[opensource-dev] SL Beta: things that are broken greatly

[Tillie Ariantho]

Hello,

I have to complain again. I know this is the dev list, but it's all bad development, so I think it belongs here.


- Resetting all your preferences

That's pretty bad. Each time a new client comes you have to redo ALL your changes. I'm pretty annoyed by that, I have done this many dozen times till today. Why not parse the config entries against
some minimum/maximum boundary list, drop whats unknown and set values to default if boundaries are crossed? I really hate do disable toasts, voice, media, resetting the cache path, raising display
settings, filtering all the notice types etc. over and over again.


- Viewer automatic update installation

This is as bugged as the regular standalone installation. It downloads the update and when installing asks you for the windows admin password... and... as bugged as the standalone installation, starts
 the client ad 'admin' right after. So, if you customize all the preferences, all the settings are LOST, because next time you start SL as the regular user, not admin, so it can't find any
settings.xml because it's in the admin home. Why not just do a popup after installation in the end: "Installation finished, restart the client from the desktop now!" or something similar?


- Busy reply message gets lost

It's still not remembered. After logout it's gone.


- Instability

Till finishing redoing all preferences I crashed 3 times. It was never as bad as this before. Two times it crashed the nvidia driver. That didnt happen for a looong time.


- Windlight Settings Window

This change is one of the worst in the latest updates. You can't change windlight settings anymore, quickly. This is a complete nightmare for photographers and machinimatographers (see jira entries
for the complaints). Each time windlight stuff changes, you need more and more clicks to get anything changed here. How do I select a windlight theme quicky or move around the sun to get the light I want?


- Local Lights Toggle

Adds to the worseness of previous topic. Local lights on/off is hidden in the debug settings.


- Highres Snapshots

There are still those ugly offsets in water and clouds when doing highres snapshots. If you do a highres snapshot, the client splits the snapshot into like 4 parts, snapping all 4 of them one by one,
and then merging into one big snapshot. During this, water and clouds continue to move, which creates ugly offsets where the 4 parts get merged together afterwards.


The client by now is not usable for taking photos anymore beyond postcards. If you do anything more complicated like art snapshots (high resolution needed), crowded events or machinima, you need to
use a different client.

In advanced mode there should be streamlined workflows for advanced users, but there are not.

I see at least 2 different groups that would need better workflows:

- builders/designers
- photographers/machinimatographers

For both the workflows got pretty worse within the last months. You need more clicks for almost all the stuff you usually do.



Tillie
Advanced event photographer with 400+ fashion events done (photos).