[Mesh goes gridwide: Create, sell, buy & enjoy all-new things in SL]

Phoebe Avro - 

 

Thanks for the info.  I hope the next firestorm does have a mode to look darn near exactly like phoenix.    I appreciate the info and appreciate the people at firestorm and other alternative viewers for not just giving people choices but literally picking the ball up where linden labs has continually dropped it over the years.  

That said linden labs is still acting like a darn 4 year old.  When the public has continually showed they do not like this viewer a company interested in growing will typically et the message after a copule years.  Linden Labs seems oblivious to this message and it is beyond me how they can be.  

[Mesh goes gridwide: Create, sell, buy & enjoy all-new things in SL]

While not a ton out there yet when I looked what little profesional looking mesh I saw was absolutely fantastic.  It actually makes older geo prim and sculpt builds look like 1980s PC games that is how much better some of the stuff is.  

That said,  it will be the death of Second Life if they do not fix the V2 style interface (meaning get rid of it completely,  entirely,  not keep a single thing from it).  I have been in SL since 07 and I am telling you when I try a V2 (or v3 for the mesh) viewer including firestorm I feel like an absolute newb.  It is unusable.  Yeah the stability needs fixed but that will obviously come,  its the UI itself that is the problem.  I cannot describe how much I despise the v2 style UI.  yes,  actually I can.  Whoever came up with it should be fired,  and never ever design another UI in their life.  That is how bad it is.  How utterly unfunctional it is.  LL is like a 4 year old when it comes for this stupid viewer.  Since its inception people have been telling them its crap and here we are a couple years later and it is still the same basic UI that V2 started with.  

My wishlist?  Is for the phoenix / firestorm people to find a way to include all the functionality of V2/3 that LOOKS in the style of V1.  Foreget what changes have been made to firestomr,  I have watched the youtube of how to make it function more like phoenix.  It is not enough.  It is still way too unintuitive to see when you have a group or private IM.  The top section of the interface needs to be removed completely.  I do not want that stupid search bar up there.  Nor do I want pictures for my buttons.  Just put the darn text on them like V1,  why is that so difficult to have?  

Ok rant over,  V2 just frustrates me that much.  

[Linden Lab's New CEO]

While I am sure the new CEO is a very smart fellow I am equally as sure his hiring will mark 2011 as the end of Linden Labs and Second Life.  The user base is shrinking.  It is not shrinking because there are no goblins to shoot or there is no super new armor to loot from an NPC that takes 120 people to defeat.  it is not shrinking because of VARs or anything of that nature.  It is shrinking because Linden Labs refuses to understand the thing that attracts people is that SL is an open ended virtual world and because they refuse to fix actual problems and instead focus time effort and money on making new viewers and trying to add new tricks.  Fix the lag,  fix region to region traveling,  update builder tools to be more intuitive.  Those are the three things that will save SL,  everything else you do will simply cause more people to leave.