Please welcome Howard Linden!

What you are asking for is Realtime Raytracing. It is barely possible with stuff like Larabee (which isn't out of the development pipeline yet). You cannot do what you are asking for with a regular old 3D graphics card today, so do not expect to see any videogame using OpenRT for at least a year, and don't expect it in SL for 3 years at the earliest.

Welcome Howard!

As an island owner, I would like to be able to see the script times for individual avatars visiting my sim. This would help me locate those avatars adding to the instability. Please see my signature for the relevent JIRA article. There are also many similar proposals to that one.

Folks, keep in mind that Howard's apparently going to be working on the viewer, so things like sim stability aren't likely to be useful suggestions.

Notecard with spellcheck. Good gods, can I really use spellcheck....

If you mean my post argent, it would be a viewer function.

Ugh, no kidding. I don't bother with clothes most of the time, but when I do buy an outfit with prim parts, I often have to factor in if losing my tail is acceptable or not.

Not specifically, there were a few messages before yours that were almost 100% server side. Some of my suggestions are kind of not-viewer too... thanks for reminding me to go back and desk-check my own suggestions: just because something *has* a user interface doesn't mean it's a viewer-related change.

Nod. Your comment and Desmond Shang's comment about "not breaking stuff" are very important ones for Howard to be aware of.

I suspect it would take server work to get the required data to the viewer, though. I didn't know that attachments don't show up on the Top Scripts list. :-\ I will vote for that in JIRA.

Thanks Sedary. Yes some server work would need to be done for it, but most additions to the viewer would require some server work unless they were purely cosmetic additions I think. Take care.

My company wanted to develop a widget for SL, but I doubt we will with the economy tanking. All they know is the bad press from 2007 and that mass outside business exodus that happened last winter, so asking them to sink money into a proof of concept for SL is pretty pointless.

Anyway, I work for an experience design firm. We had a few people interested in Second Life join and then report back to us. They all said "I had no idea where to go or what to do once I was logged in." It wasn't that they couldn't play dress up or fly around, they just had no destination. They all tried the search engine and found it not specific enough.

What we brainstormed was a yelp like widget, a database of locations, stores, events, that you could submit and add descriptions, ratings and tags to. Anyone can tag content. You could search via tag, location, description, location. You could search by multiple keywords and use excludes. You could refine your search like:

garden ( japanese store park ) and after you search for garden, you can go further into it by just seeing things tagged garden and tagged Store.

It will also have GPS (it's a hud) so that when you come to an new area it will tell you all the points of interest for that sim in order of how well they are rated.

Basically we wanted to create a good search engine. The current one sucks.

Here's my priority list for Linden Lab:

1). Customer Service Improves. ALL ASPECTS

2). Stability, Stability, Stability.

3). Bug Fixes. Asset Server, Teleport Bug, LINKSET Moving Bug. These issues were introduced over a year ago, and yet they continue to be a problem. You can "talk" however you want, but ACTIONS will always speak louder. You say you are committed to making SL Relevant in our market place today? I suggest you make sure SL WORKS before any more "positioning".

4). Reward Loyalty! How many people have been in SL for more then 4 years and don't have a Lifetime Acct? These people, who have proven over time that they are LOYAL to Second Life, should be allowed to purchase ONE Lifetime Acct for themselves. The same awards as other "Charter Member" accounts should be attached as well.

5). OPEN and TRANSPARENT Communication - This was promised by Robin Harper nearly two years ago, and yet......well enough said. Improve your communication skills and you just might improve some Customer Service issues you have as well.

6). Remove the Lazy Corporate Culture at Linden Lab. People still choosing to work on what they want to? Time to grow up and be professional there at the Lab. Bug Dept., not going to work on Bug Reports that have no repro steps? Is this why the Asset Server, Teleport Bug and others aren't fixed yet? Bug Fixers going to work on whatever gets the most votes? This isn't Kindergarten Class kids, grow up, act professional, maybe when we see your example, we could follow.

7). Immediately fire ANY EMPLOYEE that bad mouths, harrasses, or Abuses any CUSTOMER. Remember BUB? And you call yourself a professional company?

. Bring back Town Halls, and remember, answer the hard questions; Town Halls are supposed to be for the benefit of the Community, not for your CEO/COB to look good.

9). Start a Virtual Linden Office where your Community can go to report issues and get help. Your Community consists of more then just your paying customers. Many Community Members are non-paying yet contribute Content for free, teach classes, etc. It's time to treat all Community Members with respect and concern.

10). Stop the propaganda machine! The Community doesn't want to hear about your fluff in the Blog. You want to put out Press Releases, put out Press Releases. The Blog should be where you communicate with the Community, NOT the press. You have a Press Office for that sort of thing, learn to use it.

11). Refund people for their OS purchases. You don't want to grandfather in the OS owners then I suggest you do something to appease them. Otherwise you will be losing a LOT of business very very soon. That's not going to look good on your stats, if you dare report the truth.

12). Stats. Quit spinning them. Get rid of BOTS, ALL BOTS. Let's see REAL numbers of concurrent users, not these BS things you keep publishing. Let's see the REAL numbers on how many UNIQUE Acct Holders there are, not total number of Accts. Quit trying to hide your numbers, show us the REAL numbers; what are you afraid of?

