Jump to content

TriloByte Zanzibar

Resident
  • Posts

    250
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Blog Comments posted by TriloByte Zanzibar

  1. User-generated content makes for a completely different set of challenges, Guinevere.  Warcraft and other game titles have a much more limited palette of textures and objects to worry about loading and rendering.  In SL, the variations are limitless and the content is delivered on-demand.

    Q glossed over a number of the features in this particular Viewer version, but one of the most important ones was an upgrade to the libraries used for texture rendering.  Significant boost in performance, meaning textures load much more quickly.  The performance gains are even bigger for Linux and Mac users (since the old versions of those libraries were slower on those platforms) - kudos to Merov Linden and everyone else involved, who have been working hard on that upgrade since sometime last summer.

  2. I had been hoping my question about the name change could have been answered as a response in this thread, but if not, I'd like to have it as an agenda item.  Explanation/justification of the name change (from Office Hours to User Group). 

    I'd also like to see Traffic and Sales Reporting get covered this time.  I know it was on the ambitious agenda from last week's session, but there wasn't enough time to get to it.  Sales and traffic reporting tools were talked up early in the development stages, and we were promised better tools than XStreet had, and that those tools would be in place before the big launch.  As data migration problems continued to stall development, reporting slipped from the site's initial launch with a new pledge that we'd have them within a few weeks.  That was back in October, and we still do not have functional tools.  Many of the current reports are flawed (only Transaction History and Orders are accurate, and with those reports we've got fairly limited sorting/searching capabilities).  Please share with us the current status, and an ETA on when we can expect to get some of this functionality.

  3. @Loving Clarity: I've atended a number of Office Hours meetings held by different individuals & departments over the years, and a fair number of them work from an agenda.  Some have a fixed agenda, and others use the SL Wiki for their agenda and allow community participants to add/suggest items.

    If there's a good reason for it, rebrand away.  But changing the name from Office Hours to User Group without good cause just makes things more confusing (and more difficult) for new residents, and muddies the waters rather than fosters clear communication. 

  4. I'm not sure if this means the filters will be running until next week or running continuously from now on, either case, Brooke's first point seems to indicate that we're not going to get any fixes until Tuesday of next week.  In retrospect, it was a monumentally bad idea to begin this process on a Thursday, as we now have a major disruption to a lot of Marketplace businesses that will run over the course of a weekend (prime time in SL).  Brooke, if you get the time to read this and care to elaborate, that would be great.
    In my opinion, continuously running filters are the worst possible idea.  It will only encourage people to 'game' the system, there's already been a lot of talk about people posting known filters/ratings and changing the keywords they use to get around the filters anyways.  On day one, that's a fatal flaw.  Continuous filtering only wastes processing time, and makes things difficult for customers and legitimate businesses.
  5. For Mac users with nVidia graphics, it's possibly the best Viewer release in years.  Nice mix of important fixes and enhancements, plus dynamic shadows (nVidia 8800 and above).  Shadows still have some glitches (eyelashes don't render properly, shiny/bumpy are broken), but overall a massive improvement.  And zippy.

    For Mac users with ATI graphics, it's another story.  To get Anti-aliasing to work you have to enable FBO, which unfortunately breaks Name Tags.  And any attempt to use the deferred renderer results in a system lockup that will cause residents to lose unsaved data in other applications (not fun).

    Significantly better than Viewer 2.2, and once AA/FBO and the fatal crash are resolved for ATI users it'll be a must-have for all Mac users.  As a tester, kudos to the development team and open-source communities, I'm loving the progress and look forward to even more.

  6. It sure would have been a great viewer for Mac users too, except that anti-aliasing is broken for all users.  For many, the viewer actually defaults to turning on the broken AA and the incompatible FBO settings, which result in a VERY garbled screen that can only be un-garbled after playing with debug settings (set RenderFSAASamples to 0, or enable the Development menu and choose Development -> Rendering and uncheck FBO).  In the meantime, Mac users should not download this version.

    The video shows the problem as it exists in both the beta and release version, hopefully it will get fixed soon.


  7. Actually, that percentage is up to over 10% in the US, and I suspect that among SL users, Mac usage is even higher.  Even if it's not, that's 10% of 1.36m logins in the last 60 days, or 136,000 of what LL describes as current users.

    Worst part is that this issue was on LL's radar.  Esbee, Oz, Q and others were well aware of the problem and Q even acknowledged it as a showstopper that must be fixed and tested less than a week ago.

  8. Anti-Aliasing is still broken on Mac.  This is a major regression that you've known about for nearly 2 months, it's a crime that you let this ship without being fixed.  When I say you I mean both LL viewer development in general, and Q, Esbee, Oz, Vir, and recently departed staffers Aimee and Tofu.  What part of "fast, easy, fun" does this fall under?

  9. As a resident, as a merchant, and as a participant in the beta, I'm very excited about the Marketplace. 

    What I'm not excited about is how rushed the last couple months have been, and how many outstanding issues and pieces of essential functionality are still missing (sales reporting, traffic reporting, and search still need a lot of work), despite being told repeatedly that they would all be in place before this point.  A partner would have responded to those concerns, or adjust the transition schedule in order to make sure the Marketplace offered the same or better functionality as XStreet.  I look forward to a better partnership moving forward.

  10. I'm sorry to hear the news about what appears to be some drastic increases in the cost structure for educational customers.  Unless the intention is to drive educators off the SL grid and onto other platforms, the goal should be to encourage educators and students to use as many prims as possible.

    I understand that developing the land market and land market products has many factors and considerations, but I can not help but feel that opportunities are being missed.  The challenge (as it appears to me) is how to innovate and create new and compelling land products that perform the same or better than current offerings, and to provide customers (commercial, institutional, and otherwise) with solutions.  Heading into 2011 with 2008 offerings and prices hardly seems like a winning strategy.

  11. It's funny how things can be taken so far out of context, sometimes.  In some cases it's just someone innocently skimming through a transcript and misinterpreting what they read, in others it reveals a certain bias or predisposition on the part of the person blogging/tweeting.

    That said, I agree with your post.  Too many buttons/controls add a lot to the complexity not just for the folks writing the code, but for the residents who are using it.  One area where I think the Viewer could benefit greatly is by defaulting to a minimal set of controls, then let residents optionally open up the other groups of controls through something like profiles (builder, machinimist, role-player, etc).  As a power user I like having access to all the knobs and buttons and switches, but I also recognize and understand all those controls intimidates and turns away novice users. 

    Some RL friends were recently visiting, and asked us to show them "that Second Life thing" we spend so much time with.  Had there been a candy-coated version of the Viewer, chances are they would have signed up.

×
×
  • Create New...