Argent Stonecutter wrote: > > So you think the way forward to Snowglobe should be to ignore 2.x and > see about backporting the 2.x functional improvements to 1.3.x? > > What would Linden Lab do if people actually started doing that? > I remember several instances when people asked what Viewer 2.0 would bring to Second Life and them getting back the answer "You will be amazed!" Well, I am. Not particularly happy though. I see some bug fixes we have been hoping for, for a long time, made it into Viewer 2.0, but I cannot use the UI. All the winking, blinking and bouncing gives me seizures. Hell, I can play stuff like Battlezone II and Portal without problems but something about Viewer 2.0's UI drives me over the edge. Most games do make me uncomfortable but Second Life has never been an issue until now. I can kill particles. I can kill face lights. I can return spinning flashy garbage and I can teleport home avatars that cause me grief but I cannot do anything about the UI but avoid it. Back to Snowglobe 1.4.0 for me.
I have heard the excuse that "It tests well with new users" several times but I really don't care what a person that doesn't care about Second Life and doesn't know diddle squat about what's missing or broken in the UI thinks about it. "Play testing" only works when you make sure the "player" is involved in ALL ASPECTS of the game. In Second Life that's a VERY TALL ORDER. No way are you going to get the uninitiated man off the street involved deeply enough to properly gauge your UI. All you can do with him is fiddle with the few things he does whine about until he stops whining about it. Something I learned long ago, give a man a task to perform and when he fails to perform satisfactorily his first excuse amounts to him blaming the tools. This has resulted in many broken golf clubs and damaged power tools. Imagine what would happen if sporting equipment and tool manufacturers failed to properly train their product testers and blindly followed their suggestions? I know I am going to catch heat for this post. Somebody is going to tell me "That's not the way worked" or some such rubbish. Well, when you sequester your User Interface design and development away from the users for a year while making massive changes you have to expect a large number of those users to dislike the results and suspect you are not acting in their best interests. After all, we have to use this thing, not the random people that are not interested in Second Life that answered some ad to be a product tester for some unnamed product. Argent, to answer your question, I think the proper thing to do is distance the UI from the rest of the code. Maybe LL has started doing this. A decent API for user interface functions that pushes the UI code out of the render loop is gonna have to happen eventually. I think now is the time. I only wish I had the mental capacity to dive into this task and achieve results. God knows I need the job. What would Linden Lab do if people started enhancing Snowglobe 1.x with features added to Viewer 2.0 by Linden Lab? Rub their hands together and cackle with glee as their user support costs go down because more and more users are using an unsupported viewer would be my first guess. Until there is a public announcement, in the Linden Blog FEATURED section from "up stairs" telling us insignificant little existing users that this is not the case I am sticking with my opinion that "up stairs" only cares about the real world population that IS NOT in Second Life already. All argument against it here will be ignored as usual as I know for a fact that many Linden Lab employees do in fact care a great deal. They will have to let their upper management fend for themselves in this issue We are being fed conflicting information by Linden Lab employees. It may not be deliberate. It may just be people repeating stuff they hear without really thinking about how it will formulate in our minds. We have some people telling us Linden Lab cannot foresee the future and we have people telling us that Viewer 1.x will be supported for the foreseeable future. This fires off both of my doublespeak detectors. (That's bullshit detectors for the laymen out there.) This is Ardy Lay and turn the lights off on your way out. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
