well, I can't stand to look at you now, this revelation's out of my hands

Scattered musings from a stressful night.

Under v.2: there is NO. WAY. to make the camera controls NOT opaque that is at all workable. I know. I've tried. I can't be the ONLY person using camera controls to get around in SL. (Though Fawkes says I am.)

There is a way to make the camera controls more transparent--but it ALSO makes every other "active" window even more transparent along with it. By the time the translucency is enough for me, I can't see chat. For me, that's not unfortunate; that's a goddamn design flaw.

Under v.2: When I've been telling people they need to go to the top of the bar, and click that, and they'll get the About Land menu, NOW I know why they've been staring at me. Because there's no way to do that, either. On default v2, you can no longer do that. You CAN click the "i" icon and get a 'Place Profile', which will give you About Land.

That is incredibly, INCREDIBLY cumbersome for anyone who deals with land--working on it, living on it, selling it, buying it--INCREDIBLY cumbersome.

You can also get there by World > Place Profile > About Land. This is absolutely ridiculous, when they HAD a working one-click, and they've managed to replace it with one system that goes through two clicks, and a SECONDARY system that goes through THREE clicks, to do the same thing that opened on one click before!

This is dumb, Lindens, really dumb. You're making people work harder to do the same thing one click did before. And you have the gall to be surprised when they stay with the older viewer, or worse, various third-party viewers (from trustable to complete hack jobs) because it does what they want. Dumb!

We are now working on tracking down the code line in the .xml file that will make the inventory that opens be the new inventory window that is separate from the UI dock. We're not sure if this will work. But it will most assuredly help. Because when I open the inventory off the UI sidebar, I can't move. Lag kicks in and I literally can't walk around, I can't open windows, nothing. But if I split the inventory window off by undocking, or create a new inventory window--miraculously, I can move again.

That? Right there? That's another design flaw, people.

Also, windows--when left open, like, oh, say, the new inventory window that I undocked--get sleepy. I have to wake them up to move them again. Takes about a minute and a half.

Lindens, you are making people work harder! DUMB!

We went through the sidebar, just to bring me up to date.

Place Profile. I am told that this information is 'focused' for the 'average' user, and the 'About Land' button--inset into the Place Profile--gives further, more 'in-depth' information.

This is crippleware. Why wasn't all the information put into Place Profile? Needless duplication, here!

Now, the UI sidebar itself (which I still despise utterly and want to burn in the fire of a thousand suns, I hate it, I will hate it forever, it needs to die): the arrow brings me to the last tab I had open; whatever, I deal. Maybe that's a good thing.

The Linden hand takes me to "Home". Bwuh? There are other places to retrieve ALL that information. Absolutely unnecessary.

The folder with the little guy is my profile; web profiles suck; we move on.

The little people icons are just that--People. It seems to be a combination mini-map and radar system. I don't know why it's there; it seems fairly useless. There's apparently a lot you can do with it, and Fawkes says it's better than Firestorm's radar system, or Mystical Cookie's MystiTool; the only thing is, while it will show people, it won't show how far away they are, which is kind of the whole point.

There's also a debug setting called 'nearmerange': this will change the active range of the People search feature. I dropped mine down to 101.000 (just because it was a fairly nice even round number, ish) but Fawkes has his up over 1000.000.

'My Friends' shows friends (duh); 'My Groups' show groups, and also, if you select the group, and move down to the bottom and select the check mark, that makes that group active.

There's another little Profile icon to the far right of each group, and clicking that now brings up the group profile. (Yay?) And the only real difference there is that now they're on drop-down menus--what Fawkes terms "accordions"--from the 1.x tabs.

The globe, again, brings you to the Place Profile.

The suitcase is the inventory, which now has the inventory total (and at 67,973, I really need to gut my inventory again).

And the little shirt icon leads to 'My Outfits', which...has some flaws. Like it doesn't seem to recognize 'default' items. Say I have an outfit that I want to wear another tattoo with beyond what I consider my 'default' tattoo. But, when I walk around normally, I have that back tattoo. When I made up the outfit, I wasn't thinking, and now it's in that folder.

