I’ve been reading a very disturbing thread on the SL Forums (registration required) that points to a new type of inventory loss bug : VWR-6610 – Detaching a HUD could lead to the permanent loss of the detached item.
There are multiple ways to detach a HUD, of course, but far and away the most common ‘accidental’ detachment comes from the Second Life® viewer’s damned stupid user interface design. When you click the ‘Release Keys’ button, it blows off every attachment that has scripted access to your movement key. This could include nearly all animation overrides, C:SI swords, most in-world weapons of just about any flavor, and even the key display HUD that I created for Aimee.
And it makes me wonder, just why the hell is it necessary to do that? Why is it necessary to have a button taking up valuable screen real-estate, and even sometimes (depending on what viewer version you are using) intentionally placed as if to encourage accidentally pressing it? If the devs over at The Lab deem it to be such an indispensable feature, even though it’s almost certainly very rarely used once a person finds out how horrible the results are, couldn’t they at the very least place it in the Tools menu alongside the nearly-useless ‘Stop Animations’ item?
/rant off
Please note that the JIRA issue mentioned, while it gave me a chance to rant about something that irritates the crap out of me, is not limited to problems encountered using the ‘Release Keys’ button : It would appear that under some (unknown) set of circumstances, detaching a HUD by any means could result in the permanent loss of that HUD and all of its contents, which may include very expensive animations.
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The next best thing to Release Keys is the Replace Outfit option in your inventory. Ever put on some boots…and then realize all you have on is boots? Fun times.
Yeah, I’ve done that, though not in public.
My favorite one, though, is this: My first week in SL, I was making my very first skybox at 500 meters in the air, and wanted to move a part of the wall so I right-clicked and selected…. “Wear”
Yup, turned that big ol’ skybox into a hat
Some guy sent me an IM as I was falling, asking me if I was having fun playing “Ride the house”, haha.
And at least once a week I STILL, even after almost two years, right click a sword I’m working on and select “Delete” on accident because I miss “Wear” by a few pixels. Whose stoopid-ass idea was it to put those two next to each other on the pie menu?
The SL(R) client’s user interface is just very very poorly designed, and combined with the possibility of permanent inventory loss mentioned above it’s a recipe for disaster
Time ago this ‘Release Keys’ annoyed me so much that I looked for a way to solve this problem. Since then, here is what I do with every new release of the client:
- in the secondlife folder, locate skins/xui/en-us/
- open “panel_overlaybar.xml” in a text editor
- search and delete: the stuff in this pic
- save the file
HTH
part of my text disappeared ….
>>
search and delete: http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/5760/capturebf3.jpg
LOL yeah Takuan I’ve selected the delete option like that a few times…grrr silly badly designed UI.
I’m very happy this blog takes up a problem I encountered some 15 mins ago to my big despair. But, um – why doesn’t this post say anything about how one can solve the problem when one’s been unlucky?
Therese Carfagno’s latest blog post is : Heaven and Hell
Therese, the places that I linked to above, namely the JIRA issue and the SL Forums threads, have solutions that some people have tried and have reported success with.
As I’ve not personally experienced the loss of content issue, I don’t have any experience with any of the proposed fixes and wouldn’t know what to recommend.
But Keen gives a method that I’ve used (and that I also linked to above in the main post) to *prevent* it from happening again.
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