Hi, I'm Mariana Latynina and I exist as a character in Second Life. Of course I am also a real-life person behind the character - but, to quote Leslie Neilsen, "that's not important right now."
This blog is to organise my thoughts on how to improve Second Life. It would be nice if other people read it, but I'm not vain enough to think that many people will care! I will be talking about the things that bug me in SL which I think can be improved, and the first one of these is Viewer 2.
As anyone who uses SL regularly will know, Viewer 2's interface is one great big WTF-fest of weirdness. The "Communicate" window from the 1.x series viewers was a nice little thing that looked and behaved like an IRC client, but Viewer 2 threw out all of that for no readily apparent reason and has made chat a frustrating experience. Lots of things that used to be separate windows, like profiles and inventory, are now stuffed into a "sidebar" thing which basically means you can't open someone's profile and your inventory at the same time! It's all a gigantic mess.
My first reaction on encountering such an abomination was to try to rewrite it - in RL I'm a C++ programmer so I thought that it shouldn't be too hard.
Boy was I wrong!
I run 64-bit Linux, which seems to be woefully neglected by the Second Life developers. I've tried and failed to compile most of the viewers I can lay my hands on - the only one I've had some success with is Phoenix. I managed to coax that into compiling something, but the resulting viewer had incorrect fonts, showed me as being in no groups (which is wrong) and it crashed every time I tried to teleport anywhere. It did run, though!
I do have plans to improve both the compile situation and V2's interface, but I'll save that for further posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment