Invisiprims? InvisiAVs!

Lately, there has been an explosion of use of Invisiprims... prims with the "forbidden texture", or whatever you want to call the prims that hide AVs and are otherwise fully alpha. Unfortunately, these effects are really a hack using a bug in the system to create a cool effect.

The effect is very worth it when it works properly. It allows people to do certain things that are absolutely amazing with avatars. Of course, that requires the effect to be working properly. And from experience, it often doesn't. Usually the problem is related to more than one set of these prims in the same area, so as more people begin to use them, and more incompatibilties are found, the usefulness declines.

So the question comes up: Why isn't there an "official" way to do the entire funcion of hiding AV parts? Such a function would be useful in many ways, and would allow for a bug-free capability to make some pretty amazing AV's.

Obviously, some of the major concerns are people becoming completely invisible. This would be counterproductive to the social nature of the world, as well as creating a propensity for troublemakers to try to hide themselves. Hard to eject somebody you can't find, right?

Basic safeguards can prevent problems. Simple things like "Highlight Invisible" could show the alpha AV's parts in blazing color for example. Encertaining that nobody can force-hide their hovering name would assist as well.

For a more complex safeguard, upon an AV alpha change or attachment change when there is any alpha in the AV, the entire AV unit, including attachments, can be evaluated for "Visibility", meaning that it should have a certain amount of visible area or even alpha sum from all directions (With a general sampling, at least.) this would, however, be more CPU intensive, and rapid, repeated changes to CPU-bomb things should be prevented as well.

Overall, AV alpha could be an extremely useful tool, just like regular prim alpha. In the same way, it can be abused, just like prim alpha can, but the proper safeguards can prevent that as well.

Opinions? Concerns? Yays or Nays?

Well, as an avid recent user of invisaprims for my prim avatars, I can not possibly express how awesome the approval of this would be for ava makers like myself. The current methods of prim hacks is not a very reliable process and it prevents a lot of things some of us would love to do most.

It would be a personal dream of mine to see this sort of thing happen. That, or some sort of checkbox set in Appearance to toggle the display of specific limbs.

I say YAY!

I wholeheartedly support this idea as well. People have been thanking me for my invisiprim (though it really wasn't hard to make), but I would feel even better if we could have a real solution that doesn't have the bugs inherent in invisiprims. Simply allowing us to use alpha with av skins would make a ton of av designers very happy, I guarantee you. There's a significant demand for this -- I should know.

In the meantime, for anyone out there using invisiprims, I highly recommend grabbing a free copy of my Invisibility Prim Public v1.1a and using its script in place of whatever you currently have. If all invisiprims in an area use this script, there shouldn't be any problems with them hiding non-alpha textures (an issue I'm sure you're aware of if you've been using invisiprims for any length of time).

I support this too.

Anything can be abused. But if we stopped progress just because some tool can be abused then we'd still be squatting in caves ripping at carcasses with our bare hands.

Being invisible doesn't prevent things from being sensed and detected, and in principle they can then be made visible again in outline by being showered with a cloud of objects, although this is very inadequate.

I would propose that the method of becoming invisible be made official and even improved since it allows wonderful avs to be created, and that the methods of sensing and making visible again be improved as well --- for example, a plot owner should have an overriding ability to make invisible objects visible on his land if he or she wishes, at least through the Debug menu.

There are some pretty good games that can be created using these effects, and now that we know from Philip's latest Town Hall talks that high-speed interactive gaming is part of his vision for SL, the more interesting facilities we have, the better!

You're seriously going to use THAT argument after the permission debacle?

Though I agree, alpha-ed AVs would be nice.

I'm seriously going to use that argument consistently and universally, in 1L, 2L, 16L, SL, and all other L's.

Let me put it in perspective. Few things can be worse than the atomic bombs that were dropped on innocent civilians in the last century, yet I would not have wanted R&D on atomics to have been barred just because we live under the perpetual risk of brain dead politicians misusing them.

That's our misery as humans, the sensible and the idiots are all part of the human race. But we cope with it, and we advance, and in due course we'll be among the stars. And of course, even then, assorted idiots will be blowing up entire solar systems full of people.

Yes, it's not pretty, but it's better than to willfully chain ourselves to the past.

In the context of SL, any risks we might take are entirely trivial compared to the risks we take in other spheres. So, yes, I most definitely use that argument.

I support this fully. If it were done with checkbox's it could help out with lag as they wouldn't be rendered.

Do you two always have to argue???

Strife, the simple answer is "No" of course, it's not necessary.

It starts when the other party makes a personal remark instead of sticking to the subject. You may have noticed that it is never myself that makes the first personal remark, although I do respond and that is my fault entirely.

I guess I could ignore it. Advice?

You just reminded me Strife, I still "owe" you a response to your inter-object messaging proposal followup, in the sense that I started on it but got side-tracked. It was good, but brought up some issues.

One day, hehe.

send a private message? ignoring it is best though.