Different kinds of viewers

People come to SL for all sorts of reasons but we all use the same viewer.

If you are someone just curious to come take a look or if you are here to build a city and make complicated machinima with fancy light settings, we all have to first figure out the rather complicated viewer and struggle trough the very steep learning curve.

One of the reasons new visitors don’t stay is that they find SL too difficult to figure out.

The viewer has a lot of buttons and no matter what LL tries, the viewer will always remain too complicated for new people because they give us so many options.

The only option you have is to show the “advanced” tab or not.

I think it might be a good idea to make a really really basic viewer.

New people only want a few things; change their look, explore, interact and chat.

It is only after a while that they want to tweak some of the countless settings, try building and creating and make some stunning snapshots.

And countless don’t even need that, they are quite happy using SL just for chatting, shopping and exploring.

I’ve been in SL for over 3 years and still find the countless settings, different viewers and general usability of SL far from easy and smooth.

I think that it might be a good idea to create 3 different viewers or give the current viewer 3 different settings;

• Basic
• Advanced
• Expert

The Basic viewer is perfect for the first time visitor to SL, it allows you to modify your avatar, walk around, chat, shop, etc.

Nothing fancy, very few options, just the things you really need to get around in SL.

For most people this will be more then enough during their first explorations of SL and to many it will more then they’ll ever need anyway.

No building tools, no dozens of tabs, no millions of options.

All wrapped in a simple, game like package that is easy to figure out.

 

When you have been in SL for a while and decide that you are ready for more settings, play with windlight, add gestures, tweak your camera settings, of just explore the countless options, you ‘upgrade’ to the Advanced viewer.

Perhaps it is just a button in the basic viewer that simply adds some of the many buttons.

 

Finally, when you are ready to become creative and want to start building something, you move on to the Advanced viewer, this adds the building tools.

 

Because remember, all these things are now available to people who enter SL for the very first time, who have no idea where they are or what they are doing.

They need to find out how to just go from A to B but are confronted with lag analyzing tools, prim builders, rez permissions, etc.

One of the main problems SL has had since the early days is keeping new visitors.

Most people who try SL do not come back, I think the complicated viewer is one of the reasons.

Have a look at some of the games out there that also use virtual surroundings such as GTA, Mafia, Assasin’s Creed, etc.

They have a very simple ‘viewer’ that enables you to walk around, use a car, shoot someone, etc.

If SL’s first experience is more like that, people would be less intimidated.

Look at “the Sims”, lots of complicated options (including building and creating) but all compacted in a nice easy to understand navigation bar with big shiny buttons.

SL does not want to be a game, but to keep those new visitors staying a bit longer, it may be a good idea to make it feel more like a game.

If you want more, the viewer can be upgraded and you can join the rest, if just the basics will do, you don’t want to be showered with options you’ll never use.

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Improving groups

As I run a roleplay community SL groups are very important to me, but it isn’t always easy to use them.

Let’s start with the titles.

Every group has roles besides being able to wear a nice title like “1920s Berlin rules” under the name floating above your head they also give people certain powers and identify them as being someone with a certain role.
For instance, in our community we have people who maintain order who we call Polizei (police) and we have people who live in the many apartments, they are called Tenants.

The police need their title so people can see they are official sim police and not some joker pretending to be.
These officers also need the title because it comes with very important and special powers that include ejecting and banning someone.

Our tenants want the title so they can show they are part of the community, they need the title so they can rez objects and decorate their homes.

But because we are a roleplay community, we sometimes also need or just want more titles, just to show what group of people someone belongs to or so that we can communicate with just a certain section of our people in stead of everyone.
We sometimes want to remind all the children that school is about to begin without having to tell all the 1000+ other members of our main group.

For our 1920s Berlin group alone we use about 13 groups in total, out of the maximum of 42 we are allowed to have.
You can imagine what will happen if I create another sim like Berlin or if I join a roleplay sim as diverse as ours…
I would soon run out of groups I could join.

So, SL groups could do with some improvements.

One of the first things is that groups need more space for roles, at the moment a group can have just 10 roles, a few of those don’t count because those go to owners, everyone, etc.
That is not a lot of roles for a roleplay sim.
If we had more, we wouldn’t need to create more groups… except for communication.

We even have to use a pay per month service from Hippo to create another 20 groups just to be sure we can communicate with them as well.

