The Unbearable Lightness of Being Failing Furniture
August 13, 2008Life can let you down in a lot of ways, and Second Life is no different. It just lets you down in totally new ways. Have you ever, in RL, had to learn new complicated procedures to sit on your ass? NO? Didn’t think so.
Awhile ago Nika Dreamscape of Diamonds and Rust featured The Loft on her excellent and informative blog, Second Homes. Being the supportive type that I am, I went and looked at their store, and I found some stuff I liked. I liked their small skybox as a small office for working on scripts, etc, and I rezzed one over Podcaster Island. Take a look if you want - check my profile picks for location. My homemade computer desk, Macbook Pro computer, and chair are in the back of the skybox. I should put them for sale for some tiny amount.
Anyway, I bought some deck chairs… one of the things we put in below on the Tiny Beach is a kind of a tiki house thingy that looks cool in the water. Wanting people to be able to hang out and talk about the weather and how they fell and broke their hip last month, I put out these deck chairs. Well… they look great. Then I realized, these things are primarily made as couples chairs. That’s not what I wanted. But I thought, ok, they have options for single sit poses, and I can set them so that only I have access to the menus, so I can make sure they get used as single sit chairs for hanging out on the deck. Sounds great, right? The only problem is that THE MENUS ARE SO CONFUSING AND NOTHING SEEMED TO WORK THE WAY I THOUGHT IT WOULD BASED ON THE MENU CHOICES and so they wound up being deleted. Gone. FOREVER!! Mother… flippers.
I want to reiterate again that I’m not bitching about the loft per se, but I would ask vendors: If you’re thinking about using the MLP system in your products, do yourself a favor and just go run in front of a bus. Mmmkay? Really, that’s all I’m asking. Off yourself, or off your furniture, but just off something. For the good of Avatarity.
MLP is a great framework that takes a lot of
Peter Stindberg | August 13, 2008MLP is a great framework that takes a lot of work off designers. The problem is, that most designers see it as a drop-in-and-forget tool. That is why you see the same menues and the same poses over and over and over and over again - it really makes you sick.
However, if a designer goes the extra mile and puts custom poses inside, and strips (no pun intended) the menu to the possible minimum, you won’t even notice it is MLP.
MLP gets distributed in the source - you can do whatever you want with it. But in many many cases it simply lacks creativity, and in some cases skill, to make it a tool for you, and not a “hey lets put some poses in”.
That makes sense. It does seem more like something to
Radar | August 14, 2008That makes sense. It does seem more like something to set things up for the creator, not the end-user, at least in the form I saw it in. Not trying to rehash our plurk conversation but just wanted to acknowledge here that yeah, that makes a lot of sense given what I was seeing.
I'd buy your virtual Macbook Pro, since I don't know
Lunette | August 14, 2008I’d buy your virtual Macbook Pro, since I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get one IRL.