[Viewer 2.5 with Web Profiles Has Arrived]

@ Fredrik Linden on 02-14-2011 09:43 AM

"If we are still having problems with aspect ratio, upload a new picture?" No that won't work - please pay attention while I explain it again...

Image in GROUP PROFILE - square!

Image for GROUP in AVATAR PROFILE - not square!

This can't be fixed by uploading a new image. It will be wrong in one place or the other.

Squashing aspect ratio makes images look amateurish and wastes the time that people spend making them. Do some research on Raskin's Laws, stop ruining our content and wasting our time. 

[Viewer 2.5 with Web Profiles Has Arrived]

Anyone else finding Shakespeare's Pants a problem with this viewer? This is when pants (EN-US) or trousers (EN-UK) appear tight around the ankles like leggings instead of being the expected width at the hems.

[Viewer 2.5 with Web Profiles Has Arrived]

You can use the web profiles to share but it's a bit bugged.

Open a profile of a person you do not currently have an IM session with, you will see the the actions button, pull it down and click Share, the IM window will open and you can drop something into it anywhere = works.

If however you already have an IM window open, Share makes it close. #DEFECT

If you have a closed IM chiclet for the person, Share does nothing at all. #DEFECT

Of course, if you are already IMing the person you would not open their profile to share something. But share should always work irrespective of what else you are doing.

I'm using the IM in separate windows / chiclet method. Anyone using the tabs method feel free to describe how it works with tabs.

[Viewer 2.5 with Web Profiles Has Arrived]

Thanks for the update. In general, profiles never fitted into the sidebar properly, so it would be good to be able to have a properly formatted and professional looking profile.

As far as I can see, there are just 4 things wrong with this.

Starting from friends list, I (on a Mac) right click on a friend and select profile.

1) It takes too long to load the profile. As somebody said above, it should be as fast as loading any ordinary web page.

2) The window opens with my friend's URL but then switches to my URL and loads my profile. #DEFECT!

3) The profile does not show all of my groups and all of my picks, but instead selects 3 of each to show -apparently the first in alphabetical order. They should be 3 that I select if they are limited to 3.

4) Aspect ratio! The group image in the web profile is stretched into a rectangle, but is square elsewhere in the viewer, for example in the group profile. #LAME!

Showing an image at anything other than the desired aspect ratio is inexcusable. It makes a mockery of the work that people put into making these images as professional as they can manage. SL's handling of image aspect ratios has been amateurish since I joined SL in 2006. There is no excuse whatsoever for making the group images in the web profile rectangular when you know that people are already using square images elsewhere.

What would be an improvement apart from fixing the above? Ease up on the length restrictions for the text and allow formatting.

Agreed with others, there are bigger elephants in the room than profiles.

[Technology Improvements for Q1 Including Raising Group Limit to 42]

@Adam Spark :

I was discussing problems with usability for Group Invites. Obviously open access groups are not subject to these problems and my comments do not apply to open access groups.

If you could be in an unlimited set of groups and choose at any time which 40 of them you could chat in simultaneously, wouldnt that be ok? And if LL had to reduce that 40 to 35 next month, that would still be ok.

When someone IMs me who is not my friend, I want to be able to click on that IM and invite to group. Count the clicks and keystrokes to find and open the group profile and retype their name there. The system is already showing me the name, I should not have to retype it at all.

If you ran an SL business and were ever away from your computer you would understand why mobile group invites are important. The group invitation UI is broken and hopeless. Providing it on the web would be better for everyone and may be easier and more cost effective than fixing the client.

[Technology Improvements for Q1 Including Raising Group Limit to 42]

The real test of sim crossings is high speed high prim vehicle crossings. I took one of my rideable sailboats out last night at high speed, notice little bumps at sim crossings but only one occasion where the boat flew up for a while.

Any reports from pilots?

[Technology Improvements for Q1 Including Raising Group Limit to 42]

The improvements in sim crossings are welcome (even with the deceptive graph axis), but we are still sticking to the same outdated notion of group membership and virtually unusable UI for inviting people to groups.

