Meet the Godots! - A discussion on things unfinished.

What is a Godot?

Back in the sands of time Malachi Petunia and I started refering to features much announced but not forthcoming as 'Godots' - 'we're waiting....' I like to think Malachi first coined the phrase as it's much too clever for me - and if it was me he can take credit as it detracts from my toilet humor reputation.

We're familiar with the big ones:

Havok (2 - 3 - 4?)
HTML on a prim
XML-RPC (a complete version).

But there are many other little Godots (Godettes?).. and I think as we find them we should list them, instead of having each and every one buried in a mish mash of individual posts.

These are NOT feature suggestions per se - it is a discussion on things you've found that are not complete.

This is not a flame thread - again - it is a list of things you've found that are not finished.

So apart from the big 3, heres a few I've found:


We have custom animations - yet no way to change the defaults without scripting - this should be something you can do in the UI as well.

We can apply force to an av - or move it via an attach - yet can't turn one.. not to a rotation, nor to an arbitary point.

We can Teleport - we can find someone on the map - yet we can't teleport to them via scripting.

The permissions system is still lacking

I can get an IM from an object - but an object can't recieve an IM - the only inter object comms over a sim boundry is email - which isn't very efficient.

With sims that have water depth of 80m in some places (created by LL) it seems the 100 global/ terrain follow limit on vehicle hover heights is nearly delibately set out to break them.

An object rezzing a child can have its key via an event - why can't the child get the key of its parent via an event?

These are a few just off the top of my head - feel free to add more.

Although I love flashy new features - I do beleive that 'filling the gaps' should also be a priority.... so list your Godots...

those are some excellent feature suggestions siggy! LL should bookmark this thread!

'Partners' never went anywhere. There was some promise when it was first accounced/introduced that some benefits would actually come with it, but that never happened.

SL has yet to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams... which is what drew me here in the first place - to live as a free Capitalist. So far, the place remains a Communist stronghold.

Hopefully, with 1,000,000 avs it will happen.


Oh, and I also joined because Philip was so cute! Brilliant move putting him on the homepage.

It long boondoggled me, as dreamy as it is, how SL is a social place and I can TP, but I can't do a group teleport. I know this was never formally announced per se, but it's still something I hope for because it's such an inevitable culmination of TPing advancements: we can walk together, fly together (with attachments), and certainly travel in vehicles together.

Speaking of Partners, I'd also like a more obvious way to partner from inworld. Popular question that comes up a lot, "How do I partner?"

Some of these "big ones" I originally learned from reading Town Hall transcripts.

Animations? An easier way to create animations from within SL. Or, editing things like loops after you've uploaded. Weren't there also some others when 1.4 came out that haven't seen the light yet?

I was going to say, "an easier way to click-and-sit" because that is such a PITA, but that's been done in 1.9 through object actions.

Superfar draw distance, like 1024m. That is a fantasy of mine.

I'm actually curious who else has been compiling lists of things that took a long time and finally DID come. One good example is making good on moving FORCE SUN to VIEW from DEBUG after that originally came up. For me, that's a real gapfiller. Another one is showing all attachments you currently have on, and where you have them, along with not replacing a current attachment without warning you.

Nice stuff

Remember to avoid having this moved to the gulag of 'feature suggestions' - we're keeping to stuff that seems 'half implimented'...

Vehicles that can cross sim borders reliably.

Don't know about the 'half implemented' thing, but these items are mentioned or confirmed as being 'in development' or 'will come in the future' at one time or another:

1. generalized texture layers
   
2. extended land/group tools (1.9?)
   
3. viewer 2.0 (prob. won't happen, as it will increase bandwidth demands, atm LL is reducing bandwidth demands)
   
4. outbound RPC (prob. won't happen, risk of being misused is too high)
   
5. mono (will happen eventually, but needs a LOT of tweaking and testing)
   
6. html on a prim (will happen)
   
7. standalone html viewer (will happen)
   
8. configurable UI (been mentioned as useful and necessary by LL some ages ago, current UI is 'half' XML/.ini based, so there's a start)
   
9. permission system based on creative commons model (prob. won't happen, no clear migration path from current permissions to this model, so will break too much content)
   
10. increased max. prim counts (related to havok updates)
    
11. weather? (accepted in feature votes, although no idea why)
    
    
    

I can probably think of more when i have more time.

