Please welcome Howard Linden!

80% of regions are privately owned, and privately owned regions dropped at an annualized rate of 90% in November.

You can thank your boss for throwing you to the angry mobs that he created.

80% of regions are privately owned, and privately owned regions dropped at an annualized rate of 90% in November.

Howard can thank his boss for throwing him to the angry mobs that M created.

Ah yes.

Howard: Windlight made the Alpha Sorting problem much much worse. If it's at all possible, figure out how to fix this. Please. Please. Oh, and please see if you can convince Runitai to bring his lovely depth-sensitive water back. Mmm-hmmm...

The ability to log in and not bee seen as online by the entire world.

Investigating and responding promptly to AR's, taking action when possible over frivolous or vindictive reports and explaing to customers why an action has been taken promptly, in non Kafka esque language. Give customers a chance to explain their side of the story. A lack of manpower is no excuse for this not happening. Hire the staff or do away with the idea totally.

A method for the average user to report bugs other than JIRA. It is not user friendly for the non technical person.

Have more of a presence in world, see what is going on. Use your product, on machines that your customers are likely to use. Again, not enough staff? Too bad. That's your problem, it's your product. Support it.

More Cowbell

*kudos for at least having a proper first name , Howie. The initial only thing may look hip and edgy and all, but it just puts more distance between you and your customers.

Speaking of water, I'd like to be able to have my camera right at the boundary between air and water, so we see the air view and the water view at the same time, like we used to be able to do, or like one can do in other virtual worlds.

Also, I note that there is a "Howard Linden" in LinkedIn, which is not Howard Look, apparently. I bet he gets a bunch of connection request now from the metaverse crowd.

Might as well ask for a No-Gradients skin, where all the text foreground is in high contrast to the text background, and the text background is a uniform, non-shaded, non-gradient background, where there is no part of the interface that has dark dark gray text on a black background, or any other similarly dimwitted illegible color scheme.

And independently adjustable, change-em-on-the-fly font sizes for different parts of the interface.

And we can send people an email postcard - why not let us send a plain email with attached images of our choice? Email a notecard?

Let us import our facebook, myspace, beebo, twitter, etc. contacts into our friends list.

Gray textures.

Are you going to let some of us evaluate this new user interface long before you spring it on us? Some of us are trustworthy and abide by NDAs you know.

Don't worry, in 1.22RC1 they're black, except sometimes they're white, and sometimes clear. It's the amazing texturecolor dreamcoat, in monochrome.

Please fix the numerous texture handling bugs that have contributed to steadily declining texture performance since Windlight.

My user experience goes negative when I log on or switch sims and have to wait 30 seconds and up for things to stop being predominately gray.

I'm thinking right now of features that would benefit teachers and their students:

1. Make Landmarks work like a browser's bookmarks.

Landmarks *seem* to emulate a web browser's Bookmarks feature. Landmarks have the right name, and they store the right kind of info. There are just a few things missing that would make the Landmarks feature more quickly understood, more quickly useful:

a. Landmarks Menu - many users are accustomed to finding their Bookmarks in a menu. Some like to organize them, re-order them, delete them, etc. You can still use the Inventory for most of those functions, but you should consider offering a Landmarks Menu, and possibly an interface screen that lets your users re-order, rename, group, move and copy their Landmarks.

b. Landmark Shortcut Keys - you should set a keyboard shortcut that creates and saves a Landmark instantly, asking the user nothing, but possibly making a sound or visual change that signals, "Yes, you just saved a Landmark". If I could, I'd set it to CTRL-D, keeping different OSes in mind, of course.

c. Landmarks have a "My Notes" box - Much as a Second Life user can write private notes that seem to attach to another avatar's profile, each Landmark should have a "My Notes" field that never, ever gets copied to any other avatar's screen, even if you share that Landmark with other avatars. The "My Notes" field is important - users benefit when they can make a note such as "Here's where I found friendly teachers".

d. Sharing Landmarks Easily - On the Landmarks menu I propose, place a choice near the top that says something like "Share Landmarks". When users choose that, their Inventory opens but, in addition, you offer some interface design that makes it very clear, and very simple, for users to give a copy of a Landmark (only a copy, always a copy)

e. Landmarks Look Like Something in-world: Consider settling on one standard 3D model that would represent any Landmark that's dropped from a user's Inventory into the 3D world. Perhaps a push pin, perhaps a globe. The point is to get your users to think of a Landmark as an object.

That last suggestion, e, I'm still a bit doubtful of, but the rest I suggest wholeheartedly.

