Oz Linden talked to Jessica Lyon of Firestorm Viewer fame and Saffia Widdershins, of Prim Perfect fame at SL12B this evening. Now if you want the full skinny on the lowdown, you’ll have to wait for Prim Perfect to upload the video, which should not be too far in the future. However, if you want to read some frantically scribbled notes, that may contain inaccuracies, carry on reading here.
Oz discussed current issues, past issues and future issues in what was an extremely engaging interview.
I crashed a few times whilst taking my notes, but I’ll try not to start any blasphemous rumours. However crashing is a good place to start as that was part of the discussion. Oz explained how in the past he had worked for products where a 1% crash rate was considered pretty bad, however the crash rate for Second Life is higher than that and the panel agreed that Second Life users seem to accept these crash rates.
However Oz went to great lengths to point out that Linden Lab do not accept that crash rates should be as high as they are and they have been working on improvements and continue to work on improvements.
One point that Second Life users should bear in mind is that some viewer side crashes are out of the control of Linden Lab, for example, when someone has a graphics card that suffers from a memory leak. This is an issue that the people who create the drivers need to fix, and that’s not within Linden Lab’s remit.
The wide range of hardware that Second Life residents use is of course problematic when it comes to bug fixing, but Oz gave a tip on how to improve one’s Second Life experience, it’s a tip that I heard many many moons ago in relation to Microsoft Windows. Whereas a funky new graphics card can improve your experience in Second Life, a cheaper option may well be to increase your RAM.
Oz also discussed how new features in Second Life are received by the community, some people love them, some people hate them, some people are indifferent. However, Oz pointed out that whether people are criticising or praising a new feature, the level of intensity shows that people really care about Second Life. There was also a discussion of how some features introduced by Linden Lab won’t be appreciated by everyone because they simply don’t have the hardware to take advantage of them. A glaring example here is of course materials, whereby if you can’t see the new texture types, then you won’t see the enhanced texture on your screen. The beauty of this though is that people will still see textures as they’ve always seen them.
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