Monday, April 4, 2011

The next RLV will have a little Firestorm in it !

Hello there,

I long wanted to port a few features from Phoenix/Firestorm to the RLV but never had the time for it. These features are meant to improve the user-friendliness of the viewer, and I am glad they are now part of the original RLV. See for yourself :

- Temporary texture upload : This one is almost a copy/paste from Firestorm, and is very handy, it allows you to upload a texture without having to pay the upload fee, this texture being temporary and not surviving across sessions. It's a life-saver for the builder who wants to test textures without going broke, or for the snap-happy who wants to quickly show their pictures off.

- No advertisement on the startup page.

- Show the name of the parcel and region (with coordinates and properties as icons, plus a quick info button) on the top status bar, making the navigation bar less necessary, hence freeing a lot of real estate on the screen.

- In-world profiles, in lieu of the new web profiles (except for your own personal profile, which requires more controls to edit it). They are much faster and smaller, you can open several of them at the same time, you can drag/drop items on them, etc, etc. They are not a copy from Firestorm though, they are looking much more v2-like.

- Names over the "look at" crosshairs. I don't know how useful it is except for saying "stop staring at me !", but many people like them, so here they are.

- Added the current number of groups and the maximum number of groups to the groups panel (I don't know why it isn't there out of the box).

- Added the distance to the avatar on the minimap inspector.

- Added a menu item (under "Me") to list the current RLV restrictions in the chat history (this one was looong overdue).

- Added an automatic replacement of leading ":" by "/me", to please the MU* people (works in IMs too).

- Added some of the radar functions of Firestorm into the People tab : Payment info, Age in days, Number of seconds spent since detected, and more importantly, the Range ! I did not add the context menu and especially NOT the "Teleport to avatar" action, because I believe it breaks the privacy of said avatar. Nobody likes to see someone appear right in front of their nose without a warning. I banned some for that in the past.

- Added 4 buttons directly on the IM window : Profile, Teleport, Share and Pay, as shortcuts to the same buttons on the left sliding panel (the one that slides open when you click on ">>").

All these are small enhancements, but added to the enhancements the RLV already offers (right click shortcuts, sliders on the status bar etc), it makes the viewer much more user-friendly.

Please don't message me to ask me to add this and that feature though, my goal is not to copycat Firestorm (or any other viewer for that matter), but to add a few improvements that I feel LL should have added long ago.

There is no ETA yet, there is still a little work to do but everything I have listed here works already.

Have fun !
Marine