Hello, Howard!
The Question:
What sorts of benefits to your experience of Second Life, via the viewer, would you dream up for someone with Howard Linden’s background?
Additional landscaping 1 prim content (e.g. trees, shrubs, grass / please do not replace the original content)
In addition to landscaping content, how about animate and inanimate objects (e.g. animals, insects, static objects, shadows etc)
Move the map button into the search feature function
Create a web browser tab under the search feature function (at present I type http://insertURLhere.com followed by loading the local chat window and clicking the URL to access the viewers web browser)
Un-clutter the bottom menu or have the option to either show the menu buttons you prefer or undock certain buttons
Similar to gestures, add emoticons or user specific characters (e.g. webdings and wingdings)
Transparent background for bottom menu bar
Revise viewer sounds
Have the option to display only your first name
Add a text to speech component with selectable or customizable speech attributes
When using voice add a component that allows you to customize your voice within the viewer
Make an official Linden Dollar texture
Have the ability to customize agent energy particles or replace with a user selected texture/particle
Add either a secondlife.com or support.secondlife.com tab to the search feature function
Revise viewer pie menus
Add permissions to inventory filters (e.g. sort by modify, copy and transfer content)
RSS feed into viewer
Not to exclude but with land tools how about setting a ban limit relating to avatar render cost (e.g. </= 50 cost allows access to land)
Review previous JIRA submissions regarding the UI

I think SL has majorly overlooked immense community potential by ignoring the massive power of social networking tools.

Why is the profile system not like Facebook?

Profiles should be a combination of blog, scrapbook and social network. People should be leaving notes on each others profiles, organising events, leaving pictures etc. Groups should also tie into this system as communities.

I've seen it. They all suck big time.

Here's what I propose instead: The world is there when you look at it. That's what it said on the secondlife.com site when I joined. It was almost sort of true back then.

Ah well, one can just turn off surface patch, volume, characters, and particles and that fixes most of the problem.

Incidentally, is being on the team that did the foundation work that led to VRML really something one wants to put on their resumé? VRML was supposed to usher in the metaverse, to become the 3D internet, but didn't, right? It still has it's fans and uses but didn't quite live up to the expections of it's proponents.

Ooh, ooh, one big one I forgot. Sorry if it got mentioned in the interim (I'll go back later and read the couple of long detailed "UI revamp" posts):

- Draw the movable UI widgets to the screen with a different mechanism such that they can be moved outside the main viewer window, to a second monitor for example.

How about a server-side 3D virtual room for keeping the inventory instead of the old 1D tree structure, sort of a local mini sim without most of the usual sim functionality. It could also be used as an orientation room for new residents, where they could learn things before going out into the unreal world.

Some people mentioned better avatar meshes. If you wnat to just improve the look of the current model, that's possible, but adding new models for critters and such would require server side changes as well, since avatar appearance is really a vector of morph weights stored on the server. You'd have to add more morphs, which would increase the vector size. Not a big change, but your talking database changes.

I'm working on a mesh/morph .obj import/export mod to the viewer. If you're interested, keep an eye on http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6199 I'll post a patch there soon. Note that this will only change the way you see all avatars, since all meshes are local, but it'll give the creative types out there something to play with.

Mike

Good post, I wish I'd written that.

However, there is perhaps a problem: Facebook, myspace, bebo, etc. use 2D interfaces to connect people. 2D is one D short. Second Life is supposed to be a 3D system. If we had a good 2D system built in to the interface people might ignore the 3D world and use the 2D system to communicate. This is apparently what most people who try SL choose to do already.

I'm not sure I understand how that was more true in 2003, before occlusion, then it is now.

It's in the map. Having it show the folder hierarchy under your landmarks folder would be a nice improvement. Creating a new user interface for managing your landmarks... please, no, we already have that.

Hi Howard. It's good to have you onboard.

Inventory interface improvements are something everyone will benefit from. Two I would like to see are:

1) Cut & Paste (we have copy & paste but that only does half the job -- being able to *cut* something to paste it elsewhere eliminates many unneeded duplicates and/or gnashing of teeth trying to drag it where we want or wrestling with multiple inventory windows that don't always update properly).

2) Inventory Preview! Open a preview of ANY inventory item in a small window with the ability to zoom and rotate it (if it's an object). This would not only save a lot of time and be significantly easier than rezzing items in-world in order to check them, but would also reduce sim resources.

I think some things worked better when there only 30 people online.

