Received Items Beta Testing

So I decided this evening to dip my toes into the received items beta testing, if you are unaware about this, there’s a blog post, a forum post, a wiki article and a very brief knowledge base article. I would suggest the Wiki article is the most important to get you started as it tells you how to login to the Beta Grid (AKA Aditi). You will also need to use the beta viewer or a TPV that supports the new received items folder, I went for the beta viewer.

Basically this is a new way of receiving items, it will be released in conjunction with marketplace direct delivery but this folder will be for all new received items, not just marketplace deliveries.

First things first, they don’t make things easy do they? I downloaded and installed the beta viewer, followed the instructions, and couldn’t see a received items panel. I then went and downloaded the direct delivery project viewer, thinking the beta viewer wasn’t the right one, and found no received items panel. I eventually found out what the problem was because I saw a post over at SLUniverse about it, Innula Zenovka explained:

“I eventually got the beta viewer to show me the received items folder by going to the “Quick Return” parcel, rezzing a prim and and waiting for it to be returned. That created the folder and then it worked pretty much as expected.”

So three cheers for Innula! This did indeed work, the quick return parcel Innula talks of is listed on the wiki page, it’s a green parcel. So finally I could get on with the show.

Now I could see the received items panel and with the beta and project viewers it looks something like this:

Now, first things first, I rezzed something from my inventory and picked it back up, that went back to the folder it originated from, so no change of behaviour there, thankfully. Next I created a new item and picked it up, that went to my new received items folder.

Then I did a bit of scripting to test how objects would be received from a scripted item, first of all with just a notecard, which went to my received items folder and then with a list of items so that I could create an inventory folder, which was created in the received items folder.

Now the thing to note is that the received items folder acts like a system folder, for example I can’t rename items in the received items folder, I need to drag them into my inventory to do that. This will lead to some confusion I’m sure but should hopefully be easily explained.

People will leave plenty of items in their received items folder, they won’t drag items into their inventory, this is inevitable, whether that will create any server problems I don’t know but people won’t file items any better than they do now.

So I see a couple of changes here, not major ones but potential annoyances, the folder being more like a system folder than the objects folder where a lot of inventory currently gets delivered being one issue, the second issue being folders getting created there rather than in the normal inventory and then people not being able to rename etc, as I said this isn’t a major issue but it’s likely to annoy.

The feedback in the forum has been largely negative, probably because this doesn’t appear on the face of it to improve matters, whether technically it improves matters is another issue, people are reporting that capped messages still lead to items not being delivered, so it doesn’t address that issue, whether it makes item delivery more reliable when people are inworld hasn’t been mentioned, if it does, that’s a big plus point but I haven’t seen any mention of that.

Overall I’m a bit unconvinced with the details I currently have, there’s no obvious improvement here, but maybe when the details emerge, we will see that it does improve matters.

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