The user interface is broken, fix it.

a) When i double click a script, i expect the script editor window to have focus.
b) When i press page up/page down in the script editor, i expect the cursor to move exactly one visible page up or down.
c) When i right click an item, i expect to see a menu that actually has items in it, instead of just being a black box.
d) When i right click an object, i expect a pie menu to open and stay open until i have actually selected something. It fails to behave like this like 50% of all attempts.
d) When i'm chatting, i expect the arrow keys to move the cursor. When i press arrow up, i expect to get the last line(s) i have entered in chat.
e) When i select an item from an objects inventory and press Del, i expect the selected item to be deleted. Currently, most of the time this deletes the object instead.
f) When i enter a closing curly bracket in the script editor, i expect it to appear exactly where my cursor is. The "smart" placement does not work, i hate it and i want to disable it.
g) When i'm typing text into any window on my 2.8 GHz computer, i expect the software to display my input as fast as i type. I actually type faster than the SL client can handle it. Pretty sad.

There are more UI problems, but those are the worst i have experienced yet.

When I double click a script, the editor does have focus. could you explain where you are clicking on the script from?

Keeping one line of context on screen is not uncommom, and seems to be what SL does. I like it that way, but meh, personal taste.

When I right click an item, the Pie menu pops up. Again, what are you clicking on here?

Known problem - this is mostly related to not repositioning the cursor to the center of the pie when the pie cannot be placed centered on the current mouse positon - i.e. close to the screen edges.

There is a preferences option "Arrow keys move avatar when chatting". If you unselect that, left and right will allow you to edit your text. There is no chat recall function, but then, most people don't tend to repeat themselves in conversation anyways. (well, you know what I mean)

Agreed.

Again, if you follow the indenting style that LSL usually uses (as is shown in all the wiki examples, and most of the sample code in the forums) this function works just fine. If you do things a different way normally, well, I would suggest that you use an external editor, such as SCIte-EZ which is extremely configurable.

That sounds like lag. My 2.0GHz cat take text waaaaay faster than I can type in both chat and IM, until the place gets silly when there are 30+ avies on sim, 20 of them within 10m of my location.

How is your network performance, what is your graphics card, do you have current drivers for it? (the black block menu thing could be graphics driver related, too).



Really? if you think these are the worst, try making sense of the snapshot controls some time

Right click object -> Edit -> More -> Content -> Double click on script
Press arrow down. Avatar moves backward.


I just made a script that contained lines like

1
2
3
4
...
20

When i resize the window to display 7 lines at once, locate the cursor in line 1 and press Page down twice, the screen looks like this:

13
14
15
16
17
18
19

Which is fine. Now i press Page Up once:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

I would expect it to show

7
8
9
10
11
12
13

instead.


I meant an item in an object's inventory, sorry. The first click works well, any subsequent clicks just pop up a black box. I have to wait several seconds before it shows a working menu again.


Ah, thank you so much, didn't knew that.
I'm scripting a lot and i often have to repeat several command sequences. A chat history would be very useful and is actually something found in almost all games or similar applications.


I have 2 Mbit connection. My graphics card drivers are up to date.

This is a compiler convention created to save you the hassle of hitting backspace before entering the } so that it lines up:

...
     if(x == y)
     {
          ... //do stuff
          |   //cursor is here

enter a }

...
     if(x == y)
     {
          ... //do stuff
     }|      //cursor is here

instead of...

...
     if(x == y)
     {
          ... //do stuff
     |        //cursor is here

(backspace)

...
     if(x == y)
     {
          ... //do stuff
     }|      //cursor is here

(close-brace)



2Mbit might not be fast enough, just because you have all that bandwith doesn't mean SL has all of it, it isn't allocated speed in percentages. Check your network settings in SL preferences window, jack it all the way up to 1000 whatevers (kbs I think).

Hm, yes, i thought so. I still don't like it, because it is poorly implemented. It does not recognize that i'm hitting backspace myself and there's no need to add another one.
It's not only unintuitive, it is broken. All i ask is to either implement this "magic" properly or give me an option to disable it. I'm unwilling and unable to let the editor do that backspace for me. It's like someone demands to avoid the word "and" when i speak.


It's all the way up to 1000 k.

I also despise the script editor's view of how to line up a closing bracket. I am unable to do what the system wants me to do to make it work right. I would also like to be able to turn the automatic unindenting off.

Being able to redisplay a previously entered chat line by uparrowing would be wonderful. There are times when controlling scripted objects with chat that I would type the same or very similar thing thing dozens of times, plus in normal chat it would be nice to be able to get a line repeated automatically for correcting typos.

I find that typing lags a lot at times. The only program I have ever used with a comparable typing lag was the LOGO editor on my Atari 800. SL is worse than that at times. I assume that keystrokes are sent to the server keypress by keypress and sent back before being displayed, otherwise I can't see any reason why chat text would lag behind typing.


I doubleclicked a script from my inventory, press the down arrow, and my avatar walked. The script window does not get focus.

I hate the auto-indent "feature" in the script editor... the way if you want to add a blank line in your script, the next line is automatically indented, and if you add another line, its indented even more.

Actually, it's not. MS Visual Studio .NET is like that, Macromedia Flash (ActionScript) is like that, the Borland C++ compiler is like that. It bugs me too when I forget about it, but that happens maybe once or twice a coding session whereas I USE it more than 6 times a minute if I'm typing line of code after line of code.

As for the indent even more thing, I've not seen it, and THAT--if it does exist--should be fixed.




Huh, no idea.

Uhm. Even if that were true, all these products provide an option to completely disable auto unindentation.

I own all three, I'll check when I get the chance (I will have to reinstall Borland and I think MSVS is on another computer). I'll let you know both if it exists and how difficult it was to find.

MSVS.NET 2003: Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Formatting
BCB: I can't remember where, but i have worked with it for a while and know for sure it is there.
Flash: Never wrote a line of ActionScript, pretty sure it provides this option though.

Actually, it does not matter whether or not these apps provide an option to turn off auto indentation. They SHOULD provide it, as well as SL should.