Coming Soon: Big User Interface Changes to Second Life!

Big changes are coming soon to Second Life's much-debated, much-derided user interface, according to Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble, who recently stopped by the popular Second Life user forum SL Universe to mention this. The changes will merge the current Basic and Advance modes, something that's already been announced, but that's just the start. Specifically:

For the UI changes. First you will see a merge of the modes. (Basically click to move + new camera coming into Advanced which you can turn to [the] old way if you like.) That should be end of this month [October]. Next, a large GUI change for all our users. Yup, we are taking another crack at UI design again... (Moria drums)

Yes, Rod Humble mentioned Moria drums, because that's how he rolls. Maybe he believes a lot of these changes will be greeted by a dramatic rumbling from the hardcore user base. And I love how he concludes:

So in fairly short order you will be enjoying a new Linden Lab UI AND new features to help things run amok in-world. Good or bad it will be glorious!

Emphasis mine. My guess (and hope) is that Second Life's viewer will look much more like The Sims 3, the hit Electronic Arts PC game which Humble lead developed, before coming to Linden Lab. (The Basic version of the viewer already looks decidedly more Sims-like.) Whatever the big changes, here's to glorious ones that aren't just incremental.

Comments

[Osprey]

/me hopes the put the UI suppression behaviour back the way it was.

And put alignment menu BACK on the first Edit pane

[Riisu]

/me runs to buy popcorn. This should be fun to watch. ;P

[sirhc desantis]

Yep i'm with Riisu - anything can happen in the next..... :)

[Rod Humble]

... half hour. Stand by for ACTION. We are about to launch.. STINGRAY! :)

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Cool! A Stingray AO would be fun.

[Nimil Blackflag]

the sims interface is hideous and bulky, i would hope its not going to be what our viewer turns into. no offense rod, i love the sims almost as much as sl, but i hate that UI.

[Caliandris]

The big problem with the 2/3 viewer from my point of view is that it impedes building by adding clicks to the operations a builder needs to perform in SL. I've also worked with people who were using the basic viewer who were extremely confused by their inability to do things that they could see other people doing. Simplifying the viewer, if it ignores the creators and builders in favour of making the viewer user-friendly, will rebound again. I hope they have tested it using some non-newbies who build and create....

[Vooper Werribee]

I love how people are already moaning about what the new UI MIGHT be like :) It's hard not to imagine Rod as riding that nuke at the end of Dr Strangelove ...this is certainly going to be fun! :D

[Myf McMahon]

The dream of course, would be be to move to a more "World of Warcraft" type UI. Not in the surface details of course, but in allowing a similar level of user access to the underlying XML. Second Life has this to a degree, enough to allow for some level of skinning, but compared to the mutability of WoW, it's nothing. I want to be able to change and adapt pretty much every screen element, so I have the GUI that works for me, I want every other user to be able to do the same. The toolkit approach is to a large extent, what Second Life is about. The Lab provide us a world that is mutable and flexible, why not extend this philosophy to our window on it too?

[foneco zuzu]

Right now, We will have to wait and see, but the poor results of last changes on the ui, are much less needed thrn a full working grid without bugs, like the ones shown lately, pls make the grid stable before anyting!

[foneco zuzu]

Still just hope that this new viewer will be just as option for the users, cause we all know how many use the Ll viewer on a daily base!

[anotherdeadavatar]

Wouldn't it be funny, after all these third party devs spent time-with NO PAY-actually getting mesh to render in a v1 based client-that perhaps they are planning to return to the v1 platform?

I know it isn't likely but it does make me laugh a little.

[Harper Ganesvoort]

Oh, good Lord, someone else remembers Stingray here??? I used to enjoy that, oh so many moons ago. Now, of course, it's Thunderbirds.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

As long as I can toss all the point-and-click nonsense out the window and configure it the way I want it, I'll cope.

[Metacam Oh]

point and click? that's too complicated for me, I just want to move forward and backwards, that's it. Up arrow and down arrow. :)

[Rin Tae]

HaHaHa .. my first reaction to this was:

"How long did it needed to make them figure out that they need to change the UI?"

There are so many jokes around LL being slow tha I am sure this one will make a nice addition once they announce what exactly they want to make.

And while I do hope that they will finally take a look at what people actually want (because I really can't understand how the same people can make the same mistakes over and over again) and something good will come out of it, I also sense a lot of drama on the horizon ... and I admit to making sure to have the popcorn ready when it happens.

[Taro]

point and click to go is in firestorm since some while now ... and i cannot live without it anymore.

and why exactly do we need a new UI? ... again?

because 48 million facebook useres are too stupid to deal with the existing ones?

[Ajax Manatiso]

Hopefully the camera hud will be back to a usable size and have the old responsiveness, otherwise its a fail for creators right there. Not crazy about click to walk -- makes going around corners impossible and, when exploring, you have to view new items before you can actually walk up to them which destroys the spontaneity.

Right now noobs trying to use point and click are doing the nooby cha-cha -- back and forth and back and forth. LL really should make the UI more like the 1.x version most TPV's use because noobs are always asking how to do this and that -- and its somewhere else in the veteran's 1.x style GUI -- so the oldies can't help the noob and the noob gets frustrated and logs off -- forever. Think about it Rod.

