A developer's comments on Philip's Second Life vision

by Eloise Pasteur on Nov 25th 2007 3:30PM

Tateru commented on Philip's blog post about the road ahead for Second Life, and generated some interesting thoughts. She is not the only one to so comment. Nicholaz Beresford, the "mad patcher" of the Second Life client, and the man indirectly responsible for most of my current viewer configuration (I also use the visual interface patch to have a green skin, it is restful to my eyes, and they mostly work well together) has also commented.

His thoughts? Well, speaking as someone with a strong daoist leaning, they make a lot of sense to me. Why do I like his patch? They focus on getting a lot of the little things right, right now. The Linden Lab developers are focussed on getting things right at some future date. Even things marked "resolved, internally fixed" on the JIRA take some time (at least a month as far as I can tell, sometimes longer) to get out of the internal fix into the main client. That means, for a month, we, the users, are still complaining, whilst the developers are saying "No problem any more." Of course there must be some delay for QA in the main client, but it seems like a way to distress the users unnecessarily. Read his thoughts, think you own, let us know. Should Linden Lab release more "bleeding edge" clients with un-QAed bug fixes so we can get that bug fix we really want at the risk of less stability?

Source

Tags: bug-fixing, JIRA, Nicholaz-Beresford, Philip-Rosedale, philosophy, Second-Life

Reader Comments (2)

It's a shame to see simple, experience-improving patches held/ignored for many months waiting for an 'impending' subsystem redesign that (given past experience) will take ~14 months to go through.

The patch is *right there* and the devs are going to redesign and completely replace that code *anyway* at a later date. It seems senseless to let down users on the experience side for so very long (waiting for a redesign that will take place - *eventually*) when there's a solution already provided.

I am one of the hordes of newcomers, and I found Nicholaz's thoughts well worth reading. Ordinal Malaprop expressed similar thoughts in her comments:

"The thing is that issues are with the client, or the server, not the code. People submit issues based on the behaviour of Second Life. Therefore those issues are not actually resolved until they no longer appear in Second Life."

I am among the technically ignorant and do not expect to ever completely comprehend the frustrations of the developers and content creators at the choices the Lab makes.

For me, the experience on the current main client _is_ the experience of SL. I doubt I will venture into beta grid or First View anytime soon. Listening to my acquaintances relate the glories and horror stories of what is "out there" is enough for me.

The main client experience is all that matters to me.

Given the frustrations at obvious fixes not being implemented in a more timely manner, I think Philip has a point that bears equal weight. They called it the Lab for a reason. It was not a highly refined corporate product when it opened up. Perhaps it never will be.

Personally, I am always pleasantly surprised when I open the client and it says Grid Status: Online. I half anticipate the entire enterprise to crash into a heap of smoking debris at any moment.

Obviously, the procedures for implementing fixes and communicating with customers are also a long way from satisfactory. That seems a much easier fix, in my opinion. Open communication has as much value as open source coding for the Lab. Everyone marvels when a straightforward, informative Lab blog post shows up. It can be done! We have seen it!

Thank you for your patience.