Warning: Emerald and Shapes

By anti-poke are you referring to the ability to teleport to the location of an avatar found on the built-in radar? If so I'm 9,999,999% in favor of such a feature. I still believe this is absolutely irresponsible to be placed in the hands of any old person who comes along and decides they want it.

While I can see the value for some situations like enabling estate managers to handle unwelcome behavior on their estates, I think the potential for inappropriate uses of it is far more likely to be the reality than the good uses.

Perhaps they should move the ability to be mapped entirely over to the server side so that clients like this cannot come along and tell us that we are no longer able to determine things that Linden Lab has already authorized us to decide for ourselves.

You don't need the Emerald viewer to do this, you can script it easily enough... there are dozens of rapid-move-to-camera scripts out there. They're MORE effective than Emerald's teleport because they don't respect teleport blocks.

It *is*. This isn't mapping, this is just what the sim has to provide to show avatars in range of your camera.

Even if it was sim side then it still wouldn't do you any good because a script would accomplish the same thing (if more clumsily by chatting a SLurl or by opening the map). Add RLV's "forced teleporting" though and you have a script solution that would do exactly the same thing.

Which doesn't mean that's it alright to just add anything that is possible without wondering whether or not the primary usage is convenience, or primarily annoying/harmful.

Part of the problem is LL only half-implementing features as well; the best example would be "Show online/offline". All you have to do is look at a group someone is in, or use a script (or IM them but at least then you'd know someone was trying to see if you're online). If a third-party viewer adds a feature that exposes someone's online status regardless of what their settings are then you can wonder whether or not they should and that's a useful discussion in and by itself, but personally I wonder why in the about 2 years after they added that checkbox LL still hasn't gotten around to implementing it properly (show offline is show offline and that should include groups, scripts and IM).

The "code of conduct" blog post about third party viewer was probably aimed directly at concerns like this, although they're likely to get lost in all the shouting back and forth about open vs closed source and content theft and people's personal grievances.

In this specific case, if you wanted to hide your presence from people in the same sim and neighbouring sims then you'd need the ability to:
- hide yourself from scripts completely (sensors, llGetObjectDetails, llKey2Name, etc)
- prevent yourself from showing up on other people's minimap since as long as your dot is there they could simply fly up/down and look for you the hard way

While obviously useful to anyone, it would also create a rather bad anti-privacy feature because someone could be hovering 19m away from you to eaves-drop on your chat without you having any way of knowing they're there.

Exactly right. In fact, the only way it makes sense to be able to hide one's online status is in conjunction with (an extreme implementation of) "privacy pockets"--such that while one is inside that pocket, nobody who is outside it can know anything about your current status, nor see you on the map or anywhere else.

If the existence of these pockets is tied to the land (as it surely would be), then "invisible spying" from a pocket would be limited to nearby land not owned by the target of the spying. This does suggest, however, that the extent of "privacy pockets" should be detectable to outsiders, so one could at least know that such a potential spy perch exists in the area.

All completely hypothetical and tangential to the thread, of course.

That kind of thing would have to be reflexive: when you were in the pocket you must not be able to see out of it. Which is why I wanted to put them at -1024 meters or at least at +3000.

No. I'm referring to the Emerald dev named Hyang and her affinity for poking people. She's got a gesture that she likes a little too much, IMO.

/me doesn't care about the radar TP thing.

Cripes, some people.

Modular Systems has done more to improve the SL viewer than anyone since Nicholaz Beresford, and FAR more, in FAR less time, than LL ever has.

And some people complain that the features are coming out "too fast and too untested."

The shape bug is a minor annoyance, and there are at least two workarounds. Don't use breast physics, or turn them off before you edit your appearance; and make a backup of your shape. Is that so flippng hard?

At least Modular Systems TELLS people about stuff like this. It was posted right away on their blog, WITH a notice and a link to the blog right on the login screen.

GO GREEN. GO EMERALD. You know you want to.

Quoted for truth!

Gosh, nothing like coming along and ruining all our whining fun.

The quote doesn't sound like me, but I did suggested pretty much the same thing. The point is that, when something is done too quickly, it's easy to overlook something that matters - like the shape oversight. When a lot of things are done too quickly, then it's easy to overlook multiple things that matter. The shape oversight was found (I wonder if finding it cost someone their shape) but are there any other oversights lurking somewhere? It's not a good idea to press on too quickly.