13). Quit suspending me for telling people your Dirty Little Secrets. There is NOTHING in the TOS that states I cannot tell people about Linden Labs attempt to show favoritism to other Residents. Don't like the truth, then stop granting Favors.

OK, that's it. Sure #13 is more of a personal request then anything else, but I'm getting a bit tired of being watched 24/7. I'm still going to tell people about your favoritism practices, until someone, say M LINDEN, comes out and states categorically that Favoritism will no longer be tolerated. Then, I'll wait and watch. Who knows, perhaps you guys will actually do what's right in that area.

That's a good point. It's hard to say what's purely cosmetic without being familiar with the viewer source code.

Changes that wouldn't require any server work:

Improved inventory.

Recognizing read-only notecards that start with <HTML> and displaying them using Gecko.

llPlantSystem() implemented using the texture hack on the discussion page of that wiki entry.

Windlight: saving multiple day cycles, uploading and downloading settings and day cycles as XML notecards.

Flexible sculpties using the alpha channel to indicate flexibility.

Overall viewer audit.

Improved mesh as an option.

A button or menu item to tell the viewer "YES, I KNOW YOU'RE WAITING FOR THAT ATTACHMENT TO DOWNLOAD, PLEASE TRY RE-DOWNLOADING MY AVATAR FROM SCRATCH AND SEEING IF YOU GET IT THIS TIME."

A menu item "save this object *created by me* as an XML file for archiving"... the equivalent of "@dump". And a matching "@restore".

Maybe even things like an inventory displaying attachment points for prims not currently attached.

Hey there new LL, employee, person / good luck with your new job / since you will be working solely on the SL client Viewer / my suggestion would be to take a good , long & hard - look at improving the current mess that we have now / whomever designed this monstrosity obviously did so when SL was in its early stages. And apparently it has been neglected for quite some time now / Give me a client side inventory that functions like a file browser in Windows - Mac or Linux that actually is easy to comprehend and use. Thank you

JayR Cela :_)

Bring in....

- http://www.speedtree.com/ (We need better trees)
- Dynamic Shadows (We need Realism)
- User uploaded Bumpmaps (Similiar to other highend games such as HL2 and UT3)
- Improved AV animations (I want a real human walk and run)

LOL okay I vote for this one. Happens to often when I am changing avatars.

Make it so, Howard.

1 - GREATLY improved avatar meshes. I'm what, the 20th person to say this? Have you seen how many Jira issues there are for this?

2 - Pixel shading instead of the awful vertex shading.

3 - Improved lighting. Shadows were moved to maintenance but when will we see them?

4 - Speedtree(tm). Or some other way of improving the trees. A greater selection of trees at least. And maybe have them change colour with the time of year, it would make christmas less of a chore.

5 - Material system. Custom bumpmaps, shaders, etc.

6 - Official Wall-E avatar.

Welcome Howard!

More ideas:


==Inventory==
In addition to search in general. Inventory search with commas. So i can write:
"Gritty kitty, hat"
and come up with all the hats I've made, instead of trying to come up with the exact name.

Search by article of clothing. You can search now by texture, objects, scripts, but what about socks and eyes?

The inventory search now works for noobies, but when you have over 40K worth of crap in there it's impossible to find things.

Texture viewing as thumbnails?? Ok that's a high hope but that would ROCK SO MUCH. Think Adobe Bridge but for the texture and snapshot folder.

Welcome Howard!

My personal wish list of things that apply to the viewer:

- re-examine the utility of the unified "Communicate" widget vs. the old-style Friends List
- arbitrary bump maps, not just the built-in ones
- make specular mapping and perhaps other shaders available to builders. Let us make stuff as cool as Linden water!
- prims block light and cast shadows
- useful animation upload preview that uses your full avatar like the Appearance Editor does. Let us specify loop points by frame numbers, not percentages.
- a way to display properties of existing animations in inventory including frame rate, number of frames, run time, priority, loop points, fade in/out times.
- a scripted means of dismissing dialog boxes

More in all likelihood as I think of them

Welcome Howard!

I thing I could see besides a new avatar mesh is... neck attachment point! I would love necklaces to attach where they should, rather than on my chin or on my chest.

A one size fits all viewer doesn't work. There was a recent attempt to change the viewer, it hid a feature many use. The feature was hidden because it is confusing to some new users. Instead of trying to be all things to all men give people an option of basic, intermediate and advanced viewers.

Oh, yes, please, if an animation is MOD let me edit it! Yes yes yes yes yes!

How about the ability to divide a parcel and change parcel settings in 3 dimensions? (this IS a 3-dimensional world, right?) This would help multi-floor buildings and skyboxes.

How about the ability to block text and voice with either special prims or a secondary parcel subdividing tool (keep the original parcel, but can break it up into secondary 'rooms' keeping chat and sound confined)

Ability to keep floating text from one parcel to intrude on another.

Oh, and a new avatar mesh with more (read lots more) attachment points. Why isn't there a 'hood', 'tattoo', or 'mask' clothing layer, why isn't there a 'neck', 'chest', 'hat', or 'genital' attachment point?

Hi Howard, welcome.

The first thing I would like to see changed is your name to Harold Linden, I think it has a better ring to it.