Open Forum: How's Viewer 2.0 Changed Your Second Life?

Second Life 2.0 Beta has been out in the world for nearly two weeks, and while it may not have boosted total user rates (at least not yet), how has it changed your day-to-day experience in SL (if at all)?

Image credit: Harper Ganesvoort, who has a personal hands-on review of 2.0 here.

Comments

[Loki]

It's made it slower as I learn me way around new interface.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

It made me learn xml so that I could help correct at least a few of the problems with the interface.

[magggnnus]

it brings a sense of completeness.
html on a prim has been missing from SL in my eyes, so, now that's settled.

[Kitty O'Toole]

Personally it's made my SL experience better! After three years of living this world every day, I find myself in the strange position of having a steady experience on a daily basis: by that I mean minimal lag and infrequent crashes. I love new features such as the outfit tab and the tattoo layer, that's made sorting out a chaotic wardrobe a ton easier and the tattoo layer offers lots of new options. My dislikes are niggles: I don't like the new camera function, it never seems to remain on screen where I've positioned it, and I can't say that I care for the fact that each time I use a pose and cancel out of it my avatar ends up ten feet in the air flying...but these are minor niggles. On the whole I am really liking it and look forward to more improvements in the near future..
=^..^=

[Uccello]

Thanks for the opportunity, Hamlet. I've written a couple posts on my blog (http://poultryreport.blogspot.com/ or click my name below) about th SL 2.0 viewer. In a nutshell, some things are still inconvenient despite daily use since the release but it seems to be solid otherwise. One day I'll have to hit the feedback forum to request changes like the return of avatar coordinates and faster access to About Land.

[Hiri Nurmi]

I'm still trying to figure out how you add a notecard as an attachment to a group notice - because of the way they are on separate exclusive slide-out blocks now I don't see how it's possible.

Otherwise web-on-a-prim and the new layers are sufficiently promising that I'm sticking with it for now, but I hardly think otherwise the viewer has much to get over-excited about

[Chestnut Rau]

The new camera controls stink so I have been using keyboard commands to cam around. Using the keyboard has the significant benefit of eliminating the blue camera control box taking up valuable screen real estate.

[Ann Otoole]

SLV2 has given me a much larger appreciation of third party viewer developers without whom LL would probably be sunk without anyone to code defect fixes. For free.

[Valentina Kendal]

After bouncing around between viewers, 2.0 made me realize that tweaked Snowglobe is the viewer for me. Sad to give up 'web on a prim', but the speed and interface clunkiness just don;t do it for me. Face tattoos are the new Glow.

[Crap Mariner]

Resource pig. It eats up just enough additional bandwidth to make my marginal DSL connection that much more unreliable.

Not only can't I browse live music events and get reminders like before, but now I'm having to grab the stream in winamp and sometimes log off because that program handles buffering better than V2.0.

Had to drop from First Question last night because I hit the ceiling trying to do 2.0, Voice, and Skype. (2.0 has messed up old client's Voice settings, it seems.)

I'm not sure that anything more that 3m down and 512k up are available in my area because of old wiring, so I may be taking a spring and summer break while waiting for faster connection rollout or buying a house.

-ls/cm

[Vax Sirnah]

I've made some really cool effects with the alpha mask so far. That's pretty much it.

I don't have the neurotic hate for it that some people have (and seem to have for anything that LL does) and I learned it pretty quickly. But Emerald still has some features that are pretty much key for me, so I've been going back to that.

Until there is the surge of people using the Shared Media option, I probably won't use it too much. When Emerald integrates the new tech from Viewer 2, I'll probably stick with/go back to it. Once again, I like the extras of Emerald too much.

[Tateru Nino]

No change.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

On my system, V2 is a slideshow, utterly unplayable. If this build displaced the current viewer, I would be forced out of SL.

As I am neither a university nor a corporation, I doubt the Lab would notice or care.

[Ciaran Laval]

The camera controls are awful and like Chestnut I've now taken to using the keyboard to pan around, which isn't a bad way of working at all but the camera controls are really bad if you're working with them.

A lot of things I'm finding my way around with, finding my picks, classifieds was a bit of a pig to start with but I can find them.

Search is not so good, finding events is a real pain in the backside, events people want to browse, not search for.

However HTML on a prim is a massive step forward and security concerns aside, has massive potential to attract new users so it will be interesting to see how that develops.

[brinda Allen]

Like Arcadia Codesmith, I won't use it unless it becomes the only way to access SL... and then since my 5940USD a year tier is less than peanuts to *The Benevolent Monarchy* I'll leave.
Sadly, but leave.

[Annechen Lowey]

Calling the V2.0 "Beta" is a gross overstatement. It is not even ready for that designation.

Yet again, the developers in the Lab prove they are not using the grid at all. Chat boxes are only suitable for those who use txtspk, and rarely at that. It is most Certainly Not suitable for anyone who monitors multiple group chats that are very active. The screen real estate is poorly managed, and the lack of transparency in inactive windows means multitasking is made more difficult. These are just a small portion of the "improvements" that are included with the viewer. This is not just a retraining curve, but burying previously simple one or two step actions in non-intuitive menus, because "New residents do not need that" is insulting.

All V2.0 shows is that M Linden does not really want retention. The blatant disregard for the CURRENT residents is proven with every new "Improvement" rammed through the system.

[Kittenanne Mousehold]

I'm having the strange occurrence of V2.0 crashing my network connection. Yeah, I'm hardwired into a router that is just not happy with SL at all.

Opening all the ports Linden suggestions on their wiki page only helped briefly. It seems they are swamped at customer service with V2.0. They haven't been able to get back to me on this for a week now.

[Adric Antfarm]

It's such a conflicting thing to talk about 2.0 since there are cool things like HTML/Media prims, but the interface itself is just too much in so many ways.

