Monday, November 26, 2007

10 Things I Hate About SL

1. Crashes. Of Course.

2. DP with heels. If I were in charge of programming in Second Life, this would be the top of the bug list.

3. Blue dialog boxes. Stack of ugly things in the corner interuptting everything. What would I do? I would have a window that has a "drawer" effect list of dialogs, small ones would have the yes no cancel options visible at a click or with check boxes to deal with several all at once, larger ones would, on mouse over, slide out, you could resize the space so that when you want very long dialog boxes would be visible. That or a wheel window would pop up with options or "more."

4. Pose balls. All right thinking avatars hate ball sprawl. What would I do? At the very least hide them. Better would be to make it so that more would position avatars above them, and appear as spots on the ground. I may do a demo of what I mean.

5. Lack of ability to create facial animations.

6. No joins on hands for our skeletons BVH files.

7. Slugly architecture. This is too big for a fix, but one major improvement would be to actually support huge prims. Another would be to have guides to better building published.

8. The Have/Have not economy. Too big for a single fix. But one large thing would be to make information easier to find. Traffic is a killer of information. It is meant to be. Get rid of it.

9. Ad farms. And all the things LL deliberately does to make them possible. Simple fix would be to zone mainland sims in advance by the minimum parcel that can be created and minimum width. Never create any more Governor Linden strips that create jagged edges whose sole use is for ad farm creation. That way, if people want to buy into ad farmy sims, and put up with the clutter, they can. Presumably at lower cost, since many will not want to be there. Right now everyone everywhere on mainland is always at the risk of slumification.

10. Its state religion.

2 comments:

  1. I hate that SL uses the IM "Friends List" and "Notecard" model or tracking contacts. Then Second Life allows hacks around being able to make yourself "invisible".

    I crave more control over who can "see me" online, how to organize contacts, and to be able to set custom reply rules for specific people or during specific hours.

    I would also change the default Avatar to clearly include a shape, skin, Prim Hair, and AO. 99% of users will eventually need to replace all of the above, best start the user off with folders for each and a working model of how avatars are truly set up, instead of humiliating the user with an ugly duck walking cartoon.

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  2. When I think what I really hate about SL I usually have those small things, like blue dialog boxes and lack of possibility to organize contacts in folders. Yes, there is lag and there are crashes, and yes they are annoying but I can live with them most of the time. But I don't see any reason why should I live with things that are obviously easy to be done.

    So, beside blue dialogs, all the problems with contact (officially known as friends) list and growing need for custom states beside busy and away with custom auto-replying messages and behaviour....

    I would be so happy to have some control of what comes to my mail. At the moment it is all or nothing. I may want IM's of my friends to show up in my mail inbox but not to be spammed with all the announces of the clubs. Sounds reasonable.

    I would also like some better building tools. The whole list is about those. And not to mention what would I do for an off-line building tool. Just imagine how many thousands of residents would be off the grid and off the heavy interaction with asset servers while doing things much faster and easier. Building in-world sometimes is a wonderful experience but sometimes we need productivity.

    Casius idea of changing avatar.... it is not heavy to be done at all... you don't need to change Ruth, just to supply each newborn witha nice package of useful things. Just to update that store on the help island. And it is important. That crappy and humiliating look prevents quick integration and is one of the reasons of low retention in second life.

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