So the next improvement would be a very simple one; let us send messages to members inside a group who have a certain role.
For instance, our group could have tenants and police as a role, all within our main group.
When we want to announce a rent decrease we can use the very same main group and send the message or note to JUST the people with the tenant role.
Or when some criminal is wandering around town clearly being planning some evil deed, we could send a note JUST to the people with a police role… to make things even nicer, we could perhaps even start a chat with JUST these people.

A little dropdown menu next to the “chat” or “send notice” buttons is always set to “everyone” but by clicking it you can choose the people who have the role you want to talk to.

All this would cut back on the amount of groups dramatically, it would would make search a lot easier and would give people less groups to manage.

Most of all it would allow people who manage large communities to keep things a little clearer and also save some money by quitting those paid services.

 

Group lag has been reduced a bit a while back but it is still rather bad at times.
Another important thing that groups REALLY need is the option to ban someone from joining the group.
Right now it is a bit of a hassle, you need to take away someones ability to take part in a group chat if you want to chat them up.
A manual and complicated task.
And even if you remove their group chat ability they will still receive group notices and be able to listen in.
It is odd that as a sim owner and group owner I do not have the power to simply ban someone from a group!

I also think many of our SL group options should be useable trough the SL website so we can send messages and even start a group chat without having to go into SL.
More about that in this other blog post.

 

Improving out-world possibilities for in-world situations

As someone who manages a sim with a decent amount of traffic I often have to pop into SL just to tweak a few small things, send a few messages, etc.

But unfortunately I also have a rather busy RL and don’t always have the time to do these things.

Also simply communicating with people in SL from RL is not always easy, it has to go trough IM to email, their online profile, etc.

LL could make all this a lot easier for us by creating more fluent interaction between SL and RL.

Let’s start with communication.

Someone send me an IM in SL, if I have “send IM to email” set, I get the IM as an email, reply to it and thus am able to sort of chat with someone inworld.
That is very handy but it would be even better if we could just “open a chat window” via the SL site, just like we would if we were in SL.
Same look, same options, same chat log, option to see profile, etc, etc… except you don’t have to visit SL for it.
If your friend is online you should be able to chat with them trough the SL site.

But there are more options.

I would LOVE to manage my groups and some of the region settings via the SL website.

Imagine the situation, an event is cancelled, a griefer has struck or the sim is suffering from some extreme lag.
People start sending me IM’s about it, I have to log into SL, open the group window and start sending a message.
This may not always be possible.
Because SL does not give us enough group options we, like many sims, use the Hippogroups services, they DO allow us to send messages to inworld from the Hippo site.
Great, but not perfect and it costs money.
It would be awesome if I could simply visit the SL site, open the group window (again with the exact same look as the group windows inworld) and use it just like I would if I was inside SL.
Change permissions (need to remove that rez permission from a griefer fast or don’t want a new tenant to have to wait till I get out of work!), send messages to the group so they know what is going on or to announce a new event, etc, etc.
All the group options accessible from the SL website.

Another great option for sim owners would be the possibility to manage their regions from the SL website.
Again I have to use a third party (paid) service just to see who is visiting my region without me actually going into the region myself.
I would love to be able to do this from the SL site but also manage some of the other options like quickly closing the region when there is trouble, sending a message to the region, restarting it or something as simple as turning the sim to day or night (as LL won’t let us set a 24 hour light schedule).

All those pesky little things that just need a few moments to take care off, jobs that you could do in seconds trough the SL website… now take minutes (especially if your computer takes a while to start SL up and fight the lag) or even hours if you have to wait till you get home.

Little things that you could even take care off with mobile devices because you just need to be able to load the SL website.

But even if you do not own a region, it can be useful to have more interaction trough the SL website with people inside SL.
Imagine being able to start and take part in a group chat from that site, a fun communication tool but also important when you quickly need to know if that event is starting at 2 or 3 and if evening dress is required.

LL promises huge improvements to SL

LL has announced that they will be making some major changes to their systems to fight lag.

At least that is how this old fashioned person who thinks a gramophone is still a mechanical wonder and the bee’s knees, read this following message on the SL site;

This year, Linden Lab is making the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of the company.
This new hardware will give residents better performance and more reliability.
Additionally, we are converting from three co-locations to two co-locations. This will significantly reduce our inter-co-location latency and further enhance simulator performance.

Sounds good doesn’t it?
You can read more details here; Link to blog.

I don’t know enough about all this stuff to make any useful observations but I do know that improvements to our sims and anything that makes lag a little less is good!