Once again, here is my proposal:

• a group owner defines people as having PERMISSION to be in the group
• if the group owner revokes the permission, the person is ejected and can no longer rejoin
• with permission to be a member, the person can join and leave and rejoin whenever they want...
• ...and decide whether they want to be in group chat for a given group
• ...the limit on the number of group chats you can have active at a given time can be varied by Linden Lab without affecting the number of groups you are allowed to be a member of
• the group owner can give and revoke group membership permission and change roles from a website as well as inworld. In fact I'd take website instead of inworld.
• fix the UI to work with the minimum number of steps and in the same way irrespective of the person's online / offline status and membership of your friends list.

Here once again are the issues with the current group invite UI:

• Expected: If I click on an avatar name not in my friends list and click through to invite to group, I should be able to invite the avatar to the group WITHOUT RETYPING THEIR NAME
• Actual: I have to retype their name every time

• Expected: I can copy and paste their name into the group inviter UI
• Actual: When the group inviter UI opens YOU CLOSE THE IM WINDOW
• Actual: If you reopen the window or try to copy the name before inviting, its much harder than it used to be (i.e. in V1.23) to select the name from the IM window and you may get the timestamp as well

• Expected: the person succeeds in joining the group
• Actual: nearly every time the person fails to join the group and I have to go through the whole rigmarole again.

• Expected: I can see who has an outstanding non-accepted invitation to my group
• Actual: I can't.

• Expected: If I accidentally mistype a name on a group invite and send it, I can rescind the group invite before the person accepts
• Actual: I can't.

• Expected: I can send a group invite using a mobile client
• Actual: FAIL. It takes too long for the group info to load over wireless - for example, tried for 20 minutes, did not succeed.

Invite me to a group FJ!!! Invite me to a group Amanda!!! Using your iPhone from an airport!

Please fix this.

[Viewer 2.3 Launches with Display Names]

@Trilobyte, thanks for the detailed and informative summary.

Mac nVidia 320m users - you can now enjoy shadows.

@Jack - so we have a bug that not only crashes the viewer on today's ATI iMacs but also freezes the whole machine losing unsaved work in all other applications. Why is this not mentioned in the release notes as a known bug? Would we put up with this from a web browser or word processor? Why is it ok for a non-beta Second Life viewer to do this?

[Help Us Test the SL Web Viewer Beta]

@Vergs - this is in fact a way of eliminating client lag - your computer is not rendering Second Life any more, that's being done on the cloud.

[Help Us Test the SL Web Viewer Beta]

This addresses a couple of potential barriers to getting started in SL - the viewer download and the need to "make an identity statement" before seeing the world. The guest accound doesn't need to choose a name and arrives inworld with a randomly chosen avatar.

While changing the default avatar is possible, my attempts to do so were ignored for quite a long time.

While I could go to one of the "chat" destinations, and then travel to my land from there without a map, I couldn't find a way to TP. I tried sending a TP from my regular account to the guest account (it did not arrive), sending the map URL in an IM (it showed up as unclickable plain text) and also having the guest account type a map URL (also turned into unclickable plain text). So there is no way to get to anywhere that isn't flyable from one of the provided destinations. And flying is pretty hard with no map.

My friend tried giving money to the guest account. The money was deducted from my friend's account but not given to the guest account. This should be prevented.

The guest account can participate in local chat and can respond to IMs received and can IM avatars that it can click on. However it can't IM people who are not present.

There are a wider variety of use cases if the guest avatar could travel to known locations and contact known avatars. Guests could visit places that they had read about which are not on the destination list, or contact friends in SL given their avatar ID.

There is still a download - a Java app that claims to require access to your computer. This is quite a turn-off so it would be useful to explain why it is necessary and what it's actually going to do once it has access.

[[QUICKTIP] Get less lag in seconds by increasing your Maximum Bandwidth!]

