Nevertheless I felt it was about time I compared the two to see if and why I am sticking with Firestorm. Only recently, when trying the Oculus Rift, I tried the official Linden Lab viewer again and it made me remember why I never use it. ‘Always open the Chat Bar at login’ can be used to make sure the Chat Bar begins open/visible even if it was closed when the previous session logged out.īubble Chat can also be enabled on this panel along with the new option to duplicate the chat as a toast notification instead of only showing it as a chat bubble.I’ve been in Second Life for over 5 years and for almost all of that time I’ve been using alternative third party viewers. This can be combined with the “Pressing letter keys:Starts Local Chat” and “Open Chat Bar instead of Conversations” to create a mode where starting to type opens the Chat Bar which then closes again after sending the line of chat. When this is turned on the Chat Bar will be closed after sending each line of chat. ‘Close the Chat Bar after sending a line of chat’ is a new setting which applies to the Chat Bar only, not to the Conversations floater. The actual setting is misleadingly named ‘CloseChatOnReturn’ which described earlier behaviour however its current behaviour is better described by the text in the Preferences floater - this setting decides whether keyboard focus stays in the current chat entry floater or returns to the world view after each line. “Conversations:Nearby Chat/Chat Bar release keyboard focus after sending a line of chat” is another existing option that wasn’t presented in the UI. This behaviour along with other aspects of the Chat Bar can be configured through new options within Preferences. The other is to close the floater and then use either chat toasts or bubble chat to display the inworld chat. One is to have the Conversations floater open to view local chat history as well as IMs. There are several ways that the Chat Bar can be used. Unlike the V1-inspired approaches where the chat bar is fixed near the bottom of the window, you can place the Chat Bar anywhere you wish on the screen and choose the width you want. Once Enter has been pressed to send the chat message the floater will revert to its original height with space for the first line of chat entry. If the amount of text entered exceeds the display area the floater will automatically resize itself until 10 lines are displayed after which it will remain at 10 and apply a scroll bar. The size and whether it’s open will be remembered across sessions on the same computer. The floater can be dragged horizontally to change its size. Once visible using it is much like the usual chat entry. If the Chat History window wasn’t being used chat would appear temporarily on the left side of the viewer window and fade after a time (similar to the way that chat toasts do now if they’re enabled) Notice in particular that the chat history doesn’t allow any chat input. The picture below (of the Cool Viewer by Henri Beauchamp) shows how this looks. In V1 chat input was entered through a fixed writable area at the bottom of the screen and a separate floater handles chat history. It is possible to undock Nearby Chat from Conversations and then shrink it down to just the input area, however this isn’t ideal since it has to be expanded again any time the conversation history needs to be viewed. This means that any kind of conversation needs a fairly large floater to be on the screen. In the current UI all communication input, whether to local chat or to instant messages, is handled through the Conversations floater. For those who haven’t used a V1-style viewer a little explanation is in order.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |