The battle of the viewers seems to be hotting up, with Oz Linden set in the role of Sauron according to some, but recent comments from Oz have been bang on the money. Tateru Nino reports that Oz said if third party viewers don’t keep up, things will break. This is a perfectly sensible comment and one developers of third party viewers should welcome. There are also quotes of Oz saying that Linden Lab will look into what motivates people to stay with a viewer 1.x experince, again, this is perfectly sensible step, I’m not sure why Oz is getting such a walloping over this.
The back of my thighs are killing me, I had to do some weeding yesterday, this has nothing to do with Oz! This getting old malarkey is no fun, your recovery time nosedives. However getting back to viewers, I think what frustrates people about Oz’s comment on the viewer 1 issue is, it has been going on since viewer 2 went open beta!
I’m not going to go over all the viewer 1/ viewer 2 issues again, I covered plenty of them here, when I asked if Mesh would tempt people over to viewer 2. The main point is that there have been way too many “People don’t like change” comments about viewer 2 and this attitude hid the real issues. Yes some people don’t like change, but there were way too many issues with viewer 2 for that to be a sustainable excuse for the lack of uptake.
Inara Pey also covers these issues here.
The thing that frustrates people is that the complaints about viewer 2 have been available to Linden Lab for over a year, now not all of the complaints can be dealt with, but the reasons people have stuck with those older viewers go way beyond people not liking change, they come down to some very basic functionality.
I welcome Oz’s comments and I think some of the criticism he has got over them are hugely unfair, in many ways he’s saying what people wanted LL to say, ok he may well be twelve months late but his comments are fine, people shouldn’t shoot the messenger here, it sounds like Oz is on the right track, give him a break and do pay attention to what he says, he’s right about TPV’s.
Oz called it right wrt to Viewers that *cannot keep up* with upcoming updates ending up broken or dead by the side of the road. I’m still stunned at the degree of slamming he’s taken in some quarters for what is a valid statement of fact.
I’m more sympathetic towards those who have laughed at his (/the Lab’s) apparent lack of understanding as to why V2 isn’t the big hitter that was perhaps anticipated, however. As you say, the reasons have been writ large for the last 14 months…
Oz was spot on about TPV’s, they have to keep up, it’s not Linden Lab’s job to wait for them and as critical as I am with the Lab for communications, they do seem to have a good relationship with the TPV’s.
Meanwhile… what seem to be the two most popular TPVs have V2-based viewers in active development, both of which seem to directly address quite a lot of the LLV2 dysfunctionality… and the people who prefer TPVs over Lab product but who can’t be arsed about the drama are patiently anticipating further releases of their viewer of choice, while saying “Well, duh…” to Oz’s first comment and “It’s about time!” to the second.
Indeed, I don’t see why his comments raised so many hackles, they were perfectly sensible. I’m not on the TPV bandwagon too and awaiting their developments because the official viewer has been very problematic for me lately.
I gave Viewer 2 a shot for about three weeks, and just gave up on it. I think it has some great features, but I just couldn’t get *my avatar* to rez. Seriously…my skin, eyes, and clothing would never fully rez no matter how many times I rebaked, even though everything (and everyone) else would rez just fine.
Being that I take a lot of pictures inworld, this problem made it just useless to me. And after the Emerald debacle, I simply don’t trust the third party viewers at all, so I’m back to Viewer 1.23. Maybe once Viewer 2 gets a few more updates, I’ll give it another try. Until then, I’ll stick with the old stuff. At least it works properly.
I’ve just blogged that I’ve downloaded TPV’s, I am fed up with the performance issues I’ve had lately with the official viewer 2, including people sending me photos to tell me I am Ruthed even though I look fine. Like you, I have always been wary of TPV’s.
I also take a lot of pictures and haven’t been able to lately without crashing lately, it’s so infuriating. I don’t blame you for sticking with what works and this is one of the main reasons people have been reluctant to switch to viewer 2.
I do think mesh will push a lot of people to viewer 2. Yes, people don’t like change, but they do like cool stuff. To this point there really hasn’t been a pressing feature that would push the oldbies to use viewer 2. Display names, meh, take or leave. Outfits? Most TPV’s have that feature now in a Viewer 1 interface.
I agree with you totally, there has been nothing about viewer 2 that has been a big enough hook. I use viewer 2 all the time now, well I’m on the TPV’s now, but I’ve been using viewer 2 and whereas there are some nice features, there has been nothing that has made me think people will really want this, Mesh may well be that feature.