@Ewer, what you are missing is that complaining about lag is like going to your doctor and saying you hurt, but being unable to say whether it's your head, stomach or feet that hurt (as I recall, it was Torley who first came up with that analogy). How can your doctor help you? Lag has 3 main components - client (the SL viewer), network and server (the sim you are in).

If the server is lagged out by too many avatars, crashed physical vehicles or scripts, then you will experience server lag; time dilation lower than 1.00 and the walking through jello effect.

If there's something wrong with your network connection (high time to communicate, known as ping time, or high packet loss, meaning some communications don't get through) then you will experience network lag. You hit the keyboard, your avatar does nothing for a while. Also if your network connection is too slow (twisty lane instead of 6 lane highway) then it will take longer for stuff to rez. You will tp somewhere and it will be bare land for a long time, and then the scene will build slowly.

I have to say what I do is exactly the same as Lance Corrimal describes. It works, maybe it's conservative.

Finally, client lag can still strike in a sim that is running fine with a good network connection. Set graphics to ultra, draw distance to max and stand inside a megayacht built out of megaprims and sculpties. If your graphics card is a few years old, your client FPS will plummet.

The easy way to see the cause of the lag is the lag meter, which gives you red yellow and green for each of these 3 factors.

The more detailed way is the stats floater (control shift 1) which will show you what's wrong with the client frame rate, network connection or sim. The sim aims to run at 45 fps, which means it has to be able to draw each frame in a bit over 22ms. If script time or physics time are approaching that figure, then the sim has no choice but to slow down.

[Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More]

Ah, sanity returns, thankx Torley!

[Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More]

Apart from display names:

1) the white popup box hints for noobs - please provide a way to turn them all off forever. As it is, if you X them, they come back again later, so even noobs will eventually get sick of them. Preferences Notifications would be OK.

2) V2.3 breaks getting texture info.

Old way: edit the object, select the face, the texture info appears in open chat. Good enough (apart from lack of discoverability), didnt need changing and nothing about changing it was mentioned as far as I could see in the release notes.

New way: Edit the object, select the face, not one but two message notification burned black toasts pop up. The first has the object name, the second has the texture info.

New way part 2: do this with the whole object selected, not just one face, and you get one cubic zillion burned black toasts popping up with the name and texture info for every face of every prim in the linked object. Now I have a cubic zillion toasts to X.

Sigh.

[Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More]

Did anyone consider enforcing the rule that no display name shall be two words separated by a space?

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

We need to be in groups both for the following reasons:

• group chat
• receiving notifications
• controlling who can have rights on land parcels (rezzing, setting home, all the way to selling the land).

Sending a group invite is one of the worst user experiences in SL right now:

• somebody who is not on your friends list IMs and asks you for a group invite, then goes offline
• if you click to invite the person, their IM window disappears but does not populate in the group invite UI
• even if they get their invite, they normally fumble and drop it at least once, and need to be invited again.
• many times when you get the group inviter UI open, it won't load the group roles and then you can't send the invite
• if you give a group member a different role, they don't get their new privileges right away - we often have to try tp'ing into and out of the sim, relogging, ejecting and reinviting them
• if your group is open access, you can't ban a griefer from joining it
• if you're using a mobile client in marginal cover (for example an airport) the client will hang for 20 minutes and still not get to the point of inviting the person.

So here's my proposal:

• a group owner defines people as having permission to be in the group
• if the group owner revokes the permission, the person is ejected and can no longer rejoin
• with permission to be a member, the person can join and leave and rejoin whenever they want...
• ...and decide whether they want to be in group chat for a given group
• ...and there could be a limit on the number of group chats you can have active, while still (possibly) having a higher limit on the number of groups you are allowed to join
• the group owner can give and revoke group membership permission and change roles from a website as well as inworld.
• fix the UI to work with the minimum number of steps and in the same way irrespective of the person's online / offline status and membership of your friends list.

