As so many of you have heard, the Second Life client source code has been thrown open to open sourcing. Now most of you who've used Open Source software know that one of the common habits of OS developers is to take the same code and tweak it in a million different ways to produce a million different 'forks'.
If you had l33t coding skills and could code and compile the source differently, what would you put in the client for yourself? None of those lame "less lag" things - everyone wishes for it already. I want off the bat answers, and I want them... erm... now? XD
Answers in the comments please!
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4 comments:
As a mac user I'd look for a client that actually obeys the mac interface guidelines.
Following that, some system to let me bind my own shortcuts into the system. Most of the shortcuts I'm used to would stay, but there are a couple of other things it would be lovely to have to hand because I use them quite a bit.
A hotkey to freeze the rendering/processing of geometry and textures, oddly enough for those times when I really need my CPU cycles for something else, but I need to keep talking and handling IMs and working with my inventory and whatnot.
I'd make it so that "Joe Resident has left this session" messages to a group chat wouldn't open up an IM session for that group if you don't have it open.
I'd let you choose to suppress your own "particle beam" which shows up when you're editing an object, because if you're working with microprims they can get really annoying.
I'd add a way to let touch_start(), touch() and touch_end() determine the face and UV coordinates of the touch.
I'd add in new map types for textures: bump and/or normal maps (in addition to the built-in list), and a shininess-level map, for those times you want part of the texture to be shiny but not all of it.
I'd add a way to let animations control the facial "bones".
I'd add in specular highlights (maybe letting the strength optionally be controlled by another map).
Like Eloise, I'd add in the ability to bind shortcuts (teleport to frequently used landmarks, wear favorite outfits, open the inventory at a particular folder, etc.).
I think that's good for a start.
One thing that might be interesting if I can get the time to do it would be to strip the client down to the bare ability to send IMs and work that into a sort of external IM client. And then refine it from there. I know I'm not the first to come up with this, it appears to be a fairly popular idea but it would be a great way to figure out how the client software works, a learning experience if you will.
Another feature, if I could I would try and hijack the auto spell check from firefox and see if there is a way to implement that into SL for notecards, chat and IM and maybe scripts (good to spell the comments correctly ;)
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