I suppose all could be forgiven, but the quintessential thing about Second Life to me is rezzing a box, uploading a texture, and making something which has gone from a simple click or two to a pain. That is something I doubt I will ever get over.

[magggnnus]

@ hiri nurmi:
you just need to open a second inventory window.
from the file-tab choose "new window".

[Rusalka Writer]

It is interesting, but so slow I can't go anywhere and just explore anymore. Textures and sculpties take an eternity to load.

[Metacam Oh]

"you just need to open a second inventory window.
from the file-tab choose "new window"."

Which freezes up my computer for a minute before it finally opens up. Sounds like a design flaw to me.

[Nalates Urriah]

I use it now and then. There are several features I like, MOAP, tattoos, and Alpha are great.

The chat and group chat make things unusable. If you have a local chat and a couple of groups chats going along with an IM... the screen is a mess.

I agree with those that believe the developers are not really users of SL. I would bet the team spends very little time in SL.

I'm curious what feedback Torley is giving them...

I look for forward to seeing the new features added to Emerald, Imprudence, and Kirsten's way neat S19.

[Hiri Nurmi]

"you just need to open a second inventory window.
from the file-tab choose "new window".

An I thought this was supposed to be more intuitive?

[Wall Berliner]

It's way too complicated. It's not at all intuitive (good luck , noobies!) It's slow. I won't be using it until it's forced on me.

[Nexus Burbclave]

Since one of my better selling items was a prim browser for viewer 1.0, it mainly has me thinking about when to sunset that item. I've got a number of shared media items in the pipeline for 2.0, so for the most part any "spare time" I have to spend in-world is being spent in my lab.

I'm actually very excited about this part of viewer 2.0, although there are many aspects of it that I either dislike or simply have no opinion on. I'm not a big fan of the greatly reduced field of vision caused by all of the screen real-estate consumed by the new UI. I'd love to see somebody work the actual enhancements into a viewer with the "classic" UI.

[Not You]

Meh, it has been pretty smooth.

One thing that dose bother me, and I KNOW will NOT get fixed by release and may make SL highly less usable for myself is whenever I edit something the tablet functionality stops working until OS restart (Vista Functions, not the tablet itself)

HUD Hovertext seams to be broken? Think this was an issue with the new font.

llInstantMessage fails to display properly in chat, that was a bummer.

Many have said the new UI takes up more screen space, I see this too. Lucky for me, unlucky for most of SL I run the viewer across dual screens so it dose not cause me to much issue.

Learning some of the hidden functions behind icons was a little weird, they did not pop out enough for me. After the learning curve the only thing that I start to hate is the way communications are handled, well one or two messages is one thing but as many have said trying to multi-task can be more demanding.

Web-On-A-Prim is cool, I am on the fence though. You could just share a URL for others to open up, it dose atleast make it native, and let you know that SECOND LIFE IS ABOVE THE WEB MWHAHAHAHAHA!

The real issues come around the big S word, Security, which if I remember right was the exact reason the project was shelved in the first place a couple of years ago. Think about an avatar that makes a web-prim and puts it in highly visible places to harness the computers of thousands of users for a distributed DOS attack without infecting computers, or them even knowing they are apart of it. I was able to set up a "Hyper" media cube that displays the same website 20 times over on different prims while auto refreshing every few seconds, google was not to happy with me :D (Try for yourself)

Feature Request: Put everything (Top & Bottom UI elements) in the side bar, and make the sidebar tabs detachable. Would remove most of my issues with the UI.

Overall though I think the revamped UI has some rough spots for sure but overall pretty dammed nice.

[Ted]

Go Hippo, Imprudence, Emerald, Meerkat.. oops, defuct,,,

Point being, if you want a better experience with a client, leave it to the open source community. I use the above clients and have to say that viewer 2.0 doesn't exactly appeal to me at all.

Viewer 2.0 is slow. It's terrible with how the menus are. The tool configuration requires two more clicks just to do what I have on my screen all the time at login.

I like to build and script. I like to work on things. If viewer 2.0 ever becomes mandatory.. people will once again leave.

If linden doesn't like people using other open source clients, they might as well hang up the shop.

my2cents

[Liv Leigh]

I'm with Arcadia, Brinda, Rusalka and Wall here:
2.0 is unusable. It's a resource-consuming hog that leaves me with a fraction of the framerates I get on decent viewers like Hippo Open Sim Viewer or Kirstens S16.

What Linden Labs itself calls 'An easy browser-like experience' reminds me of what I did when I downloaded internet-browsers that got way too heavy: de-install them immediately again.

As about the interface... Maybe some like it, but I prefer to see something of 'the world' on the screen, not have it all covered with buttons.

I consider 2.0 a total pain in the ass and I will not use it unless it is forced upon me. If that happens, it may seriously bring me to cash out from SL and spend lots less time there..

[ozzy]

the new viewer is awful...a total disaster...how could anyone be so stupid as to screw up something that worked...this is worse than new Coke.

[victoria wheeler]

Why can't I find something standard like how to Search for people? I STILL can't find it. Why did they do this? It is so creepy and alien. Lindens said, "Change is difficult". Yeah, if you F-up the Viewer bigtime, it is. Idiots.

[victoria wheeler]

And they made the Profile pictures SMALLER! Where have they been? Those images were too small to begin with, they get truncated, too. Talk about TOTALLY IGNORING user interests. Smug, know-it-all twits.

[Lex Luthor]

Straight out of the gate Viewer 2.0 was clumsy and hard to navigate, but I found something that
is really top notch.. The SL POP Viewer at http://inflife.net/ Best user oriented viewer with a 5 star rating. You’ll be VERY happy with it, and you’ll never have to worry about painfully slow logins and load times again..