They're going to take the forums away, so here's when I take off my friendly, happy go lucky, positive Mr Buddy hat off and show my thoughts about the SL client software, be they bad, ugly, or darn right scary.
I will go ahead and say I do not know and I do not understand what is wrong with LL lately. The client's UI is amuck, nothing works right, want me to be more specific? Here's what I am seeing while I try desparately to get my work done and meet my deadlines at work:
The Edit Menu:
Edit Linked Parts checkbox unselects itself every time I select a single prim in a Linked set, unlink only that prim and delete it. Next time I click the rest of the linked set, I have to recheck it. This can not be correct UID. Anyone else want to comment? I dont know what to suggest for this, it just does not feel right.
Tabbing Through Fields:
Yesterday aftera couple of hours of building in SL, tabbing altogether died in my Mac client. As in tab button no longer worked to tab between fields.
Click on Fields to edit values:
Selects the whole field and makes me put thing at the edge of the sim. I think they're fixing this one, according to Torley's post.
Placing things at 786 meters:
I dont understand the interface in SL. I can not reach over and edit a prim over on the other side of the sim but I sure can place an item there when I type in the wrong coordinates. After a serious building session, I usually have to fly up to 800 meters and clean up all the things I sent flying into space when I accidentally put in the wrong coordinates due to what else the UI for the field not working right.
Does anyone else feel we need to have one or the other, namely:
Either let us edit everything within visible distance
or Dont allow us to put an item to anywhere beyond the allowed object editing distance. I know this will piss off skybox builders but come on this UI makes zero sense.
Moving Multiple Objects by Selecting and using fields:
Why doesnt this work, didnt this used to work? Now if I select a few items and I enter let's say a new Z value only one of them gets moved. Come on guys and gals, fix your code it's been 2 freaking years.
Allow anyone to copy:
Old news I know, it does not work. Please make it work. We use this function a lot in my sim to share items. Now everything has to be set to sell for 0 lindens and it confuses newbies.
Default Permissions:
I noticed that when you set an item to sell, the default permission on an object have been changed to be transfer/resell only. It used to be all permissions enabled (mod,copy,transfer) Well that's fine, it will protect less experienced designers. But what's up with sell ORIGINAL as default???
EDIT: It looks like this works fine now. But I swear last week or the week before, it flagged the item as an original to sell. Did anyone else see this or am I hallucinating?
Auto-Return
With the latest update LL has managed to break auto return as well. Now when I set a land to auto return at 900 minutes (it's a sandbox on my sim),. sometimes intermittently it returns people's item as soon as they rez it, or within a couple of minutes. There's no rhyme or reason to the problem. It seems like the lot decides to return things all of a sudden. This even happened with people that were in the group that owned the sandbox area. So at least their objects should not be returned. There's something weird and seriously wrong with auto-return.
IMs to the Orientation Island
someone on the orientation island should not be able to receive teleport requests from someone in world. Lindens would be exception to this list of course. Why is this a problem. Well, one of my coworkers registered, and then sent me an e mail with his SL name at which time I assumed he was already through the orientation island, well guess what he was just beginning it. So I sent him a teleport and he accepted and he ended up skipping the entire orientation island, something he needed very badly we later found out when he walked around our educational sim naked for the rest of the day despite how much clothing we gave him or tried to let him understand the rules and regulations. In fact, his behavior still, after 1 week of coaching and training is still borderline griefers. It is my personal theory that what we call griefers are made when someone skips the orientation island altogether. Maybe LL should rethink the ability to skip this.
Other things not so good:
Land Terraforming tools:
This is a sad sad sad bunch of UI and tools. I did not realize how bad it was before I owned a whole sim. Without the use of a raw file upload you can pretty much count on spending a whole day terraforming an entire sim. Things that I found that speed this process up are:
A. use a PC
B. use T1 if you have one available
C. Graphics tablet makes the work a lot less strenuous since you dont have to click and hold down the mouse button.
Vehicle Physics:
Mostly Sad. The default freebie vehicle script, while it is wonderful to have and we're thankful to have it, is horrible. It ends up crashing the sim or ending up spiraling into the land of the sim, or just flying all over the place instead of sticking to the surface of the sim like any other land vehicle. Could we have someone write and distribute something a lot more stable? Maybe we can all pitch in for making this better version open source. I would pay for it. Anyone else? I would be willing to raise money for this project, if anyone else is interested.
Sign Up Interface: EXPLOIT
I just had to sign up for an alt in order to write instructions for our students to guide them through the sign up process. The wording is off in many places throughout the screens and there are some webapp gotchas kind of bugs. A few examples:
If you pick your name and click to proceed to the next screen only to decide nah, I want to change my name, and hit back on your browser, you will notice that you can no longer use the old name you picked, it has already been registered with the database, so you HAVE to change the name. Two big problems with this scenario -- the database ends up committing names that are in fact never used and someone can potentially register and disable hundreds of name combinations without registering a single avatar by just hitting continue, and hitting back button on their browser, and putting in another combination and doing the same and so on.
Language on the Credit Card/PayPal page insinuates that if you put in this information you will be charged. This is simply not true. LL needs to make it clear that if you use your credit card, or paypal account we will give you the incentive payment of 250 lindens. Many people I helped over the phone while they registered thought the 250 lindens were charged to their credit card. Please clarify this screen.
Sad, sad sad default avatars. I know LL wants people to get out there and see the fab avatars and outfits available and register to get their credit card on file and blah blah spend money blah blah. But this is like being born into a world with no limbs and being given the option to buy them IF you are sure you need them.
What am I supposed to do when I run an educational sim, and I have a guest speaker coming in, and s/he has to get ready for the presentation in less than 30 mins. We dont have time for the orientation island, we dont have time to find them clothing -- so they're going to end up looking like ass while they give their presentation on our sim?
I spent the whole week helping a handful of newbies from my department with getting shapes right, getting clothes right. etc etc. This can all be alleviated if the default avatars looked something a little less pathetic.
My mental list is not finished but the energy I have to put into a post has, so I will stop right here.
Thanks for listening LL.
Troy
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