What should Philip work on next?

Stable, well controlled database would be good.

how about this project they had about on the fly animation system?

it looks like they gave up?

Given that LL's main office is in San Francisco, there might already be a sufficient supply of joints in the headquarters.

I don't think dynamic shadows will increase my enjoyment of SL at all.

Being able to set the font size in each specific part of the interface, on the fly, would increase my enjoyment of SL.

Being able to use a better script editor would be nice, even if better just meant being able to turn off the indentation function.

An in-world sculpty editor would be fun.

Being able to paint directly on surfaces, inworld, would be nice.

Language translation built in to the interface.

Ability to exchange chat (with language translation) and images with Hipihi, Novoking, Active Worlds, OpenSim grids, etc. would be nice.

Being able to share your display with other users would be nice, even just a one-click "snapshot to object face".

Improved automatic walking and flying.

Walking or flying with just the mouse, no keys involved.

Make the collision skeleton for sculpties match their appearance.

Store our debug settings at their location so I never have to set them again.

Find a way to completely prevent Linden trees from ever appearing as solid crossed rectangles.

Make the Linden trees maintain what appears to be the same size and shape regardless of viewing distance.

Allow importation of contact lists from Facebook, Gmail, Myspace, Windows Messenger, etc.

Add all the online presence viewability options one has in normal chat programs that make sense for SL.

Text to speech for chat.

Forum style persistence for group chat, i.e, when you log in and look at a group's chat, you can see the chat that took place in the past, like you can when you log in to the Second Life forums.

Fix our lousy walk animation.

Well that's enough for the moment.

The real challenge is figuring out things that Philip would be good at, that would capture his attention.

He might prefer to let us know what's he's been working on, in the past, when it's almost finished and is likely to succeed, rather than admitting to starting work on a particular project and possibly having to report failure after working on it a while, and in the meantime having to hear all the complaints one would expect about the project while it's being worked on.

completely new avatars. i dont like the old ones, and was told 2 years ago they are working on new ones. looks like it was all just talk :-/

I would like to be able to pick up a cup of coffee and drink it, or pull a book off a bookshelf and read it, or grab something in my arms and walk around with it, without having to go through the overly complicated "take a copy to inventory and then equip it" step. Its the kind of thing we all sort of expected we'd be able to do when we enter a virtual world...

A database that can handle 250K concurrency and a plan in place to extend it to a million, nothing else means diddly without that. What good does a map do if you can't teleport?

A forum that works. Name one major application you have that does not have a support forum that is actually treated as a support forum?

Sim crossings. 'nuf said.

Thanks, Phillip!

Simply click the close box of the group chat? You'll have to do that again if you relog though, but you need not relog to rejoin it, simply open that group's IMs as if starting one.Those exist already! Have you ever tried shift-clicking to open multiple scripts at once? Voilà, tabs!Perhaps you might do this by mapping one of your mouse buttons to the forward arrow? Perhaps with Autohotkey? (Then you may simply steer yourself by clicking on your back or mouselook.) One of mine is now the alt key so I can cam-shop with my mouse alone...

Yoiks! Is Philip fast or what? I just asked for that tonight!!

TY, Crystal. Nice feature that I didn't know about. I still want more, tho - if I have multiple scripts open, it's usually scripts of two different objects. Having an option to have _one_ script window - one. period. - would be even nicer.


Yes. I know what I'd like to see done but figured that having a big list of doable things from a variety of sources would have a better chance at catching his eye/interest. Maybe I'll try to sum the thread ideas up in a notecard and send it his way in a few days or so...

Nice list, Suzanne!

Dear god, no. Hypergrid's utter disregard for IP issues is already holding back migration to OpenSim. I'm not a huge fan of OGP either, but hypergrid and its insanely simple-minded approach to scalability that spreads assets into individually owned sims is exactly the wrong direction. We could as well ask Philip to please create the next generation CopyBot.

I second this. IIRC, the project was called "Physical Avatar" and the animation bit was "Expressive Puppeteering." It would be mostly server-side, has lots of visible impact, and might be manageable in size if the old groundwork is still viable, so it could fit well with a Philip assignment.

One thing that I would love to see is a reliable method of informing residents when inworld services are borked or about to be disabled (see FJ Linden's latest post on the blog about weekend stability), and also when the all-clear can be given. Far too often these 'blue flag' notices reach some users and not others, and there surely *must* be some way of making them reach everyone. Also, if services are about to be disabled, then five and three minute warnings in advance (such as we get when a region is about to be restarted) would be great.

Looks like you missed the intruduction of the new set default avatars, they are in your library, they got prim hair too.

New avatar *mesh* not same avatar dressed differently.

I'll add extensions for Html_on_a_Prim to my previous on building and scripting tools.

The same could be said of WindLight, basic light and shade, avatars, textures, terrain, chat. The more features we have that enhance the graphics, the better the experience. Boiled down to basics, avatars could just be coloured balls and the world a flat, featureless grey sheet of graph paper!!

True. I enjoyed SL better prior to Windlight.

a new basic prim tool to shave the corners of a cube in increments, so it can have 10 faces (un-cut), top, bottom, 8 on the side, or some other useful basic prim shape?

I would like to see my hair not cut through my body when i move or by bottom poke out my skirt when i walk. And no my bums not to big

1 Doing the same speed trick with the viewer + reliability + simplify.
2 Scale it up to 1.000.000 concurrent users without a crash.
3 Serious Marketing.

In other words, hijak him for a while to come

The problem is not ban line visibility, it's ban lines, period.

We need better privacy tools, in-world, and they need to replace ban-lines.

Great mind you have Jesse !

1 Doing the same speed trick with the viewer + reliability + simplify.
2 Scale it up to 1.000.000 concurrent users without a crash.
3 Serious Marketing.

And, apart from a serious extension planning, this forum is almost Third Life and diddling with small talks and sarcasm. Should be a lot more about actual support and also users actually much more helping others

I said 'ban line visibility' to distinguish it from what the sim does when you try to go into an area you're not allowed. Especially the way vehicles behave.

If LL works on communicating better with users on where they can and can not go, I'll be happy. Doing more than fixing up the existing mostly-group-controlled methods would be, I suspect, a far bigger job but either way could be a big improvement.

I understand what you mean, and I mean something completely different.

I want to see ban lines completely eliminated and replaced with an effective and useful privacy system, instead of the mockery that we have now. Ban lines provide a poor illusion of privacy, we need the real thing.

That sounds like you're making the assumption that ban lines are ONLY for privacy.. Any plan that calls for a rework of this whole area should probably allow for people who don't mind being part of the scenery but don't necessarilty want to come home and find someone in their bed..