Category: Viewers

On Monday, NWN confirmed that Tom (T Linden) Hale  had gone from Linden Lab. There was some confusion over this, as (at least for some of us) his in-world Profile (alongside that of Cyn (Linden) Skyberg, also laid-off last week) remained accessible when the likes of Pink Linden’s Profile poofed almost as the news of the lay-offs hit the wires.

Hale’s departure has prompted speculation that Viewer 2.0 is about to go the same way.

All I can say is, guess again, kids.

The basis for the speculation is that Hamlet, in his piece, cites “sources” who suggested a link between Hale’s departure and the “poor performance” of Viewer 2.

Now, whole I’m no great fan of Viewer 2 – I think it was released far to early in its development cycle and with far too many flaws that could have easily been addressed if the developers had been allowed to engage with residents properly and constructively as the Viewer went into the initial “closed Beta”. But, that said, I don’t go along with the idea that the Viewer is going to be scrapped – or even that it is a failure.

The fact of the matter is, it is still far too early to judge the Viewer dispassionately. This is for a number of reasons – some of which I’ve touched on before, but are worth repeating:

• The viewer was released too early and with to many basic flaws / bugs (the god-awful sidebar behaviour; the myriad of search issues, etc.); as such, it was never going to find favour or popularity among a user base that has time and again proven itself somewhat “anti” change in SL whatever the colour of said change
• The development / release cycle of Viewer 2 is improving; more to the point the likes of Kirstenlee Cinquetti are demonstrating to LL just what needs to be done to the Viewer 2 user interface to enable it to gain a broader foothold. And Linden Lab is actually listening. The 2.1 release addresses many of the UI shortfalls contained within the initial 2.0 releases and are, in themselves, making Viewer 2 far more user-friendly. What’s more they come on top of changes quickly rolled out in response to the initial “backlash” against other elements of UI functionality, demonstrating the LL are trying to get the balance right. So long as this continues, Viewer 2 will gain wider use
• The Viewer, together with the New User Experience was intended to be the vanguard of a drive to generate a marked increase in new sign-ups. However, neither can exist in a vacuum – for either to have a major impact on the rate of flow of new users joining SL, they need to be coupled to more aggressive promotion of SL by Linden Lab. This hasn’t really happened. Ergo, both the Viewer and the NUE exist (again, as I’ve said before) in some kind of Costner-esque la-la land of “if you build it, they will come”.

As such, it is hard to see Viewer 2, even the degree of time, effort and money invested in it to date is simply going to vanish as a result of Hale’s departure. Rather the reverse would seem to be the case – as recent blog posts have indicated – the release cycle for Viewer 2 is going to increase, again indicating it is here to stay. I’d also lay odds on it being the foundation for the new “browser-based access” to SL that was announced alongside of the restructuring.

If Hale’s departure was connected in any way with the “poor performance” in Viewer 2’s uptake, I can only assume that it was because he was the one selected to fall on his sword (or tripped in the direction of his sword). Again, we’ve seen very little aggressive marketing from Linden Lab when it comes to getting users through the doors – either utilising Viewer 2 or the New User Experience. Some suggest the total growth in sign-ups since the release of both has been around the 50K, which is not a huge amount given SL’s user retention figures – and much of that influx seems to have been off the back of James Cameron’s Avatar rather than any sustained marketing strategy on the part of Linden Lab.

That there has been no sustained strategy (or any real marketing uptake – when was the last time Catherine (Smith) Linden was in the limelight?) tends to suggest that if Viewer 2’s take-up is already being looked at so critically that a sacrifice was warranted…then one cannot help but roll the word “scapegoat” around in an idle fashion.

Indeed, I’ve often found it interesting that LL have never considered the position of Director of Marketing as being a executive management post.

But to come back to the point: no – whatever the reason for Hale’s departure (including the merging of departments that effectively made his role somewhat redundant), it is not indicative that Viewer 2 is going anywhere other than forward in the immediate future.

Linden Lab have released an “Alpha” of Viewer 2.1.

They’re making progress it seems – calling the release “Alpha” rather than trumpeting it as an “almost ready Beta”. Who sez they don’t listen?!

On a serious note, the new release (which admittedly, I have yet to download and try) brings with it several much-needed improvements – such as the bane of my life, the Sidebar, now “overlaying” the world-view as an option, rather than shunting it rudely off to the left. Why anyone would want the latter option constantly shattering their experience, I’ll never understand; but at least we now have the long-overdue option to get rid of it for something altogether smoother.

They’ve also finally got the message about camera controls – recombining things into a single pane (why, oh why were they ever split-off in the first place?), and they’ve made the bottom button bar somewhat more customisable to meet the needs of experienced users.