Okay, just delete it; except, if you're wearing it, you can't. You have to take the item off, wear something else, and THEN delete that item from that outfit folder. Even though they're supposedly just links, not actual items, in those Outfit folders.

Plus, the Outfits seem to update, change in and out items; they don't seem fixed, at least to Fawkes. So they're somewhat quirky.

Plus, I can't wear items by double-clicking them, which Fawkes says should work, but it doesn't.

Fawkes tells me that the 1.x viewer structure was like a disease--it didn't quite kill you, but it was hell to deal with on a daily basis because it just took so much out of you. While people adapted--and we did adapt--he says it was like that self-same disease fighting all our efforts to do more than just breathe and stay sick.

Versus, in his mind, 2.x being the cure. And, because we've been sick for so long, that cure feels like additional suffering. But stick with it, he says, and it will improve. It will get easier. We will heal. And soon, we'll laugh that we thought 1.x was usable at all.

And I'm still not seeing that. What I'm thinking is...Viewer 2 is Esperanto.

Esperanto was developed by a linguist to be a language that was designed to be absolutely easy to pick up and become fluent in, even if you were an untutored farm wife in Serra da Saudade. In fact, it was mostly designed with Portuguese in mind; and if you speak Portuguese, you're pretty much golden, the sentence structures will make pretty much complete sense to your understanding.

The problem is, to the rest of us, we see the value in it, and we understand the point of it, but it's a pain to learn. And we still have other ways that work. Do they all work well? No, English is a pain to learn, too. And being superior enough to insist on a world that speaks English is pretty damned silly overall.

Except--just as over here, and in other countries, people learn Japanese (and there's a rising tide of people learning Chinese, just to be on the safe side), in Japan they learn English. In fact, if the average worker doesn't know English by the time they get their first job, there are schools designed to fast-track language learning so they can pick up the slack. The world has adapted. We can still communicate. And we didn't need Esperanto to do it.

Viewer 2? We didn't need it. Did we need a better interface? Yeah, maybe. Viewer 1.x was starting to show its age, and there were things they could definitely do better. But was the solution viewer 2.x alone?

I don't think so. And I'm not alone. Unfortunately, the Lindens aren't listening, and mesh is coming.

However, since we just did this dance where I said v.2 sucked, and Fawkes said I was wrong--AGAIN--I will formally offer up the crackhead means that I am currently using SL. I am warning you now, brains may well fall out.

Also, please click for the larger images, if you want detail--because the smaller ones just won't show you. There's just too much going on.

This:

(from miscellaneous)

is how Singularity is structured for me. Everything translucent; everything visible; everything separated. I can work like that. I can move around like that. I can shop like that. Everything's where I need it to be. (And again, I have to reiterate: I know it's a picture, but since you can blow it up and see the characters and type them--don't click any of Jakkar Carlos' links. Really. It's just never a good idea.)

Now, this:

(from miscellaneous)

is what Snowstorm looked at it after Snowstorm and I declared a draw in the ongoing battle and withdrew to lick our wounds. Nothing is really where I want it; I'm not happy with the ugly "plain text" font; the separated inventory window keeps falling asleep; and the camera controls are both too fucking large and solidly opaque. I can't change much of it, I twitch trying to adapt, and even though I know I have to, it's like being wrapped in sandpaper--any movement, even small ones, after a while just hurt and piss me off.

And this:

(from miscellaneous)

is me trying to build in the finite and narrow window between the build menu, the inventory, and the camera controls!

Ultimately, while I do realize that Snowstorm 2.8 is the best version of an exceedingly bad idea, and that it really, truly is the best that can be expected...it still makes my soul cringe as if in the direct presence of Nyarlathotep.

You know, before I get eaten and scream my doom.

But--remember, that thing about mesh? This is the stupidity I'm stuck with. My alternative? Leave SL.

AND DON'T THINK IT'S NOT ON MY MIND.

It just galls me. Am I the only one that uses the game this way? Because if I'm not, then have all the others who played this way left when they ran out of hair to pull out of their scalps?

There has to be a trick to this, to using v.2 without losing my mind entirely. I'll figure it out...or, unfortunately, I'll go back to Singularity and leave when mesh arrives. I don't see a lot of options, here.