Please welcome Howard Linden!

Hi Everyone,

Wow, thanks for the very warm welcome and for all of the fabulous ideas. This passionate user community was one of the huge draws for me in choosing to join Linden Lab. I'm looking forward to working with you and the team at LL to help bring many of these ideas to Second Life.

Now I better get to back work. It's going to be a very busy first week...

Regards,
Howard

These sound wonderful. Particularly, I would love to see #2.

I completely second Clinton on that. There is a jira ticket on this performance problem that has been ongoing for over six months without much interest from Workinonit Linden, that silly name used by Linden Lab technicians when they have no clue or do not seem to be interested in an issue despite all the feedback they get from genuine and mostly advanced users.

The jira reference is VWR-7779 and the problem is still present after at least three releases and a myriad RCs.

And I agree with Clinton and many other Mac users that the lockups (and subsequent complete stall of the WHOLE computer) may be tracked back to the final release of the atmospheric shaders, also known as Windlight.

But LL continues to claim, directly and indirectly, that it is Apple's fault that SL does not work on a Mac now. Blaming the maker of an OS for compatibility issues when they are obviously caused by the maker of an application does not appear to be a very smart example of customer care or technical expertise and personally I do not care if anyone takes offense at my saying this. I am a customer, I paid real money for the newest Mac machines, pay LL real money for a subscription and for Linden dollars and I DEMAND a working product without having to install Windows on my Intel Mac, is that clear???

I recommend that Howard (and possibly M) should have a look at the Jira ticket I mentioned as soon as they wake up this morning. As a Mac user, I am literally at my wits' end, feeling neglected by LL and ridiculed by PC users of SL. I do not consider my SL experience joyful at all, my average login time on SL has been reduced from 18 hours a day to a mere 4 (or less if my lockups are ten in less than a minute) and I will not renew my premium subscription next year.

Sandor

Welcome Howard

for me it would be meshes that better fit smaller AVs and extra attachment points so furries can wear paws and carry stuff

My addition to the list of things that needs doing is change Howard's posting colour to Linden Orange!

Hope this oversight isn't a sign of things to come

A few ideas I haven't seen mentioned yet:

Ability to landmark a place without actually going there! This would be very useful for those situations where I've found an item I love, but don't have time to go buy it right at that moment.

Clicking a SLURL gives you a landmark, as it does now, but then you can save that LM to inventory.

Land-wide/sim wide object and script search. I have a nanoprim on my land that poofs particles that I've been trying to get rid of for months, but I can't find it.

More levels of authority on the parcel and estate level. For example, an Estate Assistant level, with the ability to estate ban, and maybe return objects, but nothing else. Also, the ability to have two or more people with full Estate Owner powers on a sim. Allow a parcel to be owned by two people - this would cut down on excess groups created by couples for land purposes.

Already mentioned, but additional thoughts:

Greatly expanded profiles! I would really like Business, Work, and Personal tabs, with plenty of room for including needed information. For people like myself who run a company in SL, under the business tab, there could be fields for business name(s), a staff/contact list, rules and policies, upcoming events, and latest products. The Work tab could be for those who are employees of a company (dancers, hosts, etc.) to post their pictures, rates, and work schedule. Personal could have fields for interests and hobbies, what kind of people you'd like to meet, friend shout-outs, Partner tributes. All profile fields where other avatars would be listed should have myspace-style linked names and pics - clicking the person's name takes you to their profile.

Opening boxes without having to rez them! Being able to view and edit the contents of a prim without rezzing it.

The texture picker window has been AWFUL since the latest viewer update. It causes the whole viewer to freeze for 30 seconds. Texture loading is incredibly slow now, too.

More group slots, please. I know this isn't strictly viewer related, but it's essential for social networking. 50 groups would probably be enough. Also, fix group chat!

Newbie experience stuff:

Any tutorial needs to include info on how to: sit/use poseballs, attach and detach items from your avatar, open boxes, create notecards, give items to other avatars, and to left click on everything to find out what it does! Also, teach them how to put payment info on file, and give them a one-time L$ reward for buying L$ if they do so within a week of registering. It will cost you a tiny amount but you will make that investment back in spades.

A basic etiquette guide to what is considered polite and rude in SL. For example, it's ok to ask questions, many people are helpful, but don't beg for L$. Explaining to them that SL is a world, not a game; some people make a RL living here, so if they have a job in SL, they need to be responsible and work hard just as they would for an RL job, they need to pay their rent on time, and not lie/cheat/steal etc. just because they feel powerful and anonymous. Also, and I'm not sure how one would do this in a tasteful manner, but some newbies need to know that SL is not all about sex. Some people live out their sexual fantasies here, yes, but walking around non-sex areas with your new prim penis on and propositioning strangers is as inappropriate here as it would be in RL.

