Stamping my foot
Ok, get ready for a rant. I have been building in SL a lot over the past few days, and have been INFURIATED by the changes to the way that edit and camera moving work. In the past, if I was building an object and wanted to see it from the other side, I could use ALT and the arrow keys, while editing, to move my camera around the object. It’s something I do without thinking, all the time. Or did. Nowadays, if you have any windows open on your screen, the camera refuses to budge, even if the window is only the inventory.
Ah, the inventory. A long list of folders, containing other folders, containing items or yet more folders. I remember the days when you could close a folder and it would stay closed! Yes, hard to believe nowadays, when every folder you have accessed in the past 24 hours appears to spring open again the moment you close and reopen the inventory. With someone like me, with 20,000 inventory items, that’s a lot of folders.
So, at the moment, if I am talking to someone and they ask for an item of mine, I can close all the irrelevant folders, go to the item, think… oh, can’t drop it on them from this angle, need to move my camera, try, can’t with the inventory open, close the inventory, move my camera and then find that every darned folder has opened, and I have to close them all again before I can proceed. Of course, half the time the other person, not realising you are trying to drop an item on their avatar, has wandered off again.
That’s annoying enough, but the inability to camera cruise around builds while building is the real killer. Like an SL addict on the web, constantly trying to zoom in on webpages, or send an IM to the owner of the page, you will find me trying desperately to do what I have always been able to do, move around the building without moving the avatar, while editing.
It seems to me that if Lindens were real residents, stuff like this wouldn’t get into the releases. They need some proper builder testers, like me!
Incidentally, boss, where’s the category for building, bugs, Linden Labs, UI…?
January 21st, 2007 • 
Caliandris Pendragon • 
comment | January 21, 2007 at 07:49 | individual comment-link
Caliandris, we discussed trying to do something a little different about those categories at our last meeting on Friday. I guess that meeting time is a bit late for you to make on a regular basis considering the time difference. I will try to fill you in on the proceeding about the categories.
jvastine and I are trying to figure out how we can make the top categories less in number with sub categories below them. Hoping not to overwhelm people trying to find something on site……. It seems ashame to have categories with only 1 or 2 post in them as top categories, so we are going to try to “file” them better. If you have any suggestions on an efficient way to do such please drop either of us an email.
comment | January 22, 2007 at 10:59 | individual comment-link
Hell, yeah. Having the inability to camera-zoom in JUST when you’ve opened up your inventory to pull a house out in edit mode is like — a show-stopper. It really cripples you inworld.
But I’ll go you one better — and surely you’ve noticed this UBER annoyance! You open up an object, say a rental box, to edit the contents, say, a script or a notecard giver. You click on that notecard or script to start working on it, but the object’s menu suddenly intrudes on to your view. That is, the thing you just clicked on to edit and work on is now blocked behind the edit menu which suddenly pops up for that entire object. This didn’t use to work this way, I swear.
I wonder if you report these annoyances as bugs. I wish they had a reporting page called “annoyances”.
I’m also developing lists of annoyances in the group tools.
o Danger of sending invitation out as “owner” and not some other role because they are all in the same list, and the user interface can and does slip sometimes when you try to curse down it.
o When you need to upgrade or change someone from one category to another within the group, you have to first expel them — there is no override. That necessitates endlessly asking people to leave the group, they don’t get why, they stall, you finally eject them, they get bewildered or angry — stupid.
o When you need to eject someone, the menu that gives you their status in the group, say, tenant versus resident or officer or owner, is NOT the same page as the page where you have the eject button. Now that is hugely stupid, and comes from Lindens never having had to run land groups or club groups (running town hall meeting groups doesn’t count, frankly, as that isn’t very sophisticated).
So you first have to go to the “members” subpage to see their status, i.e. ‘tenant’ versus ‘manager’ or something THEN go to another page and wait for the group member list to load again (it often takes forever for a large group or doesn’t work at all) and then finally eject them.
Which Linden is responsible for creating these annoyances, and how can we get to them to get them to understand? Surely the thing with the edit menu view blocking has GOT to be obvious to them and is so unnecessary. This happened during the “focus reforms” which, for my money, are so much bullshit. This lighting up of things I may NOT want to select is intrusive; this bouncing of the focus as it finds is annoying.
Also saving of notecards is a very 50-50 affair. They just don’t save. They bounce and lag when they do finally save. You could be standing right there and it generates a message about being far away.
comment | January 22, 2007 at 11:43 | individual comment-link
Welcome back to VTOR Prokofy Neva is this a sign our little blog is actually becoming something? We have only managed to get one small comment out of you before (to the best of my knowledge. Anyway we are glad to see you here.