*POKES!*

"Experimental breast physics"

Damn, I'm going to have to get a new line, now that someone else has cottoned onto it

D'oh!!

Actually i think Nicholaz is on their team..I heard someone mention it or read it on one of the forums..
I know hearing that really made me get it even faster
It's a great viewer..and even though some of the things may not work yet..it's nice to see the direction they want to go with it..And if Nicholaz is on the team then i trust it
I actually look forward to the releases to see what new candy is on there..it's like christmas

Has anyone had much joy with Emerald's export/backup from inventory? I have my prefs set to export object properties, contents and textures. I've just been playing with it and managed to export some scripts that I wrote, but it failed to export objects with contents where both objects and contents are 100% my own creations, and it doesn't export either animations or textures - of my creation and uploading.

I haven't had any joy with exporting a rezzed object with contents either, even though everything is 100% my own. It actually exported a few files, but failed to fully import them again - and what it did import, it placed in Trash.

Rushing ahead with too many things too quickly?

So when was the last time LL came up with a useful client modification? Somebody has to friggin do them.

There's some extremely good stuff in Emerald. I sang the praises of the temporary uploads not many days ago, but I don't see any sense in including things that aren't ready for inclusion, or that don't work. It gives a bad impression, y'know And the too much too quick thing came up with the very bad bug - the potential of permanently losing your shape due to putting the jiggly boobs out too soon, without thoroughly testing it - too much, too quick.

ya they had that the last version..i could only do my own scripts also..that or the ful prem free ones..i don't need them out there..i just wanted to see if it would work ..i was wanting notecards to work so i could clean my notecards folder out a lot faster than reading them all now and copy and pasting them..

i want to clean that long folder out hehehe

Did you actually spend any time trying to figure out what was special about the object that failed, reported it as a bug and worked with a developer to figure out a specific repro for the bug - if there even is a bug - so that it can get fixed?

You keep jumping to conclusions about features not being vetted enough, but generally the only person that knows whether or not they did enough testing before committing is the actual developer.

Every bug in every piece of software all over the world is something that could have been prevented if only someone had tested that specific usage case at the proper time. However, at some point there's going to be a decision that as much testing as is useful is done and that it's time to turn over the code to other people (ie other Emerald devs and beta testers) and eventually a public release.

It's also always a guarantee of not "if" but "when" - no matter how much time you spent testing - someone is going to encounter a bug. What's important then is reporting the bug and not simply assuming that it must be known because of course it has to be the result of laziness or lack of testing; and yes that may require some back-and-forth to figure out exactly why something is failing for your specifically.

well, if that's the approach no wonder it's failing. if your horizons are limited to the developer and use cases then it's a recipe for poor quality deliverables.

However, you should be able to outclass the LL IT project teams. Although I would think a 5 year old child could do that.

When I was reading your post, I decided to respond to this bit but Couldbe beat me to it so I'll leave the response to her.

I'd like it to work so I can have local copies of many of my store items. The previous version exported rezzed object fine but not their contents. I didn't even know about exporting from inventory until a couple of days ago.

No I didn't. Is there anywhere in the Emerald viewer that provides a method of reporting a bug, etc.? I ask the question because I just had a look and I don't see anything. So, if it's not there, your question is moot.

I would assume that, like the Jira system for the Second Life viewer, it would be on their website.

It probably is, Argent, so there's no reason for a user to even think of reporting a bug.

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The Emerald viewer isn't the same as the LL viewer. LL first put a new one out as a Release Candidate and loads of people use it, and find many or most of the bugs in it before it becomes the regular viewer. And there's a system for reporting bugs for those are that way inclined.

I don't think that Greenlife does anything like that, although there's no reason why they shouldn't. I've seen several posts here, suggesting that we should report bugs, but why? We are just users. Most people who use the regular viewer probably wouoldn't report a bug if they found one. Some would, but probably most wouldn't, and there's no reason to expect more from Emerald users.

According to Kitty, it's just the developer of a particular feature, and maybe a few friends, who do the job of the Release Candidate, and that's nowhere near enough, as we've seen a number of times in posts here. Perhaps Greenlife ought to consider doing a Release Candidate system.