Saturday, June 20, 2009

My Top 10 Wishes for Improvements to Second Life

Written 20 June, 2009

My Top 10 Wishes for Improvements to Second Life

1. The ability to have large amounts (thousands) of avatars together in one place and one time.

2. Smooth handoffs between sims (no lag, no weirdness)

3.  Increase in prim allowance (maybe 40,000, as on other grids)

4. Decrease in tier ($195 USD sounds like a fair amount for a sim. $295 is too much.

5. Longer sounds (10 seconds is just not long enough), and zero delay in hearing sounds

6. Ability to create bigger prims (100 meters is a reasonable upper limit. 10 meters is ridiculous)

7. Ablity to teleport with avatar intact to and from other grids

8. More attachment points (my sop to the fashionistas amonst us)

9. More upper and lower clothing layers (another sop)

10. Click on attachments or groups of attachments to attach them.

(These are off the top of my head. I'm sure I've overlooked something horrendously important.)

[I'd like to hear the wish lists' of my readers.]

5 comments:

HomerTheBrave said...

The first few of your list all relate to the problems I'd point out (unstable group chat, for instance).

Basically SL doesn't scale. It's reached its bigness and might have to be completely redesigned to get any bigger.

idyll said...

Ability to join more groups.

Graphics in notecards.

Refinements to friend levels - so that friending isn't the only option besides calling cards, which nobody will use.

Connecting directly as a network node so your prims (and inventory?) are stored on YOUR computer.

Melissa Yeuxdoux said...

Top Ten Improvements, eh? Here's my wish list.

1. LL moves from their current server code to OpenSim. Why? See Gwyneth Llewelyn's blog entries "No More Limits" and "OpenSimulator: the Choice for 2010", and Adam Frisby's post about recent changes to OpenSim that cut down the CPU load by nearly 60 percent with 100 avatars in a region.

2. Improved appearance adjustments: a display of body and body part dimensions rather than just the [expletive] arbitrary 0-100 slider scales, and the ability to scale one's entire avatar up or down in size while preserving proportions.

3. VWR-1258... as if you didn't know. :) It's not just about extending limits on body part sizes, but also improvement in the avatar shape.

4. Shapes other than the stock human shape. Right now in SL, centaurs are obviously people dragging along a fixed model of most of a horse, and people have to do all sorts of perverse tricks to get shapes that vary much from the ordinary.

5. Prims larger than the 10-meter limit; many have already commented on their utility in builds. The current under-the-table, wink-wink nudge-nudge tolerance of them is ridiculous.

6. Ability to teleport, with avatar intact, between grids, _taking one's inventory with one_, and to communicate between grids.

7. Flexible sculpted prims.

8. Clothing that's really clothing, rather than body paint, and that acts like clothing--jeans that don't look like you're trying to suck them into your colon, tops that jump across the concavity between your breasts, and real skirts instead of strips of cloth tied together around your waist!

9. Clothing that fits, rather than really working only for the precise shape that the designer used to create it. Clothing should have associated scripts that take as parameters the avatar shape parameters and GENERATE the version that the buyer actually wears, adjusting sleeve and leg lengths, modifying textures so that they match where edges meet and don't get stretched into blurry messes or mashed for body parts of a size different from the one the designer used. (See VWR-10839 for more explanation and examples.)

10. Real shadows and prims that can be realistically made to look like chrome, polished stone, etc.

Those aren't in order of importance, just the order that I thought of them.

Peter Stindberg said...

#10 on your list is already possible wth alternative viewers like the old Nicholaz, Imprudence or CoolViewer

Tycho Beresford said...

All of yours, plus:

I want to be able to put a tattoo on one arm without having to have the same tattoo on the other arm as well.

I want to be able to own a homestead sim without first having to own a full sim.

I want to be able to drag chat, inventory, minimap and other miscellaneous windows onto my second monitor so that I can view the beauty of SL uncluttered.

I'd like many more groups, and group chat/notices that actually work.

I'd like to be able to attach more than one object to a group notice; I often want to send both a LM and notecard, plus possibly textures.

I'd like an expiration time/date for group notices, so that when I log in I'm not bombarded with notices for events that have passed.