Floating Text

I have been providing floating text on most of my vendor boxes, to provide customers with easy access to basic information like product name, description, permissions, cost.

I know that floating text has drawbacks, and recently it appears to have a bug where everything that used to be broken up into 2 or 3 lines of text, is now showing up as one long line of text. So am debating if I should stop using it.

What do you think?

1. Floating text helps me find what I'm looking for.

2. Floating text is ugly and annoying.

3. It makes no difference to me.

They recently broke most scripts that use llSetText. Removing the "\n" newline character.

Why there has not been outrage expressed by anyone yet I don't know. I mean they did just completely destroy a large amount of content on the grid.

Say again, LL just destroyed a large percentage of all content on the grid. And no one cares

it's like a lot of things in SL well RL for that matter to much and it loses it's effect.

can't stand shopps that have everything floating you cant read anything then it's all flaoting over top of each other

I care, I found it very annoying to discover another Linden created bug. Not to mention all the work I will have to do to fix all of my vendors.

So THAT'S why I have vendor boxes with 11-meters wide floating text! Is there a "fix this" Jira I can waste my time voting for?

Also, do they post the bugs they've created like this somewhere on the web? When the rotation script became borked a few months ago, I had to ask a billion people what I did wrong, only to discover it was not my fault. (Yes, I have guilt issues.)

It's fixable, just reset the script.

/me votes that it's useful. But, like all things, it's annoying when over-used. Having floaty text on every object in a crowded store gives me a headache.

It is bad that the \n's got removed from floaty text. Kinda surprising that nobody on the beta grid spotted the problem...

Agree with Meade, floating text everywhere is a pain and it can be intrusive on your neighbours but it is useful.

1. Floating text helps me find what I'm looking for. [Check]

2. Floating text is ugly and annoying. [Check]

I'll add:

3. Hundreds of "informational" textures that take 8 minutes to load is beyond annoying.

Floating text isn't elegant, but it's a lot more efficient than textures in cases where information needs to be conveyed to a customer about a product.

I think the reason there hasn't been all that much of an outcry over this bug is that floating text is usually fairly dynamic. As soon as you set a new text, or reset the script, the linebreaks appear correctly.
It's only an issue for those instances where you set a text big enough to need linebreaks and walk away, never to change it again. (And frankly, in most of those cases, it probably rarely matters whether it's a *vertical* or a *horizontal* wall of text on the screen.)

As for my answer: Floating text looks out of place, overlaps badly, and often goes through walls. It has it's uses, but product information in the landscape is not one of them. To me, floating text vendors say, "I couldn't be arsed to draw a nice presentation." It's the SL equivalent of the <BLINK> tag.

The breaking of newlines in floating text was a 'feature' of the last failed server rollout.
As posted above, resetting the script fixes it on the fly. A server restart after the rollback should also have fixed it.

Used wisely, floating texts are useful.
Packed densely, they are a complete pain.
Right up against a property boundary they are pure grief/inter-resident_dispute, as they shine right through solid textures.

The only answer for a neighbour who won't move their vendors away from the boundary is a massive array of your own floating texts (with long lines of text) on your side.

Unfortunately no, a mere restart would not help.
Floating text is a persistent prim property, just like size and color. This was what the failed server version mangled, probably when loading it into memory when restating (and then storing the mangled version when backing up/shutting down), not the displaying of it, so the information about the linebreaks was irrevocably lost.
I'd imagine that an actual rollback of the *sim* to a backed-up version before the error would fix it, but those are not done lightly.

My feeling as well. Floating text is useful to help guide you while the pictures are taking forever to download.

Yep.

/me wonders what they did to cause this problem, and if they were trying to close some attack vector..

Oh THANK YOU!!!!

I have visions of a mountain of spaghetti code, in which any change could cause a domino/butterfly effect in the most unexpected places.
Your suggestion gives me a hope to grasp on - the theory that they actually deliberately went anywhere near the lines of code that serve up the floating text.

QFT. I really hate the look of floating text, and try to keep it sparing. But I also spent a year on SL with a slow computer (before getting my current zippy graphics monstrosity), and I know full well that informational text (set as a texture) is frustratingly slow to rez for many.

So, as a shop owner, I have a few set texts over the top sellers, and disable it on the rest. Walking into a shop with a forest of bright white "CLICK HERE BUY THIS!!!!!!" texts would drive me away, I don't expect my customers to react much differently.

LOL..

Well, I don't know that it's not mountains of carbs but for _only_ \n's to get removed from floaty text sorta makes me think they added something to go through every prim in a sim and strip out characters that didn't look kosher. This doesn't seem like something they'd spend time doing unless there was a reason for it.

While I'm wondering what happened, it'd be interesting to know if anybody used literal tabs (\t) in floaty text and if that got whacked, too.

A while back you could inject HTML on the transactions history page by writing it in an object's description, so it's not unheard of to do such attacks.

when I still had a store I had a collision script at the entrance to turn on floating txt for 15 mins, plenty of time, then it would go away till triggered again. I did it for neighboring shops so mine didnt bleed into their stores.

I agree with the above.

--Hugsy

It is a necessary evil.

floating text should be used sparingly.

i see the need for it on landmark givers, so you know what the box is for. other than that, i find it to be an eyesore.

i hate to see it in my mall. it's a deal-breaker beyond a LM-giver that must be centered so it can't bleed thru the walls, and any other use is against my mall TOS, as far as i'm concerned.

i especially hate going to someone else's mall and trying to shop, and having the vendor next door's floating text bleed through the walls. i won't even bother to shop. it's hard to figure it all out, and it's an eyesore!

I agree, give us something that works better and we will use it. Like the ability to write on prims that does not involve creating textures, using a reasonable set of fonts, sizes and colours would be a great start.

If they could just keep the floating text from showing through opaque prims, most of the problems with floating text would be solved.

Placing of prims is important, avoiding this problem can be done though. I know, I do it often enough.