Tinted Backgrounds Around Avatar Names And Group Titles

I changed the color of my tinted aggravating view blocker boxes in an attempt to reduce their repellancy from apoplexy inducing to mere nauseau producing. It was to no avail.

They could have a use, if they were optional. You could pay people to stand in a stack at your border and block your view of your neighbors SBS infected land.

yeh, i looked at those screenies, and immediately thought, "welcome to Second There"

Hmmm..

Old style text labels that overrun each other when more than a few people show up and you're trying to see who's there..

Or new ones that shift about so you can still read them all, and click people out of a crowd via the nameplate.

That's a toughie.

Old style text lables that are fairly unobtrusive even when there are tons of people on screen...

Or new ones that take up a ton more space individualy and shift about to take up even more space when a crowd forms.

Thats a toughie.



Opinions vary.

I view arguments like these with a bit of suspicion. The assumption is that cosmetic changes are made at the expense of more worthwhile tasks.

I'm not a tech person, so I'm ignorantly wondering aloud here -- Intuitively I would think rounding corners in a chat box etc is less skill/time intensive than say, making a server run consistently well. Do we know that the LL techies who make cosmetic changes have the skill set to fix bugs? And even if they do, can we assume cosmetics are done at the expense of fixing a bug?

My landlords are a husband/wife team. He's a skilled handyman, she an interior designer. When she arranges flowers on the porch, it's not at the expense of her husband fixing my leaking sink. When he spends five minutes changing curtains on the front door, it's not at the expense of the week-long job of replacing floorboards on the porch -- it means he reached an impasse that day without sufficient time to begin the next step, and had a half hour to spare enabling him to address smaller less intrusive tasks.

No kidding.

First off you can alpha-out the chat box tint completely. I'm sure that functionality can be built into the chat bubble and av name tags.

I thought they were ugly too... but it's not bloody murder.

And SL turning into There?

For the love of all that is holy... we've been there already back in 1.2

We're on the verge of some really cool breakthroughs in SL. Some real technological leaps.

Yes the new name tags are ugly and pervasive and the chat bubble feature is useless... but it is not the end of SL or the beginning of it's de-evolution into There.

Can we all stop exhaggerating the tiniest of details?

Amen to that. This entire thread is pissing me off. There is significant new functionality in 1.6 - namely the inventory search and ability to see whose objects are on your land and selectively return them, among other things, and all people can do is bitch about rounded edges and transparency and how There-like SL is?

If 1.6 had purely been a bug fix release with no new features, there would have been much bitching about that as well. Talk about being damned if you do and damned if you don't. Based upon this thread, they may as well just scrap 1.6 and not release any improvements, you don't seem to appreciate them anyway.

Now who is exagerating little things?

The threat is about one point of the new upgrade. Nobody has said we don't appreciate the other stuff, in fact most of us have said we /do/. It's a threat specificly intended to show displeasure with one point of a new upgrade. We're allowed to do that, damnit. A ton of good features doesn't mean we can't find fault in, as you say, a relativly small feature. Nobody is saying "Don't upgrade to 1.6". Nobody is even saying "take this feature out of 1.6". We're just saying we want it to be an option.

A'right?

Reitsuki,

That is the tone of things I was pushing back against, not your posts. It just seems over and over again, it is "LL is wasting time on this, wasting time on that, not doing this, not doing that". It gets really old. Giving feedback about liking or disliking a feature is one thing, all the time spent criticising everything with the "Linden Lab is a bunch of fucking idiots who don't know what they are doing" song and dance is tiring and counter productive.

Forgive me if I'm not that famliar with the state of There, but hasn't development for them pretty much ground to a halt? So what's the comparison? A bubbly UI? A lot of software seems to be coming out these days with roundtangled UI widgets.

Claiming SL is turning into There because they add *optional* chat bubbles and a bubbled name tag is overlooking a lot of technical differences. You're trying to make it sound like SL has retrograded in technical sophistication and reduced it's featureset to the pathetic level of flexibility that There offers. The biggest problem with There wasn't the bubbly UI, but the lack of easily accessible building tools and flexibility in creativity.

