Allow animations that move avatar to reposition

Please add the ability to have an avatar be repositioned wherever they end up as the result of an animation, once it ends, instead of jumping back to the origin of the animation - that effect is very jarring. If the animation has you run forward, and the completion, you should stop wherever the last frame ended.

I don't do animations (yet), so I can't speak from experience. But it sounds to me like this is simply a bug, because loss of physical continuity is total anathema in 3D world behaviour, whatever the environment.

There are very few exceptions to this, and they're all typically rationalized away by some special means like space warps, teleports and dematerializing, etc. None of that applies in SL av animation, obviously.

Call this a physical continuity bug, and report it. They may not wish to accept it as a bug, but it is anyway.

I believe avatar animations are actually client-side. Your client receives the animation from the server, and renders it appropriately for you.

So no physics engine interaction is involved. As far as the server's concerned, your avatar is still in one spot.

I suppose this is a "physical continuity bug" but I wasn't sure if you intimated this being something with the physics engine.

Hence the reason why avatars can be contorted and overlap with other avatars and objects, appearing to be phantomed and non-physical while animating, since their bounding box is still in one spot.

Yes, this is almost certainly true. Even though we're guessing, it's likely to be so because that would be a very efficient way of implementing animations.

However, even with the animations being a client-side feature referenced to a server-side bounding box, there is no reason why that bounding box should be static. It makes me wonder what would be required to program movement of the avatar in sync with the positional displacements happening in the animation. I have no experience of this yet myself.

I agree it would be cool to be able to move the actual position of the avatar, and even have the camera move with it.

Another factor in this may be, and this is all just a guess, but I think the animations take the current position of the avatar as its base and then move the avatar off of that base and reposition from that base... like say the bounding box of your avatar acts as a local grid that the animation then determins how far from that current spot to move the avatar. The problem comes in when you try to make the animation made in poser that uses the basic poser positioning and make that relate to the SL world, I'm not sure if thats how it works or if SL actualy decideds how to handle the movement. But so the problem could come in determining how to change the local animation positioning into the global grid wise positioning.

If thats kinda confusing, think of it like... the animation tells SL to move the avatar two steps forward from where the avatar is currently standing. How would the animations two steps forwards transfer to *actualy* moving the bounding box two steps forward also?

Hmm, actualy it might be easy, I dunno. *shrugs*