Thursday, May 14, 2009

Slice a Prim, and Why Do Things That Have Been Fixed Always Break Again?

Sliced Cubes. All are .5 x .5 x .5 meters in size.
Written 12 May, 2009

Slice a Prim, and Why Do Things That Have Been Fixed Always Break Again?

I’m starting to figure out some things about the RC 1.23.1 viewer.

First, there are changes in the edit menu. Most notably, you can set permissions on grouped items, and you can slice certain prim shapes.

Slice is rather like dimple on a sphere. It’s just like slicing an apple. You can set a start point and an end point for a slice. I’m sure it will prove handy (I do wonder if people with older viewers will be able to see the sliced shapes, though).

This past weekend I sorted landmarks. It wasn’t until I had been to a hundred or more places that I realized I hadn’t crashed once or had a single failed teleport. Sweet!

I’m having real problems selecting things, though. When I right click and choose edit, they become unselected. To grab them, I have to keep the edit box open and select them again.

It’s the same for looking at profiles of other avatars. Often they simply don’t come up.

The avatar pie menu has radically changed. Nothing is where it used to be. Detach and Edit are buried below the first level, which is way annoying.

When entering a new area, some things rez only partially. Eventually they snap in, but there seems to be no logic to it.

Awhile back I read an article by Gwyneth Llewelyn in which she said the Second Life viewer is kludged together in such a way that changing any feature can have cascading effects that break entirely unrelated things.

I’m sure that’s true, for time and again broken features (problems with selecting items, profile not appearing when chosen, avatars floating upward when hovering) get fixed, only to be broken again in the next release candidate.

I’m beginning to think—no, I’m CONVINCED— that it would be a wise investment of Linden Labs’ time and money and talent to rebuild the viewer in a modular fashion (like the OS Grid viewer), or, better yet, to cooperate with the OS Grid people to bring us a common viewer based on the more flexible, faster, less problematic, and modular OS viewer.

How nice it would be to get new features without having old ones broken!

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