The html on prims whould be great. Even a internet port or something like that.

How about podcasts on prims? Ppl could buy a specific radio or keycard and receive
automatic the suscripted podcasts when they online. Similiar like it works with itunes.

i don't really have anything to add, i just wanted to mention that this is an excellent thread and i agree.. there should be a note made of it.

although i will mention that podcasts on a prim (PrimCasts?) would be a cool feature.. might even be able to be implemented with some creative scripting with current abilities.

You can turn an avatar. Kind of.

I'm working on the thing which uses it now.

Then it should be moved to Feature Feedback. Well, that would be assuming that moderation weren't a flippantly random process.

The moderation process appears to match the posting process perfectly

Alpha draw order - I don’t know if anyone officially ever said “We’ll fix it one day” : I can’t find actual quotes but I think the official answer has always been “Its tough to fix this but we’ll maybe try to get to it”.

"ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha" - MandarkPhilip is convinced that this was fixed in 1.7 so I doubt any improvement is forthcoming.

-llGiveMoney return value or event (Transaction Authentication)

-An event calendar that can be searched on an exclusion basis

-llName2Key()

-Proactive grief prevention toolsets on the mainland

-llSensor() working half-ass across sim boundaries

I'm still waiting to see this in the release notes.

* Web pages can now be displayed on IPS addresses.
* Linden-owned combat sandboxes and linden-owned land are no longer displayed in the list of high-traffic areas.
* The llName2Key() script call no longer causes a crash when used by someone other than the owner of an object.
* Prim hairs are no longer rendered on the map.
* Clothing designers will no longer crash on teleport.
* Fixed a simulator crash caused when rezzing IPS addresses.
* Fixed a bug that would cause some seburos to be deleted out of order in the event of a parcel over its prim allocation.
* Inventory search now has a filter for raffle balls.
* Classified ads are now discounted for Ben Linden who own flying vehicles.
* Group titles will no longer randomly start eliminating an error which kept rezzing monkeys.
* Activated script editor to recognize llJiggle().
* Enabled group chats.

FIND, particularly the people search. It works for names, but not for profile descriptions or notes. Keeping notes about people is a nice feature, but not very useful if we can't use those notes to search for people that meet certain, user defined, specifications.

SpeedTree.

ooh, good one!
All of these suggestions are good, but this is the first "Godot" that wasn't on the original post I think.

My addition:

We can "wear" or "take-off" clothes, (in fact its the one thing we do probably more often than most other things), but it can't be scripted even though the functionality is clearly there just waiting to be hooked into (it's in the "buy contents" dialogue).

Imagine clicking on your wardrobe to change outfits in one step, or scripting rotating outfit changes depending on the situation or mood.

One feature that *still* hasn't been finished... my world domination. Hopefully that will be a little closer in the next version. What's the holdup, LL??

And when scripting, you have virtually no control over the animations. You have 30+ flags for llParticleSystem, you can apply textures a dozen different ways, you can play sounds at different volumes, but you still can't override ANY of the parameters of an animation: not priority, not what bones it effects, nothing.

And you still stand up while changing clothes.

Yeh! You should at least be able to carry the vehicle you're piloting with you when you teleport (that would make security scripts that sent you home less fearsome) along with any fellow passengers. Combining that with llTeleportAgent when that comes along would let you build a "warp drive" vessel.

I beg to differ - it's not requesting new features or feature revision.

It's discussing an observation I've made about Second Life.

How about a better user interface for picking skin color?

My character (Persial Hebert, an alias of Beywulf Schaffer from Larry Niven's "Known Space" series) is supposed to be an albino. I haven't been able to get a really credible albino skin... I look like I'm dead or I've been overdoing the silver supplements.

Supposedly there's been talk of having the in-game color picker available for skin hue, instead of having to tweak "dark", "ruddy" and "hue" to trick it into the RGB values you want. Or is that just wishful thinking?