All this is very much to the good – although again points to a broken train of thought somewhere along the development trail, as all of these features should have been there from the get-go, and thank heavens for Kirstenlee Cinquetti for demonstrating to LL that all this and more could have been done from the get-go via her (still) infinitely superior S20 viewer.

Viewer 2.1 brings us a step closer to OpenID authentication for SL-related services. About time to.

A novel feature being introduced to Viewer 2.1 is Voice Morphing. Clearly, despite claims that we’ve already clocked up 28+ billion years of chat on Voice, not enough of us are using it. There are many reasons for this – some of which I’ve pointed to in that post.

Voice Morphing is an attempt to resolve some of these issues by providing the means for people to “sound like their avatar should sound” – with a range of robotic, furry and other voices – including the option to sound like a member of the opposite sex.

I have to admit that I’ve avoided Voice in the past in part because I simply don’t want my mental image of the people / creatures I’m interacting with shattered by hearing the real voice behind the avatar. It’s not the only reason I’ve largely steered clear of Voice after some early playing (and using it at a couple of OH meetings in-world), but it is one. As such, I’m going to be curious as to how the morphing tool is viewed / taken up.

On the one hand, I can see it being a lot of fun; on the other, I can seen some trying to use it for drama purposes (anyone using a female avatar and one of the female voices in place of their own must be a guy, for example). On the third hand (yes, I occasionally have Beeblebrox moments) I can see it not making an iota of difference all ways around.

The main reason for presenting the third hand is simply because a) people are slow to change their ways, and in terms of rp, where this has the biggest potential use, if it is not adopted by the many within a particular rp environment, the few won’t bother either; and b) it is, at the end of the day, a subscription service; and while “only” about $3 a month (L$750), given LL’s recent track record, doubtless many will avoid it simply because of the pleasure they’ll have in not giving LL more of their hard-earned  pennies. Especially when the voices are pre-packaged. If you only want a female voice – then it is “only” $3 a month. But if you vary from, say a male gladiator to a sci-fi robot to a furry according to your mood, then you’re looking at $9 a month to give all your forms a voice.

Mind you…I can see the MOTD promotion for Premium Accounts now: “Upgrade and (homes, support, blah, blah)…offset the cost of your in-world Voices with weekly stipends!”

All-in-all, however, the moves being made with Viewer 2.1 are welcome.

Esbee Linden posts about the forthcoming Viewer 2.1, and makes something of a ballyhoo over it. 400,000 downloads is a surprising figure. Emerald has been around a while and yet people question the Modular Systems’ claim that in excess of 70,000 have downloaded it. Given Viewer 2 has been with us less than three months, 400K is a very surprising figure. Nevertheless I expect at least one fanboi will be looking through Hubble and praising the figure for all its worth and using it as further “proof” that there is nothing wrong with Viewer 2.0….

Beyond the hype, however, there are some telling statements from Esbee. Most interesting is her list of forthcoming attractions, namely:

• Adding individual volume controls for Shared Media objects.
• Customization of the bottom bar, so that you can quickly access the features and functionality that you use most often.
• Updates to the camera and movement controls, so we can allow you to pan and orbit your view of Second Life at the same time.
• Adding the ‘Build’ option back to the right-click context menu.
• Fixing the bug where CTL-ALT-F1 does not hide all the Viewer UI as it should. This fix should solve a lot of problems for our machinimists and photographers.
• Adding a preference that allows users to control whether the Side Bar opening resizes the world or slides over it.

Frankly, while it is good news that the above are all being added to Viewer 2.0 – the fact remains that they should have been there from Day One. Period. While Viewer 2.0 is primarily aimed at new users who, granted, come into SL with a raft of different expectations than the rest of us, the fact remains that Viewer 2.0 also has to service those of us who have been here a while – and things like the irritating camera controls, restricted build functionality, lack of cohesive access to functions via the taskbar, etc., simply fail to consider, much less address the needs of the experienced user.

Similarly fundamental bugs such as the Sidebar jarring the in-world view to the left, the failure of CTRL-ALT-F1 should have been picked up and addressed long before the Viewer went to public Beta (and I have it on good authority that both of these issues were repeatedly raised during the closed beta testing, so absolutely no excuses here).

Performance issues are something I’m not going to comment on – they’re an accepted pitfall in an environment as dynamic as SL, and something somewhere is likely going to cause issues and problems along the way; as long as LL stay on top of them, that’s all that matters.

The Avatar customisation is also interesting, although potentially it will push Viewer 2.0 further from those wishing to stay with a 1.2x code base for their Viewer and put more of a load on TPV developers as they try to maintain and fix establish 1.2x code and integrate / back-engineer the newer code into their products. Even so, a greater flexibility for clothing layer use is to be welcomed.

Now, if they really could get the new search tool sorted out, then we might be approaching a waypoint to celebrate; but I’ll let Ciaran Laval give you the low-down on the situation there.