Should we stop showing hover tips for non-interactive objects?

I actually use name/description for some builds; most notably my Dark Tower museum. However, if it's "off except when active", that seems reasonable to me, since inserting even just a simple "touch to do nothing" script would turn it "active" for the purposes of hovertips, yes?

I'd prefer a preference.. I'd definatly want them kept for objects.. If I right click and edit an object when I've got a lot of lag, it kills me..

I'm all for options, defaulting to showing on interactive objects & avatars.

How come tooltips warrant attention from Phillip?

I'd imagine that Philip is aiming for a trade-off between improving performance and limiting features Since that's always a hard choice, he's asking for feedback. So, if enough people are all for improving performance (and considering more limited functionality as a reasonable compromise), he'll give the go-ahead to the developers. If, on the contrary, most people would rather prefer to have the extra functionality, and demand of LL to get more performance elsewhere (but not at the expense of the hover tips), this would be what Philip'd say to his dev team.

Of course, I'm just wildly guessing

I can't remember if it was a new viewer, or I had desided to reinstall for some reason, but not having the hover tips drove me slap up the wall until I was able to get through to Live Help and beg to be told how to turn them back on.

One thing I havn't seen many people mention is when something is set phantom. I'm heading towards a door and I can quickly see if the door is set script/touch or just keep walking because it is set to phantom.

If something is going to change the previously mentioned combo method would be the way to go. On, Off, or On for Interactive Items. Default should be On for Interactive Items.

I use the hover tips for land a lot. It's a quicker/easier way of checking who owns a piece of land and even the price of it if its for sale. It's sort of the sneak preview, then if it gets my attention enough I opt to right click and get more details. I would like to see these hover tips remain, so if they are annoying to some, I would prefer that it becomes an option you can enable or disable.

I'd love it if tips were, by default, limited to prims you're meant to interact with in some way (for sale, touch event, physical...) and for land.

With the rest available by checkbox in prefereces, and by (say) holding down the shift key.

I don't want tooltips on all the time, but I'd love a modifier key I could hold down to turn them on temporarily, or even a keyboard command to toggle them between on and off. Failing that I'd be okay with the restrictions Phillip proposed.

I like hover the way it is. We can turn it completely off if we don't want to be bothered. But it's useful when on just to quickly see who owns things including land parcels.

So leave it as is. And post a poll.

Well, defaulting to off should be fine then.

I'm happy for the proposed hover-tip change. I'd be even happier if there was a view menu option 'ALWAYS SHOW HOVERTIPS []', so the old behaviour could be forced for those people who are dead keen to keep it. Defaulting to off, of course.

(And, as Fractal suggested, with some sort of hotkey combo assigned. Just not one that's already connected to hippos)

This could very well be the case - if so, why didn't he just say so? Ask a context-free question, get a context-free response.

Have it as an option that can be turned on or off. It doesn't have to be a binary decision where either everyone has it or no one has it.

I like this idea... great for getting the newbies' attention where it need to go.
I do use the tooltips though, it's a lot easier than having to navigate the obnoxious pie menus.
Would prefer if they always showed up when I hold a certain key, as has been suggested.

Francis Chung and I were having a chat.

I'm inspired to ask this, in addition:

I am personally for the concept of the three-value system, possibly with the aforementioned "radio buttons", defaulting to a median state of "Only on specific types of objects". Options of course being "On all" or "On none". I can't think of something simpler. Anything else would add needless complexity for a function that, while used widely, is not thought about on a common basis.

With thanks for listening,
Mika Kyubi (Muromachi)
Kitsune-at-large

Leave as is, it's fine. They should default to on. It shouldn't take newbies a couple of weeks to find this and I found it very helpful as newbie.

I find it very telling that most of the users who are suggesting a three-way toggle between "all"/"some"/"none" are very old -- certainly old enough to have noticed the trend these sorts of seemingly minor design decisions generally follow:

1. A feature's behavior is changed without notice;
2. User outcry, deriding the new behavior;
3. Eventually, several versions later, a toggle is added to revert to the old behavior, with the new staying as the default. This may or may not result in way more work for the developers involved.

You've already managed to get around the pitfalls of stage one of this pattern. Why not just jump to the last one and save yourselves the trouble?

My .02$L is to have the On/Off option in your preferences for the "bubbles".

The mouse is already scripted for a lot of interactive things to change to a hand. Expanding on this might be a good idea. Neverwinter Nights (an RPG game) did this. They had different mouse pointers for movement, stairs, doors, talking to people, opeing doors/chests/lids, etc.

Depending on the complexity you wanted, SL could also give an option to go with a plain mouse look, or as above, or even a custom selction of which intereactive options you wanted shown as special mouse pointers.

Sorry if I repeated somthing another said. Didn't have time to read the whole post ^.^

~Jessy

I like the idea of removing SOME of the hover tips. Don't really know if I want them just on interactive objects and avatars though. Seems like providing a configuration (perference) option for this is the way to go.

dit-te-didddly-o

A hearty yes with one +1/2 addition:

llHoverTip(TRUE); // create hovertip

llHoverTip(FALSE); // override all other priority (remove hover tip)

I love hover tips. They are an easy and quick way to find out who land belongs to, etc.

My thoughts exactly.

I fly around all the time exploring and am always on the look out for nice lots for sale. In addition to being able to quickly see the owner with the hover tip, I can also see the price if it is for sale and anything they care to provide in the name as additional information.

I put most of my property descriptions in the name for just this reason, so that someone can see the quick selling points of the lots I sell without having to go through the hassle of viewing "About Land".

I would be very sad to see hover text on property go away by default.

Perhaps you could show hover text only on objects or property that are for sale? I would be willing to bet money that you will see in-world transactions decrease if you turn off hover text.

PLEASE stop trying to REMOVE functionality from this game. We already have a toggle for it, why remove it? If LL feels the need to change how this works... make it another option rather than trying to "fix" something that isn't broken. Changing the way it works without giving the user an option to revert to the old way does nothing but cause grief. This was done with drag move too and I STILL hate not having the ability to quicky move objects around by clicking on them rather than those damned triangle handles.

PS: Sig says it all!