That's all I have for now. Welcome Howard, I appreciate your enthusiasm!

Oh yes, the old "axehandle shoulderblades".

Seconded
extra attachment points on hands would be wonderful (RightPalm, LeftPalm?)

also a fix for the alpha textures overlapping all the time would save me some headaches

I'd be most happy with just those two

Welcome, Howard.

A very general request: With any changes to the viewer, please consider how it can be integrated with in-world scripts. With your background, you'll probably be astonished at how minimal the SL scripting capabilities are, and the elaborate and excruciating effort scripters expend trying to do anything useful with what little is available. Notably, there's nothing whatsoever that a script can do to affect (or even read) viewer-side controls. But despite that limitation, there's a lot that can be done. One extraordinarily simple step is outlined in http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6639, "Provide scriptable use of skinned UI textures (for HUDs)."

That specific jira is far from the most important, but it's illustrative of a whole class of missing functionality: script access to viewer settings and controls.

when dropping an image into a notecard, rather than including a link to the image asset, it would be a LOT more useful for the image to display IN the notecard.

Honestly, how about BBcode support for notecards? There's a whole suite of [img]andand type commands in bbcode, a code that is a defacto standard in forum software on the web. A two-tab interface on a notecard that allows you to view the "published" and "unparsed" formats.

This would solve a lot of the notecard requests, to be able to embed clickable urls, images, etc.. while potentially allowing us to pull assets not only from inworld, but from the WWW as well. [img]could contain a UUID for an inworld texture, or a URL for a web based texture.

Profile:

Rather than "adding tabs" to the profile, how about giving us a tool to completely build our profiles tab-by-tab, with whatever layout and names we like. Some tabs, like "Picks" for example, are relegated to photo albums, while others use them as a sort of FAQ regarding their stores.. and still others use them to advertise favourite places.

Let me decide what information I want to display on my profile, and what information I don't want to tell people. Perhaps a single web-based profile that we can set the URL of ourselves, and edit from a webpage on the secondlife.com site using igoogle style modules and tabs? With perhaps an option to decide we'd rather use our own remotely hosted profile (myspace, whatever) rather than the SL profile.

Take a look at the webtab on my profile, inworld..

They're working on shadows, if you use google, look for kirstens viewer and the shadowdraft. it's LL code and still in early beta but it does work on a good machine.

The ideas posted in these pages demonstrate that despite Linden Lab's propensity to repeatedly stomp all over customer relations with hobnail boots, the user community nevertheless keeps SL's best interests at heart and willingly, trustingly engages with LL when asked.

Unfortunately, the seeds for ignoring any or all suggestions in these pages have already been sown by Mark Kingdon.

Let's look at the key statement:

"Now we begin the hard work of redesigning the menu structures and tool layouts .... so that it can accommodate the design changes we are making."

This to me suggests that LL have already determined the core changes that are to be made to the viewer, and it is now about the cosmetics of how these changes will look on-screen, rather than building-in further changes.

So, while admitting I'm being perhaps overly cynical here (or perhaps not), I'd say that unless any of the changes suggested in these pages, (as worthy as they are) happen to hit something LL has already determined for the viewer - then it's really not worth getting too excited about this "opportunity"... as suggestions will be duly noted, filed and ... put to one side for "future consideration"....

Perhaps the only interesting element in Kingdon's comment (which I admittedly left from the above) is "... and modularizing the code base ...". Dusan Writer has already highlighted the possible gem hidden in these words AND asked for clarification....which we're still waiting for. So on this matter - over to you, Howard.

NOW???

Welcome Howart into our dream lands.

As it is well known today, what makes the success of Second Life is the ability for users to create their own buildings and landscapes, and also their own groups and social life.

This ability is achieved by a unique set of tools, without which SL will lose any interest.

What also makes the success of Second Life is that this ability is provided in a totally transparent way regarding our opinions, philosophies, ways of life, tastes, financial abilities, etc.

SL may gain new applications in business and industry. But NEVER forget that its main use will remain being our dreams land. And of OUR dreams, not somebody else's dream. Remove only one word from above, and SL will take the great plunge, like Lively from Google, and for exactly the same reason.

Recently, with the crackdown on openlands, SL suffered a heavy blow, which strongly weakened its position. Please bring back confidence.

My proposals for bettering SL are in the JIRA reporting forum, please check them.