I'm not sure why people are comparing SL to There, and then admit that LL responds to our requests by implementing options once they realize that a change is unpopular? Maybe they don't get it right the first time, but at least they have responded. How is There's resident support going these days?

In the end, if there aren't more serious issues to spend time criticising in 1.6 than this, then I guess LL should consider it quite a success.

If you're disillusioned about SL, just look at the competition.

if the chat/name bubbles are going to be options like somebody said Philip said then that's cool. if they're not optional excuse me while i scream "fuck".

personally i'm hyped about 1.6 but yeah i understand all the people who are mad about bugs. i don't like those bugs either but weren't the last 10 or so updates basically just bug fixes? obviously there's still bugs but it's a safe bet they're not just giving up on fixing bugs now. 1.6 is like psychologically big cause it's a step up in number not just 1.5.14 so they have to make it a big flashy thing and not just "made some database stuff run 1% faster, also a server change you'll never notice" or people would scream about 1.6 being a big fat disapointment.

big up for the great stuff in 1.6 all you Lindens. here's looking forward to more bug fixes in 1.6.1 and on.


ps: Lindens please read Edward Tufte's books on graphic design.

I got a chuckle out of the There-like qualities, that's all, man. I LOVE SL, and I'm glad they're comin' out with more features, and better ways to clean up your land. I really don't think I was bitchin' about anything. Just made a post on something I found amusing.

If I wanted to bitch, I could find something more constructive than that.

Shade

Since you explicitly quoted me, I thought I'd answer. Thanks for giving me the medium to do so as I would wish

Blah blah, fucking blah

If they make the interface so repugnant I can't stand to look at it, the fact that there are now partially obscured streaming videos of dancing badgers falling through the sky won't matter at all.

If 1.6 had done nothing but fix ghosting I wouldn't have complained a bit. Then I would be able to enjoy building a thing or two for fun, unlike now with sometimes ten, sometimes 50 percent ghosting. If they released a version that fixed every bug I doubt there would a lot of complaint about it. What would there be to complain about?

I wasn't able to test much at the preview, the frame rate kept dropping for no apparent reason down to 2 or 3 fps and it wasn't worth relogging again again.

It's odd, people seem to think it's ok to call other customers shitheads and dried up cunts and many seem to think that's fine and dandy, but insult the rounded corners on a dialog box or a scroll bar and it's time to attack the commenter for their bad attitude.

My opinion of the wasting of time on non-functional changes and the specific cosmetic changes being made are both extremely intensely negative. I don't know how to express opinions like that while sounding positive. Complaints about ghosting, invisible avatars, teleport failures, sim border crossing issues and such will continue until the problems are fixed. Expecting the complaints to stop before the problems are fixed is both unrealistic and senseless. I can't see any reason at all why I or other dissatisfied customers are obligated to suffer in silence. If the programming staff gets their feelings hurt by people complaining about bugs and design flaws that have existed since the program started they have the option of solving the problems or not reading threads that have anything but undiluted praise in them.

Expressing negative reactions to changes revealed in the previews is precisely what the previews are released for and exactly what the forums are for.

You're welcome, and I enjoyed it

Good. I haven't had a good rant for ages.

Thats a great idea. I agree totally.

Originally Posted By Cristiano

Just for the record, the three passages above, quoted by Cristiano don't have foul language or call the Linden Lab staff insulting names.

That statement was produced by Cristiano, so far as I can see.

Originally Posted by Cristiano

is ghosting really that big a deal when you're building? it happens to me sometimes and i just select the prim and send it to 700 meters.

why do i even ask that? i could say "are cute fuzzy baby ducks really that big a deal" and a dozen people would write essays on how they're worse than Hitler. perspective.....not just for artists anymore.

