Dazzle comments (was RE: [sldev] Viewer Roadmap)

[Brad Kittenbrink (Brad Linden)]

Matthew Dowd wrote:
>
> This feels like sticking plaster over a problem rather than addressing 
> the problem directly - also if this customization does not change the 
> colours in textures (such as buttons, icons, etc.) its effectiveness 
> will be limited. The current palette underlying the Dazzle scheme is 
> fundamentally flawed (see Aimee's comments in the jira issue), and it 
> really needs a redesign not a few tweaks. Moreover, you shouldn't be 
> expecting a large proportion of your users to have to customise the 
> colours before they being to use SL just to make the default UI usable 
> - this is hardly going to help new signup retention.
>
The skinning team is addressing the problem directly as Steve said with 
Skinning Phase 1 <https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Skinning#Phase_1>.  
But it's not gonna be released soon enough for a lot of people so this 
"plaster" as you call it is a compromise in an attempt to respond in 
some way to that feedback and get something to those people quickly.

Again, the major effort with a project such as skinning is not 
necessarily the code itself, but producing something that's 
maintainable, testable, and well documented.  It's better to take such 
things slow to reduce the risk of introducing bugs in other parts of the 
system, or design flaws that limit our forward compatibility.  In the 
end it probably won't take a whole lot of code to implement user 
switchable skins, but we have to do it precisely right because we don't 
want to just release a shortsighted implementation that will end up with 
users skins getting broken 3 releases later.

-Brad