(please note that I cannot follow a large thread like this one. If somebody replies to me, please tell me in world)

Create 2 viewers or 2 viewer states:

Basic. For newbies/consumers without any building options and advanced features, extremely simple and self-explanatory. The viewer is still too complicated for a newbie with no prior experience in either PCs, chatting or driving a game-style avatar. 4 buttons are enough, plus teleport home, buy, open box.

Advanced. For experts/content creators with all the advancec features we know, that allows to import/export mesh models from pro 3d software like MAX.

Welcome aboard to Howard Linden! A terrific add to the team!

nL

- agreed. the current linden trees look very 1998 and have horribly aligned LODs which pop in too early. and are performance hogs ontop of that (up the tree LOD distance in the debug settings and watch those FPS go dooooown)

- its in the workings, but of course, comes with a significant performance cost, but I like the way it goes, the alpha viewer runs decently on my system for what it is. Im impressed

- no. just no. already SL has long rez times because of the hundreds of megabytes of textures in each sim, and bumpmaps and other additional maps could easily raise the texture amount by 20 to 50%, depending on how much it will be used. its a nice idea, but will definitely cause a TON of database clogging due to all the extra files. so unless a specially optimized compression for greyscale bumpmaps is coming, Im against the plan for now

- yes Id like to see that. a nice generic set of animations, and a non-benny hill run/walk anim etc. Im saying generic because a) you want to hit everyones tastes kind of, and b) you dont want to hit the AO industry /too/ much. not saying it should be low-class anims, but they should indeed be generic to give people a solid starting point without looking ridiculous as AO-less avies

points I would like to add:
- the viewer redesign should really be considered together with both new AND experienced residents, instead of letting big spaceship bang away at it and see what comes out. remember that its made for your several hundred thousand residents, not the handful of people at big spaceship. people have to USE this viewer, and will be extremely touchy if a redesign is forced onto them (remember the first iterations of dazzle.. - and this was only a skin, not a change of useability)

- new avatar mesh with better UV layout. this is so badly needed. after looking at the mesh in 3dsmax, I wanted to facepalm at the horrible UV stretching (the uv seams around the ankle area just frankly made me want to bap whoever made them in the back of the head. theres barely a way to do more obvious stretching. the shells dont line up properly and other fun things. what is needed is a new and fully compatible av mesh/uv layout. the latter shouldnt be much of a problem in theory, since you could just use a secondary UV channel which is aligned to the old layout for compatibility, and all skin/cloth assets created before the introduction date use the secondary channel. combining old and new clothes during texture baking will result in the baked texture being transfered fully to the new layout - its fully possible to do so! - maybe even allow residents to run a conversion on the textures they own, to the new layout, to reduce the amount of access to legacy assets (like LSL scripts, for example. there needs to be a way to recompile to mono even for no-mod scripts, or something. otherwise we will be stuck with a high percentage of non-mono scripts for years to come)

Don't waste efforts trying to hit folks over the head with product demonstrations and breathy testimonials designed to strong arm them into downloading/installing the client software and acclimating to the world space. No. Instead, focus on subtle manifestations of Linden Lab's logo and hidden-in-plain-sight cube prims in places such as this...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28000158/

... so they develop a natural inclination to seek out and gravitate toward virtual world elements. (It's best to start with the young'uns.)

I agree with the previous poster.

SL should never try to replace existing technologies but instead integrate them. Facebook-style profiles and a tagging system for landmarks/screenshots would be a great addition. Right now there are third-party solutions that do exactly that (slbuzz.com for example).

I wish we could have user ratings back, I think they were really helpful in a lot of areas.

If someone applies a bumpmap to a cylinder instead of making a sculpty column because they can't find a bumpmap they like, it's a net win.

I don't know the technical underpinnings behind this decision, maybe there's a good reason why it was ignored, but there is a very major thing about avatars that Linden Lab is totally ignoring, and I'd like to see this addressed. Either make it happen, or tell us in plain language why it can't be done.

I'm talking about neck attachment points. I'm sure you couldn't have predicted the popularity of bdsm and collars in Second Life, but what about necklaces? it's a common thing to both sexes, to wear a necklace. When's the last time you read a book talking about somebody clasping a necklace around his girlfriend's left pec? No, it goes on the neck. We should have a neck attachment point. We need a neck attachment point. Please give us a neck attachment point!

I think that if dragging all the prim attachments people use from sim to sim was cheaper, we'd have seen this a long time ago.

I hope H meet Q and Torley soon, it not already. Those three have the potential to send SL to new heights.

For me, increasing the number of attachment points would reduce the number of prims I have attached most of the time, because I wouldn't need to make hand attachments with extra invisible objects (glasses, cups, keytools, sonic screwdrivers, etc...) attached, to be turned visible on script control.