27 October, 2008

More of my thoughts about how SL should be

I know my point of view on these things isn't terribly valid, because it's not as if I know how to create anything in SL. The cleverest thing I ever did was turn a top hat into a wizard's hat by futzing around with the crown in a sandbox. Still, I have my ideas and here they are.
1. Someone should invent a thing, some kind of scripted dealie, that scans the contents of your inventory, detects duplicate items, and presents them so you can delete all the ones you don't want. For example, look at how many stores enclose an LM with their products - sometimes multiple LMs to all their locations. You only need one of each of those, and the rest are just taking up space and doing nobody any good.
2. It would be awesome if Inventory had a thumbnail viewing mode. Who knows what everything they own looks like? Why do I have an empty folder called PLAAKA? What about items whose names are in another language or just not descriptive, like all those hairstyles that have girls' names but no details like 'ponytail' or 'bun'? You see what I mean.
3. Like lots of people, I've been doing the grid-wide 'Ghost Busters' Hallowe'en hunt. Mostly I've been enjoying it. It's made me think about the ins and outs of placing items for hunts and quests. I think the secret is to be clever, but not TOO clever. You want it to be challenging enough that people get a sense of achievement from tracking the little squirt down, but not so hard that they become frustrated and bored and tell their friends your hunt sucks, or feel that you are just dicking with them. Things I've seen that I liked include placing the sculpted prim ghost in front of a vendor board and colouring him to match part of the picture, so you had to notice that he stuck out in 3D to see that he was there, making the ghost small and putting him on a shelf with ornaments, putting a script inside the ghost so that he actually moved slowly around the room, and placing the ghost inside an open-and-shut item that people had to click open to be able to see him. I haven't liked putting the ghost somewhere really hard to cam to in a big, multi-roomed store build, or making him so tiny it's pretty much a fluke if you DO see him. That didn't quite seem like fair play.
Anyway, soon I'll have finished the hunt (I'm in the 90s now) and will have a buttload of new inventory to sort through!

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