Objects that change avatars

I thought this would be easy but the scripters say it's hard, so I'll ask here.

What I have in mind is the classic "Dr Jekyll" potion. object is touched and produces an anim which is of the classic "drink this... clutch throat... fall to ground" sequence. Then the object takes all the items (skin, clothing, etc) in a folder with a particular name in the taker's inventory, and puts them on the character.

I've heard various objections, but I think they mis the point. I understand that it would be bad for OTHER avatars or hidden objects to be able to impose changes, but in my suggestion, it can't work unless you have configured it to pick up the right folder in your inventory inna first place... actually, what would be cool and much more configurable would be for the object to know that it was in a folder, and to put everything else in the folder, on the person.

This feature would be useful in a whole bunch of games - and not all of them are sexual! There's The Hulk, loads of D&D, the Fantastic Four, even Superman's phonebooth could (by stretching a point) be included.

Or have I been badly advised, and can this be done already?

There are no LSL commands to access your user inventory at all, currently, all an object can do is give you something from its *own* inventory. I suspect it would be a lot of work to create any kind of scripted access to inventory, since there doesn't seem to be anything implemented to enable it yet.

What you could do is include a prim in the folder to run an animation on you from a changed event when it attaches, so that when you dragged the folder onto you the animation ould fire while the outfit/avatar change was happening. To make it more realistic, have the other attachments start 100% alpha and only appear after the animation is complete.

Wouldn't that have a time-dilation/lag problem to it though? Or do all viewers of an av get the same changes in the same sequence?

(so what you are saying is that the script would inhere to the container? Is that right?)

Yes, but so would doing the same thing from an external script. When you put on an attachment or run an animation that information gets queued up to be delivered to people's clients. The order it happens in, or whether it even happens at all, is completely arbitrary and unpredictable, and different for different clients watching.

The script would be stored in one of the prims that's attached.

I have proposed a feature that would allow for this exact type of shape shifting. Please take a look at proposition 2323 at http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2323