Suezanne,

My post is the result not just of this thread but of a whole slew of them recently, including yours and Shadow's. You are that displeased by a transparent background on a name? There is a big difference between:

"Please make the new name tag background optional for those who liked the previous version"

and this:

"The 1.6 preview on March 3 showed a continuing and increasing emphasis on useless graphics changes such as rounding of corners, adding functionless outlines, distracting highlights and fakey looking glowing effects when objects are selected in dialogs and lists. "

"Air Filter Clog=Unfocused on bugs and Bug reports.
Paint Job=Unneeded new features that took time away from focusing on the bugs."

"Enforcing unwanted graphical shit like this on us is rude."

The last time I checked, Second Life's client software belongs to Linden Lab, not us. If they want to add transprency, or make the entire window a giant bubble, that is their prerogative. Yes, it would be nice for them to make some changes optional, but not every single new thing they add has to be made optional. Change happens, deal with it. It is also your prerogative to complain about it. I just complained about your complaining.

Zsi, when I find the ghosting rate is 30 to 50 percent, I do find it a bit annoying to have to continually reposition objects.

Introducing the Hitler comparison in response to something that you said , not something anyone else said, is an excellent example of a really underhanded argumentative technique. You present the false impression of people comparing something desirable to Hitler, when what is actually being said is that severe problems with the programs function need to be corrected before spending time adding decorations to it.


It's not just having to do the extra needless work of positoning the ghosts, it's not just that the objects stay on my minimap, it's also that I don't like having to be reminded that the product is defective 50 to 100 extra times a session in addition to the dozens of time per session that other people's avatars aren't displayed at all.

A product discussion thread like this is more productive of useful product feedback when the customers focus on the products attributes rather than other customers or irrelevant historical figures from long ago. Or, for that matter, cute fuzzy baby ducks.

I have to go now, lunchtime is over. I'm in the preview grid. One of the bug fixing Lindens is spending his time handing out Free Popcorn objects. I hope he is testing for bugs and not just being friendly.

I'm grateful for these new cosmetic additions, which make it easier for me to use Second Life because of the manner in which my eyes perceive the world. The new buttonglows upon mouseover are pleasant to me, and I've sent a few other suggestions in. These visual dynamics can be great for someone who has some visual impairments such as myself.

I also humbly consider the views of those who have yet to discover the joys of SL, and a friendly interface which is familiar to them and would help them bridge the gap between other online experiences they may have had is nothing less than deserving of cheery accolades. I suspect the long-term view will be extensible skinnability of the UI, and in the meantime, as SL gains as a larger userbase, this will aid in the transition from today to tomorrow. The future awaits! Whee.

While I don't plan on having translucent avatar names all the time, the additional contrast can help -- and has already been pointed out, Lindens will be doing something about the OPTIONS.

Lindens have always been about options, choice, diversity -- that's a bedrock of Second Life, isn't it?

I look forward to more! YAYZERAMA!!!

I tried to read the whole thread, but if I missed the reply with this info, don't kill me.

I don't like the semi-opaque background around avatar Name/Title either. And yes, it is very reminiscent of There.

You can turn it off two ways. Under the Preferences menu > Show Names. Choose Never or Show Temporarily. Worked for me in Preview last night.

Surreal, turning the names off completely does not address the issue in the thread.

Cristiano, you are right, there is a big difference between what I wrote and what you wrote. My version gets my point across, yours doesn't. Your version sounds like a polite request from a happy customer about a matter of little concern and doesn't place the request in a larger context. My version sounds like a complaint from an unhappy customer who is very dissatisfied not only about a particular matter but about a tendency of which it a part. My version is better, because it expresses my feelings about the Second Life preview more accurately than yours.

Also, you version is written as if it were a request addressed to Lindens for a feature change. This is the general forum, and the message is addressed to the other customers,
not particularly to Linden employees.

Ah... missed that. I'd like to be able to turn off the background box entirely. Turning off names, or changing console opacity may be the only options though.