Custom Species

Theres been talk and debate about making differnt species and having it directly avaible from SL itself.
Poeple have been able to make anthros, robots, aliens, and other things using a few tricks. But from what Ive seen the basic Human avatar has to be coverd up and and the renderd head for instnace is still renderd under the head replacment. Thus using up resources that arent even being used. Why not atleast have the head changed to a placeholder, like a stick or something. Sorta like a skeleton for the frame. Maybe wit ha switch to turn it on and off for each part so things like the torso from the human fream can be used while the skelton frame can be used for the head instead.

Other ideas would be to be able to make our own species and settings to customize them. That way we dont have to ask for something like animal or anthro and ot species sorta things to appear in another update.
Sure it would take alot of work, but thats kinda the idea of SL isnt it? To customize everything as much as ya like xD

This should include animations too. From what I know, in order to make a custom replacment animation (walking and sitting for instance) then a laggy script has to be used in order to get it to work. Wich makes origonal ideas rather hard to make and ofcourse laggy.

Also, if there was a skeletal base frame (a very very thin one perferably) then small thinner and more abstract species creation could be accomplished, especially if that frame could be edited and added to. Say if you want to make a transforming um... transformer, you could do it.
Though perhaps this would great lag an things if things get too wild, but a limit could be placed and I realy dont see how a limit would be a problem since poeple seem to be working well with adding extra things already to beat the limits.

I was going to propose this idea in the feature voting section after seeing a proposal for centuar and anthro species sets (thought a more open idea would be better) but I thought I'd post on the furoms and see what other poeple think before I start a Proposal.

Seconded -- having a "Custom Bone model" for both regular and taur forms would actually allow many people to create great avatars, including centuars, anthro'taurs, and regular digitalgrade anthros.

There should be a selector like the male/female selector with choices such as:

o Male humanoid
o Female humanoid
o Quadruped
o Cetacean / Fish
o Arthopod
o Mollusk
o Amoeba
o Energy being

Oh, and your "custom bone model" idea is bound to be offensive to some poor invertebrate wannabe out there.



P2

LOL!

As for a selection, what we need is Spore's procedural animations.
Tired of having to upload dozens of animations to get it right? Tired of haivng to use a sepatate (non-free) program in order to make your new avatar walk? Then get Procedural! Just build it and the computer takes over and builds an animation for you!

Of course, we'd also need a skeleton builder for that, but I don't think anyone would object.

*Is going to be making dragons in Spore*

But think of the overhead for procedural movement. A computer somewhere in the line has to render, in real time, how your skeleton moves. And how everyone else's skeletons move. Either your computer renders everyone's avatar locally (getting potentially asynchronous movement), everyone is responsible for rendering their own movement locally and uploading to SL, which then uploads to everyone else to see (making it utterly impossible for dialup to access SL, though granted it's not fun now. Not to mention high speed users will be acting like dialup), OR the sim server renders it all and we go back to paid basic accounts because of all the upgrades needed. And think of all the animations uploaded to SL already that would be rendered useless because of it too!

I'm all for custom skeleton additions though, on top of the basic skeleton model we have now. I'd like to do digit animation (actual keyboard typing, or actual piano playing, or trumpet, or guitar, or.... other... fingering.... >.>; ), I'd like to add a tail skeleton (as would every furry, scalie, and avian).

And I also heartily agree to the user chosen removal of rendering body parts we deem unnecessary. I have a friend trying to make a ghostly apparition of ice with particle effects who finds he cannot because invisiprims hide particles too and we can't apply alpha textures to our avatars.

I think that the procedural animations would work well if they are done right. By this I mean:
User creats a skeleton.
Their client procedurally animates it.
The client saves the relevant data (skeleton and animations) as they are currently used.
Uploaded to server as is current.
Clients download it and run it as currently used.

The procedural stuff is done once. Everything else would be how it already exists although with a LL implemented animation override system that would be faster than any AO script and exist entirely inside the user created skeleton.

Ehh. I wrote a script that animated prims procedurally using a freeform BVH a while back. Allowed for all sorts of neat tricks like this.

Problem was, it was a kludge. And a script, susceptible to lag, no-script land, and now, the script scheduler. Nifty proof of concept, though. You can find that hiding here.


I presented this to the Lindens at one point or another. Response was usually "nifty!" -- but nothing really came of it. I suppose that's telling.

While it'd be really interesting to have a freeform avatar system, I'm going to chalk that up to "not for a really long time, if ever." Going by experience, anyway.

This is a GREAT idea! It will totally sort out my problem of lack of land!

Not really. You still can't build a house. Your 1/100th of a sq.m parcel of land gets 2/1000ths of a prim limit. ;P