]

24 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Scroll back to where I said that:

"I'm sure you must have attached a random plywood cube, or sailboat or outhouse to your av at some time.  The inventory system doesn't know that you are trying to attach something that's a non-dress.  It assumes you are smarter than that."

"Smart", in this context, is the ability to tell that an outhouse is not a dress and probably shouldn't be attached to your body.  You can tell that in an instant. The inventory system has no way to tell, so it treats an outhouse the same way it treats a dress, no matter how dumb you look.  😎

You're also assuming that there's no reason to attach an outhouse to your body. I fairly regularly intentionally wear non-clothing things like furniture, plywood cubes, etc. so I can do things like compare their sizes to things I find in stores without needing to rezz them on the ground.

[Ardy Lay]

8 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

You're also assuming that there's no reason to attach an outhouse to your body. I fairly regularly intentionally wear non-clothing things like furniture, plywood cubes, etc. so I can do things like compare their sizes to things I find in stores without needing to rezz them on the ground.

Wear a Linden plant, I dare you.

[Rolig Loon]

7 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

You're also assuming that there's no reason to attach an outhouse to your body. I fairly regularly intentionally wear non-clothing things like furniture, plywood cubes, etc. so I can do things like compare their sizes to things I find in stores without needing to rezz them on the ground.

Quite true.  The point, though, is that you can make that choice intelligently.  There's no way that the inventory system can decide whether an outhouse is any more appropriate to wear than a dress is.  

[Ardy Lay]

1 hour ago, cunomar said:

Define "smart" ?

If you enjoy an obsession with binary code then good luck to you but for me its right up there with licking windows .

Speaking of windows i can't ever remember seeing an update that improved anything .

So you like Windows 1.0?

[Silent Mistwalker]

45 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

So you like Windows 1.0?

No, 3.1.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:

Quite true.  The point, though, is that you can make that choice intelligently.  There's no way that the inventory system can decide whether an outhouse is any more appropriate to wear than a dress is.  

Only because LL made the choice to designate both as an object that has the ability to be worn or rezzed out. The Inventory system does decide what you can do with a script, notecard or wearables. In any case, this would not be a limitation for a graphical UI. After playing around with the Outfit Gallery today it struck me it would only require an additional context command to rezz out the object at a specific coordinate or 1 meter in front of the avatar if the Gallery was expanded to be used as a GUI for the inventory.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Only because LL made the choice to designate both as an object that has the ability to be worn or rezzed out.

Because there is no difference. 

Right back to the very early days, the only attachments were accessory items. Which would be built rezzed on the floor, taken and then attached.

How does the system know the difference between your house, furry head or a hat when listed in inventory? It can't.

 They are all made the same way, from the same things, and if you're clumsy, they do all end up attached.

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The Inventory system does decide what you can do with a script, notecard or wearables. In any case, this would not be a limitation for a graphical UI. After playing around with the Outfit Gallery today it struck me it would only require an additional context command to rezz out the object at a specific coordinate or 1 meter in front of the avatar if the Gallery was expanded to be used as a GUI for the inventory.

When you drag an item from your inventory to the ground. The viewer has no idea that the item which vanished from your inventory and the new thing that appeared in world have anything to do with each other. They are entirely separate, disconnected, coincidental events.

It can make an educated guess .. 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

37 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Only because LL made the choice to designate both as an object that has the ability to be worn or rezzed out.

Because there is no difference. 

Right back to the very early days, the only attachments were accessory items. Which would be built rezzed on the floor, taken and then attached.

How does the system know the difference between your house, furry head or a hat when listed in inventory? It can't.

I think the point they were making is that there could've been a difference. They could've designed "objects" and "attachments" with a clearer separation so that the user (and the system) was able to tell them apart, it's just code after all.

But that ship has sailed a long time ago, obviously.

[Drayke Newall]

2 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

I think the point they were making is that there could've been a difference. They could've designed "objects" and "attachments" with a clearer separation so that the user (and the system) was able to tell them apart, it's just code after all.

But that ship has sailed a long time ago, obviously.

This. It literally could have been a simple tick box on the object that the creator of the item ticks before selling, telling the system that that object can attach to the body where a house cant because the tick box isn't selected.

Or better yet a simple category system where a drop down menu shows and the creator selects hair. When that is selected and sold the system would then know that object is only hair and place the hair on the head.

[Sid Nagy]

Maybe it could be done with special folders.

Like everything in the folder Clothing (and in all its sub folders) is treated like clothing.
Everything in the folder Hair is treated like hair.
Etc.

Everything in the folder Junk 'n Stuff is further ignored by the system and the user.

Edited June 9, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Solar Legion]

Congrats. They didn't design it that way and the ship did indeed sail some time ago.

Next?

[Alwin Alcott]

44 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Congrats. They didn't design it that way and the ship did indeed sail some time ago.

Next?

it looks here now that the inventory is thé biggest problem there is in SL ...
But mainly a resident personal issue ; clean it up.

even the same blocks... they have a name... it's a bit like salt and sugar, both white grainy stuff.. make the mistake once to put a full spoon of salt in your milk or coffee, and you'll never do it again.

[Arielle Popstar]

It's not just about organizing the inventory but making it easier to work with. A graphical UI is faster and easier to work with then a text based one with multiple layers of folders. In one glance one can see a hundred items at a time instead of having to read each entry separately trying the find the right one. Some are trying to say S/L has technical limitations that wouldn't allow for it but though it might be a little more challenging, there doesn't seem to be any real reason it couldn't be be developed.

[Alwin Alcott]

28 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

It's not just about organizing the inventory but making it easier to work with. A graphical UI is faster and easier to work with then a text based one with multiple layers of folders. In one glance one can see a hundred items at a time instead of having to read each entry separately trying the find the right one. Some are trying to say S/L has technical limitations that wouldn't allow for it but though it might be a little more challenging, there doesn't seem to be any real reason it couldn't be be developed.

yu can keep going on, but you better file a jira . This thread was about what WE can do, not to keep posting about something that, in the ranks of importance, is somewhere at the end.

[Coffee Pancake]

Writing up feature requests on the JIRA is something we can do.

https://jira.secondlife.com/

Log in and press 'Create'

A floater will pop up.

Change the issue type to 'New Feature Request'

and fill in the form !

Take your time, a good feature request is a clear feature request. 

Carefully and methodically explain how the feature should work (eg user clicks this, then that happens), explain why the feature is important and what you hope it would accomplish.

BE SPECIFIC. PAINFULLY SPECIFIC.

Consider drawing pictures or making mockups in photoshop .. etc.

(your idea will be read by a Linden - there is a fair chance they wont intimately know your use case and automatically understand what you're going on about - remember to be careful what you wish for)

Don't take it personally if your beautifully crafted idea gets a boiler plate rejection. It happens. Sometimes ideas take a few iterations before they are ready. These forums are a good place to hammer out what ifs.

If your feature doesn't require server side changes, talk to a TPV dev, we're always interested in ideas (and time permitting, will at least be able to give you an idea of how your idea would/wouldn't mesh with how SL works).

 

[Storii Darkheart]

So I’m obviously late to this topic, but I feel like I need to point out something about advertising “on the behalf of LL” that hasn’t necessarily been talked about. 
 

This is a Second Life. I love the people in Real Life. I love my friends. But I don’t necessarily want them involved in the communities I’m in while I’m online. People always talk about SL is SL and RL is RL and for some people that’s very true. I’m fine to mix the two generally, but I’m not trying to actively bring people from my RL into SL and try to fit them into the communities I’ve made a spot for myself in.