[Making Strides to Improve our Customer Support Services]

I once had a mysterious problem on a mainland sim that was to do with the group rights of avatars. Izzy fixed it for me; it took more than simply restarting the sim. Whatever was wrong with the sim did not manifest in the stats floater. Making everything affecting sim performance visible to residents in the stats floater and lag meter would be helpful; so would mainland sim restart requests directly from the client without going through trouble ticket.

[Making Strides to Improve our Customer Support Services]

From time to time we hear about concierge level members who have been victims of content theft or parcel encroachment (for example) getting in a dispute with the other party and ending up being suspended for a few hours or banned instantly without getting to give their side of the argument. What happens next? Unable to run their businesses and deal with their own customers, perhaps unable to pay tier, and furious at the injustice, they leave SL, and make sure they tell as many people as possible how they were treated. Who loses? Everyone.

It would be good to see a commitment that nobody, but especially no concierge or premium members with businesses and customers relying on them, shall be suspended or banned unjustly.

If parcel encroachment and content theft were impossible then of course there would be less disputes to start with.

Meanwhile, my favorite article on customer service: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

[Welcoming Teen Grid Organizations to the Main Grid]

Thanks Terrence. It's good to see that educators of the 13-15 age group will be able to continue their programs.

[[TIP] Different ways to do the same thing (and save you time)]

F makes you fly, or land if you are already flying. You step into the air and just hover until you move with your choice of WASD or arrow keys.

This is often very convenient compared to using Page Up to fly, as that tends to make you overshoot, and have to fly down again, possibly landing accidentally and having to start over.

If you always use arrow keys and rarely use mouselook, it's worth pointing out that WASD is better for mouselook if you are using the mouse with your right hand. Mouselook is sometimes a better way of getting around in confined spaces.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

Bryce 7 (free) and Bryce 7 Pro (under $100) aren't on the Collada page either, but both claim to do Collada import and export, see the bottom of this page:

http://www.daz3d.com/i/software/bryce7/comparison?_m=d

And there are great tutorials from Robin Wood (Robin Sojourner in SL)

http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/BryceTuts/BryceTutSet.html

Building with prims in SL was simple after Bryce, but I don't think Bryce would be too foreign for an SL prim builder. However Bryce does boolean operations and hierarchical linking, both currently not possible with prims.

[Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback]

@Jack - what about people who can't differentiate the colors you choose ?

[Changes to Display Names Based on Your Feedback]

@Zorin - not quite: the saddest thing is gambling the users we have for the users we don't have.

If the goal is growth of user numbers to Facebook levels, then why not do as Facebook does and allow people to be anonymous.

When I'm out at the RL mall, the strangers I meet can't right click on me and find out everything about me. When I do business with somebody in a store, they see my credit card and can greet me by name if they want. If I meet my friend at the mall, my friend knows more about me and can ask how I'm doing.

[Check here if you want more options]

Thanks for the post Q.

A great example is mini-map rotation.

Everyone has a personal preference for this - north up or avatar nose direction up. That preference is deeply rooted in our own perceptual systems, to the point where a nose up person may think nobody could possibly use north up and vice versa.

I started out in SL as a north up person, and was continually infuriated at having to turn off mini map rotation every time I installed a new viewer or had to discard preferences.

Then I discovered that during boat racing, you have to see the boats that are behind you in order to avoid turning across their path. This is easily done with the minimap rotating, and not so easily done with north up:

• Same user, new use case = new preference.

Meanwhile the rotation control migrated around the user interface. However, the further it is from the point of use, the less likely it is to be found and used.

It's now (V2 at least) accessible from a right mouse click in the mini map. Now I can set it dynamically according to what I'm doing - It's no longer a preference, it's a useful tool.

• Put control at point of use = less interaction burden + more discoverable = more likely to be used.

Re complaints about screen real estate - we're going to have dockable tabs soon, let's hope this solves that issue.

But that leaves the people who declare that the UI is unusable or worse, and the only reason they can give is that it's dark. Could we please just have an original colors skin option, so we can separate the structural issues from the cosmetics.