Chevrons or T's? Am I just being old?

kk, this new change to the mini-map is frustrating me. I like the Friends in yellow bit, big thumbs up to whoever thought that one up.

However, the new chevrons to denote altitude (up/down) relitive to your position is nearly impossible to see. Granted I'm running at 1440 resolution on a widescreen 19", but still....

The T's (right side up for above, and upside down for below) is used in almsot every single radar system in the world. There's a reason for that. Because it is easily comprehended by the human eye/mind and visually distintive from one another.

So my questions:
Am I just being annoyed at change and "will get used to it", or was this another "if it works don't fix it"?

And is there any option to turn it back?

~Jessy

I find the silly things to be a bit too small.. so, sometimes it's hard to tell which way they are pointed. In a crowded sim, however, they are... just as unreadable as the "T's".

perhaps adding color coding might help.

They are a bit small on my screen. Just a few pixels taller and wider would make them much more readable.

People have complained about the T's before, that they seem to be backwards in meaning from their appearance. I always found the T's impossible to remember which way they were above and which meant they were below.

Very few people use radar screens in real life, and I suppose we get a lot of folks that don't use the programs that use the T and inverted T .

As to whether you might be "being old" you might try some reading glasses if you don't already wear glasses or contacts. If I take mine off some things go from hard to read to impossible.

I liked the T, but the chevrons are fine too. The major improvement however is the drop shadow. Now I can see them much more clearly against objects that I own. I always had trouble seeing the Ts against the cyan blue of my objects.

I still have the T's on my mini map. Am I missing an update or some such?

The chevrons come out perfectly clear to me, which is odd because i'm always the one complaining at work about how the print is too small on everything.

Errrmmm...the whatzit?

Is this "drop shadow" supposed to be on by default? IF so, I have a bug, if not, where they heck is it?

::Anyone else wish LL would put out instructions for new crap they put in updates so we don't have to go digging for it?::

And Suez, I like the idea of color-coding up/down, but with color-coding Friends already, I think it would be a mess by the time LL was done with it (err...~more~ of a mess). And my eyes are 20-20, so it's either my rezolution, or me just not liking the chevrons. Heh.

~Jessy

I still have T's too

It's just there. I didn't have to turn anything on. It's a black outline around the chevron so that now it stands out against the cyan of my own objects on the mini-map.

new viewer

I'm familiar w/ the T's, back in the days of early flight/space sims you had a similar radar setup, with lines of a grid telling you how much higer than you another play/bot was... hated that system

the chevrons look ok, but kinda small and fat from the snapshots... thinner or larger would have helped, but they are logically easir to decipher, up means up, down means down, the t's were kinda worthless w/o length to know how far anyways

not sure if I'll be happy about the friends being in yellow thing... I always go stealth and contact my friends when I'm free to hang out, or they ping me via IM, .... now if they happen to see a yellow dot me, they'll feel obliged to investigate, and poof one more level of privacy and peace when I'm working on something just evaporated

That'd be nice....if it was on my viewer *sighs and listlessly throws another rock at LL*

For the feedback I'm seeing though, the majority don't do flight/combat radars as much as I do apparently *snickers*. Well, I can live with chevrons, but would like them to be a bit more...detailed? Pronounced? *shrugs* I wanna be able to SEE them and not have to spend time squinting.

And yeah, I realise a lot of people never even use thier min-maps. I run security, so it is an invaluable tool. Not even Lindens can hide from the mini-map, heh.

Ah well *goes back to her buisness* Thanks for all the replies.

~Jessy

I would report it as a bug if you are not seeing the outline/shadow. Could be a system thing. What kind of computer are you using?

Here is what the outlined chevrons look like.

For both the T and the V, it's one of those things where many people can only imagine one interpretation, but there really are two, both valid. It's kind of like one of those optical illusions, where some people might first see a pretty woman and others an old hag. So changing from T to the V or vice versa is pointless, you just wind up confusing a different set of people in the same way. Making an option would have been easy, and kept everyone happy, but then you wind up with creeping optionitis.

The problem is that the symbols only convey relative direction, but they don't convey anything about starting point. The T says that something is above something. But are you above the other av? Or vice versa? A V says you have to go down. Do you have to go down to the other av? Or vice versa? Or maybe the V also says something above something? Maybe something below something?

No matter what you choose, some people aren't going to get it at first. There's going to be a group of people who have to climb a learning curve, which could take days or months. Some may never really get it. I doubt it's even worth doing the worldwide usability testing needed that would justify such a choice. The Ts were there, and unless there's some usability research they haven't told us about, changing them is a mistake - in spite of the fact that some people will be made happy.

By the way, the same sort of problem existed with Windowing interfaces when they first appeared. Does dragging the slider drag the content of the window up and down? Or does it drag the window - the microscope onto the page - up and down? There's no right answer.

i have to vote 'i like' the new chevrons - the Ts were awfully big on the minimap; crowds really made an ugly looking blob... overall just 'reads easier' to me. maybe there's a debug menu to revert them, i dunno...:\ i wonder if the design/ui of the minimap would be customizable in the future framework? (or build your own client and revert to Ts? more effort than that's possibly worth, of course:\)

I find the chevrons are *much* easier to see, against the light blue background of stuff you own. With the Ts, I couldn't even see they were there, let alone if they were above or below.

About the yellow colour for friends - I like that idea but this morning the yellow wasn't working. Did last night's random restart put an end to the yellow glyphs?

-Atashi

Jessica, you're not alone... see my thread on the same topic:

/327/89/221969/1.html

and here is the JIRA for it:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2808


I can certainly appreciate the black outlines on the new glyphs, but that could be done on the T's just as easily. I personally prefer the T's, but could accept the V's if their size was increased. Right now they are the same size as the "same altitude" dot, and look identical to it and eachother if you are not looking directly at the mini-map. The T's were a different size and shape from the dots, which made them very easy to visually distinguish even out of the corner of my eye.

As this is entirely a client-side rendering, I feel the user should be given the option to choose between the two.

The probability of me being in minimap range of someone in my friends list I hadn't notice the color coding.