Monat: Februar 2008

The trouble with Dazzle

I guess in the lights of the well hailed OnRez Viewer Lindenlab was tempted to build a renovated version of the viewer on their own. The result is the Dazzle first look viewer.

Dazzle looks quite blue, when you use it, but aside that it’s still the old Lindenlab viewer, all the same menus and such, nothing new in it. Yet.

That’s the difference with the OnRez Viewer. When it became public available, it had some innovations in it like the in-built webbrowser, the renovated search and others. OnRez itself was innovative, Dazzle on its own is just a new skin for the client, nothing more.

But what the client really needs is a rearrangement and rethinking of some menus, interfaces and much more, which hasn’t happened in Dazzle – yet. So in that point Dazzle is simple disappointing at the moment.

About the fragmentation of viewers

There are still many fields in which Second Life gets new development,
a good thing, if you ask me. But since those fields are quite diverse,
there are now so many first look and beta viewers around, that it get’s
troublesome to test them all out. Don’t believe me? Well, for Windows,
there are those viewers beside the official one around:

  • the release candidate viewer (version 1.19.0.2),
  • the Windlight first look viewer,
  • the Dazzle first look viewer and finally
  • the beta test grid viewer.

Each viewer is spurting another feature the other one has not or is going to make it sometime into the official line of viewers. So we got now a quite fragmented field of beta viewers. Wouldn’t it just be better to roll up all those beta features into one beta line and hand this one out to people feeling adventurous? I strongly believe so.

Don’t trust the Lindens alone to keep your data safe!

Many people, like me, have been suffering an annoying error message since months now – "Missing object from database."

It comes upon you without warning. You login, want to rez your favorite chain, skin, whatever, and you only get instead "Missing object from database." – Bam, you’re blasted! You even don’t get the name of the object at all, so you have to figure it out on your own what’s missing – bummer!

So, what can you do against this? Not much at all. This bug has been bugging residents since months, it’s spreading like a virus and still unfixed. The only thing you can hope for is that the Lindens are fixing it sooner or later, sooner would be better, of course.

There’s an entry in their famous JIRA system for it called SVC-553, take a look at it. Quite interesting read and for sure tell them what you think about it. This is such a fundamental bug, because it’s undermining the trust in the inventory and handiwork of the Lindens at all, that it’s a real shame that it’s still unfixed since August last year!

Oh, yes, external backup, anyone? No? New CTO, anyone? No? We’re all busted! Until this thing is fixed it’s unsafe to buy anything at all, because YOU could be the next!