[sldev] Re: OS-SL Development Issues (was Upcomingviewer releases)

[SL - Farallon Greyskin]

Yay for this post :D

I spent several years writing and maintaining a social MU* client, sort of a precursor to the AIM type chat clients but with a "world" to back them up. There are TONS of features I would LOVE to implement or see implemented in SL. The current communication features seem pretty primitive compared to most other programs used to communicate socially, and since that is a major point of SL, it should have more attention paid to it. Custom Syntax highlighting, sound macros, inline macros both directions (Well gestures can provide a tiny bit of this but are really something else). Triggers that can set off auto responders (Again like gestures but for incoming text as well as your own chat) etc...

I am actually on the verge of seriously considering replacing the IM/Chat/History windows with a version of my client (Well the features of it). Just not ready to submit 3-6 months of my free time to it right now, and of course the change would be so large LL would NEVER pick it up so I'd be stuck maintaining "Farallon's Client" forever... :(

It would only take a few days work to make my MU client connect to SL in text only mode but I really don't like the way your AV sits in world when you do that, it's really... "hacky". Would love to maybe see LL provide and text only login at some point, though I understand that maybe having 100,000 people on line (now that people can idle at work on SL without using up bandwidth or CPU at work) even "just" communicating through friends and groups might not be in the cards right now... 

Still, some more "AIM Like" chat feature considerations would be nice, and no, video and file transfer ARE NOT NEEDED! :D

Farallon

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Kelly Linden 
  To: Argent Stonecutter ; sldev at lists.secondlife.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 9:21 AM
  Subject: Re: [sldev] Re: OS-SL Development Issues (was Upcomingviewer releases)


  Dale Glass wrote: 
On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 10:29:02AM -0500, Argent Stonecutter wrote:
  But *right now* what we have in SL groups isn't usable for this kind  
of collaboration. Mailing lists are. SL is good for virtual face to  
face, but it's not for discussions like this, and I'm not sure that  
even with all of the above it should be.
    But I wasn't talking about the mailing list, I was talking about IRC.
Although a newsgroup in SL would be nice to have.

My point is: SL group IM is pretty much identical to IRC. In fact in
some respects, IMO much better. Excepting the horrible performance we're
having lately, of course.

So why add the need to run an extra program and make people have to keep
up with what's going there when the functionality already present in SL
could be used instead?

  I disagree.  In bullet form to be more easily refuted:
  * When developing SL especially, running a *second* instance of the viewer for communication is non trivial load.  "Lite" clients off set this somewhat, currently in exchange for some amount of complexity and robustness.  IRC clients have been around for well over a decade while lite SL clients have been around less than a year (I think).

  * Forced chat join.  When anyone sends an IM to a group in SL it forces every member to join the chat.  I would rather specifically choose which chats to join and when, and only receive the messages for those chats I already have open.

  * Name and keyword notification.  I rely heavily in IRC on the visual indicators (bouncing dock, highlighted text) when someone mentions my name.

  * Performance and reliability (already mentioned)

  It isn't far from competing, but I don't think it is 'pretty much identical'.  :)

   - Kelly



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