[Casper Jideon]

SL is a chat room

[EileenK]

I just want to scream when I read this! I'm one of those people for whom the mesh compliant viewers don't work. Can't we just fix the bugs in the current versions before doing anything new.

[anotherdeadavatar]

@lyoba

I know you wanted your comment to be posted, however, when you click post ONCE, you should wait or else you end up with post puke, as evidenced by your 10000000000 posts...lol

[Hamlet Au]

I deleted the multiple comments. Remember kids, post a comment ONCE, then WAIT like 5-10 seconds for it to show up. Pain in the ass, I know. Typepad hurts my nutsack on the daily.

[Orca Flotta]

Point and click might be a nifty feature for some - for most it won't. Also it's kinda old now since we have it already in Firestorm ... and Phoenix too I guess. Can't say exactly because I always found it not worthwile enough to bother with that pretty unnatural way to move my avie.

So where's the revolution in that new viewer?

I expect something better from LL, a really sleek, to the point, no noinsense UI. Something like as if they really listened and learned. But what is to be expected from a bunch of grossly overpaid hitec facebook fanatics who don't understand neither the philosophy nor the uses of their own product?

What the existing, paying, SL customer wants right now is:
- a stable grid (we are tired and angry about all the new rollouts and crashes and whatnots)

- lower tiers (premium fee + 25 US$/mth is already quite steep for a internet game, so give us a full sim for the price of a 4096m² parcel and you'll see SL flourish)

- less lag (with today's servers there shouldn't be any serverside lag, period)

- better server "architecture" (excuse the term, I'm not a networker, but I'm thinking about failed handovers. Vehicle users are tired of having to look out for sim borders and particularly corners all the time, and either sinking or flying up and losing control over their vehicles for 20 secs before being dropped down somewhere in the next sim)

- less flashy, content breaking, shiny new stuff (we don't need all this in a world that was sposedly imagined and built by ourselves)

- more immersion, less external shit (for example having the profile in external database was an idea that should get the employee who came up with it FIRED!)

- a viewer that doesn't resemble a website
(why won't you learn from the V2 UI disaster?)

- a viewer that doesn't put a fog of unneeded stuff between me (my avie) and the world (most oldbies will tell you how negative V2 was affecting the immersion)

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Drums, drums in the Deep. A new UI is coming!

Well, Mr. Humble sure has a way of poking the hornet's nest. As long as I can keep running SL on my rig, I say "keep poking!"

The UI has been a mess for a long time. Just try managing your inventory :)

[Krinkles Q. Klown]

Here's a thought ... actually hire UI interface experts for the redesign.

Make them spend a month in world doing everything a user does ... like building and scripting.

And for gawd's sake, please come up with a consistent frikkin' scripting language. You know like an ECMA-262 based one, like Java, C, Javascript, Actionscript, etc.

It would be so frikkin' cool to be able to create listeners with just a single line of code, like var oTouchListener = this.addListener("touch",someFunctionName);

Throw in real arrays while you're at it!

[Timo Gufler]

If they just could focus on keeping the existing users happy instead of trying to reach the Facebook dummies... Seems like we can only dream about seeing bugs like SVC-472 (about region crossing problems) fixed one day, because LL concentrates on everything else... *sighs*

[DD Ra]

They still believe you have to "rule" SL as a game to win more money ?!?

[Penny Patton]

@Taro

SL has always had a terrible UI. The Viewer 1 UI sucks as much as the incremental changes made for the Viewer 2/3 UI, just in different ways.

SL's UI, past and present, is more like that of a word processor than a virtual world. Nearly all virtual worlds have UIs that are radically different than what SL presents to us. (Remember, many videogames are simply virtual worlds with rigid game mechanics.) With Viewer 2 LL tried to make the UI more like that of an outdated web browser, something actual web browsers have even moved away from!

Like Krinkles says, here's hoping they get actual UI professionals who actually spend time using the software from our perspective rather than just shoehorning in bad changes. Tho, with LL's continued reluctance to hire anyone with even a basic understanding of visual design to address SL's many design blunders (Bad camera placement, poorly made starter avatars and Linden environments, broken building tools) I'm rather pessimistic.

[anotherdeadavatar]

@Krinkles

A UI design firm designed Viewer2-Linden Lab did not. Makes ya say 'hmmmmm', doesn't it?

[bongo]

Big Spaceship a UI design firm? lol.. they make bloated flash movie websites. The place was full of hipster no nothings. Kind of like LL. And the Project leader from the SL V2 mess got himself hired by Lucas. And people wonder why Jar Jar existed.

[Jonathan Yap]

The FUI code changes have just been merged. You can pick up a mostly-working (there are a number of bugs yet to be fix) version here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers#Second_Life_Development_Viewer

[Jonathan Yap]

Made url link shorter: http://tinyurl.com/3f6xqyq

[Jonathan Yap]

That url link in my previous message is for the FUI viewer just out as of about an hour ago.