It certainly seems better so far as gray textures go in my memory. Too bad I didn't make video clips back then. Of course, it was all new and miraculous seeming back then. Not having a flight aid at the very start probably helped too. And no point to point teleporting. Arrive at a telehub and you see telehub textures which were still in your cache. Fly out at the incredibly slow default flying rate and the world might well get there before you get to it. Seems like we didn't have the exact same bandwidth cap system we have now, and we had some choices of how to allocate bandwidth use that we don't have anymore. Plus, there just wasn't so much stuff, and probably a lot higher percentage of textures were done with the default textures.

I still don't know exactly what causes the delay. Is it purely a matter of waiting for the textures to download, or is one waiting any significant length of time with gray textures displayed after the textures have arrived?

I could probably check my Snapzilla pics and see when I went on my binge of posting gray texture pictures. Before that it must not have been bothering me so much.

This may seem like a bit of a flip response to the question, but I do mean it in all earnest. I'd like to see more attention to the mac side. Stability and performance are major issues, performance has been an ongoing issue since macs had the ability to run windows, and run comparison on the same hardware. I know only so much can be done, since the underpinnings of 3D in OSX aren't all that great, but I do believe there is some room for improvement.

Stability is a much more serious problem. Since windlight became mainstream early this year, I've had nothing but problems with the release viewers on a MacBook pro, and I know others are reporting the same kinds of issues. Second Life will lock solid sometimes for thirty seconds at a time, giving another five seconds of movement, and then lock up again. This wouldn't be such a problem, if it didn't freeze the entire system during it's tantrums, making it impossible to do anything in the meantime, or even forcibly terminate the process.

Anyway, thanks I'm glad to have been a part of Second Life long enough to see it evolve. I look forward to further evolution, as the backend infrastructure gets a kick in the pants with the fibre ring, and stability is enhanced. Seems like things are only gaining momentum from here on out ^^

Cheers

CCC

Most Computers runs on windows, so for a new virtual world it's easier to make one viewer for one OS only.

The next point is, that the most graphic card drivers for linux aren't that good, even the 3D support. I like linux and i work daily with it, but not as a desktop environment. As a server linux is nearly perfect for any kind of server you need, but the whole desktop environment from linux is still beta - but thats my opinion only.


A good question, hopefully anyone can give a answer

A mix between Second Life and twinity would rock.

I got there around 1.6. No point to point teleporting. You arrived at a telehub and you waited 10 minutes for all the dead-end boxes pretending to be stores to rez. The grey textures weren't so bad because they weren't grey, they were the texture called "smoke", translucent, and didn't obscure stuff. Just changing the loading texture to an opaque one made the experience amazingly worse. I don't know why they did it, it didn't help anything, and I wish they'd roll it back.

Both of these. Once you got away from the telehubs it wasn't nearly so bad, and you could watch stuff rez ahead of you.

I'll bet it was when they started screwing with the loading texture. Going from smoke to grey was REALLY nasty. Howard... if you do nothing else, PLEASE get that rolled back.

- Please fix the bug that makes two (or more) prims with transparancy, placed behind each other, causing a visual problem. They fight together to be seen first.

- A real nasty thing for clothmakers is, that the colours used for textures on the avatar body dont match with the exact same colour on prims. You always have to make the colour of the prims a little darker the then clothes worn directly on the skin, and then you still can never be sure it works out right in surroundings with different light.
So please make the match between the colours in body textures and prim textures more equal.

- Let the system recognise copybots and block them.

- It would also be interesting to have more possibilities with non-prims clothes. For example: make it possible to give a friend acces to your clothes, like you can give a friend acces to your objects. Or make it possible to use scripts in non-prims clothes.

i'd definately like to see improvements to the inventory. when you build, create (and buy) clothing, make furniture, and create sculptures and artwork, and run a business...well, i think you'll begin to understand how managing a HUGE inventory can be daunting. there's GOT to be a way to organize that doesn't require opening layers of windows and i need more control over the organization in order for it to be useful. btw, my "recent items" has never worked--ever--so, after creating an outfit, for example, i have to scroll down to the name of it. with 100,000 inventory items (as organized as they can possibly be), it takes forEVer to find, after taking forever to load.

i would also like to be allowed to be in more groups, though i know that's not an interface issue. ; )

Can something be done to make things more managable when talking in IM to several people, while talking in public and having shoe huds and walk huds and radar and umpty-nine other huds open, to make things easier to max/minimize and/or scroll through? sometimes i can barely see my screen!