YAY LL!!! No more awful newbie walk!

Aw, don't say that! SL has a pretty steep learning curve and often the only way to get answers is to ask.

oh noooooo...i Hope they won't remove the sexy ruth--boobies on ruthed men lol....

They already have. No more ruths, just asexual mist-beings. We have evolved. Or..transcended...or..something.

I still use an older viewer, so I still get to see Ruth a lot.


/me slowly raises her hand -- still uses a Windows supplied wallpaper and screensaver.



Oh come on now - what could be more important?


hmmm, so we retain more newbies, which increases concurrency, which causes load problems, which makes SL bork more.................

Could be...

Picture the skill set for the Lindens managing this contract animation stuff. What do you think their time would be better spent on?

I think that it was at least a month before I started using a walk overide.
That was acceptable to me because I was totally taken up with learning to build and with wandering around to see what people were building.
It was only after I gathered a number of AOed friends that I decided to do something about the walk. All the other default animations were fine by me.

It was only a few months ago that I bought an AO plus animation set. That was because a friend was having problems with one, so I bought the same model in order to help her properly.
It took about an hour of using it and all of its animations before I started to disable most of the animations.
Now I use one stand, falling, landing, flying. I'm about to disable the Sit because I'm fed up of turning the thing off and on for sitting on poses.

It is understandable that others will come to SL primarily to socialise and that "the walk" would drive them to acquire something better.
It has been argued that a non-duck default walk would remove the motivation for people to search out a better one. I'm not so sure that this is so. People who would be focussed on that area would quickly notice that people around them had a far greater range of animations.

A problem with the duck-walk is that it could drive people into getting an AO very quickly.
The duck-walk is insane really. People arriving into OI/HI for the first time will most like be feeling uncertain and insecure. This never feels cool. Then they find that they are walking that way?? This is sooooooooo not cool.



Merchants who sell AOs might consider this to be a good thing.

It's actually not good for merchants overall.
People might just pick up a freebie walk.
People might pick up a freebie AO.
If people buy an AO in a hurry then it is likely that they would go to the big names.
If it turns out that a superior AO comes to their notice, they might be slow to change from the one they have already paid money for.
Edit to add: If people rush to grab a freebie AO, they might consider it "good enough" and be resistant to buying an AO later.

If people rush into getting a freebie AO, that's probably not good for SL overall.
Some of those things can be very laggy.
They can also be very spammy in chat.
"xxxxx can't find animation: SuperOmfgWhoSayingAllThatStuff2" ...... over and bleeding over......

I think that a new default walk (or a few options) would be a wonderful thing for SL overall.
The walk(s) would be enough. Let people find animations for other actions without being under pressure to make choices with out the benefit of proper research.



My default pirate rabbit in Pathfinder Linden's Lively.com room bounces around wonderfully and has been known to say (more than a few times) "I want THIS walk in SL!"

I like to run sometimes, being an energetic type. So it would be good to see a better 'always run' animation too. But the walk needs sorting first!

I guess it's a different team, maybe the people spare are better off doing this than other things, and it has to be done sooner or later, I'd rather see a viewer installed AO though to go with it.

I'm confused here.

Would the effect of a viewer installed AO be that we would not see ourselves as others see us?

I realise that it can happen currently that we can see ourselves acting normally while others see us in the animation we were in when we last TPed , or whatever
But to do this sort of thing by design??

Funny animations are often the result of the AO hack, it evens says in the code "this is an ugly hack"

This pretty much explains some benifits

Argent Stonecutter - JIRA VWR-386, 12/Jul/08: "This proposal is actually for a set of calls that would make an AO script as simple as a particle script, instead of one of the most complex commonly used scripts in SL. For a completely internal solution, I would prefer that animations were handled like attachments or clothes rather than gestures. From the inventory, you would right-click the animation and select "Apply to..." and the sub-menu that came up would have a list of animations that this would be used as (Stand 1, Walk, Fly Up, ...). Once this would done the animation would show as "worn as Stand 1)" (or whatever) in the inventory. Then an "AO" would just be a folder in your inventory, you would select "Add to outfit" and all the animations in it would replace whatever was already there on those slots. If an avatar needed a particular animation, the creator would just include those animations in the avatar. When you saved an outfit, the current set animations would be available in the list of checkboxes."
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-386?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=68616#action_68616of

Hear Hear! I've often wanted to go to help island and pick up a couple of noobies just to help de-noobify them. This was what helped me the most. I was found naked and ruth in a sandbox by my sl partner. He swooped down, laughed, told me I was cute and off we went for new hair and clothes. The walk was the most frustrating thing for me and took the longest to get rid of. Honestly it is just so hard to look behind the noobie garb. This and the new skins will really help with retention me thinks.

Yay LL!

Hey! We had to walk 5 miles in the snow, uphill, both ways with a 5 prim box on our heads, and we turned out OK. Sheesh! Newbies today are so spoiled!

Next thing you know there won't be Barbie and Ken dolls.

No, they replace the people who quit in disguist over stability. The status quo is maintained. A very pragmatic approach.

LMAO - and that walk in the snow was barefooted, with really bad looking feet.

... though I might question that "we turned out ok" part for some folks.

*sighs* Ah, another piece of the rite of passage is being cut from the world. First, it was the box on the head.. next it was Ruth (goddess of borked assets) and now it's the newbie waddle. How shall we thus judge when a noob has moved on from noobness?

I agree with the conclusion, and will add another reason.

Someone who is new and feels like a clown because of the (former) noob skins and the noob walk is not going to think first, "Well, let me spend some money on this game that is not fun so far." The more likely first thought is, "To hell with this, I'm going to find something more fun to do."

Frustrating new residents will not cause them to spend money. Frustrating them will cause them to leave forever, becoming one of the 97% of new users who are not retained.

With a new default walk, there are going to be residents who are happy enough with it, that they don't need to buy another. However, I feel confident in speculating that those people- who are staying, want to look good, and are careful with their money- are the same kind of residents who have been seeking out the free AOs because of the current noob walk.

Animators- and all content creators- stand to make money if replacement of the noob walk contributes to increased retention. Higher retention = more potential customers.

(Of course, other things contribute to the low retention rate, so upgrading the "noob" look alone doesn't do it, but it has to help.)

As a "vetern" I feel it is my responsibilty to help out those who havent been on sl long. After surviving the incredibly boring oreintation, I was lucky to meet someone who gave me tips and advice...like checking out the freebies for hair, skin, and clothes. Freebie shops were the first things I hit. I think b/c I didn't look like such a noob, I was treated better. I have seen folks treat noobs badly and I just wanna slap them and help them remember how it was when they were a noob.

Don't get me wrong, I have met my share of rude noobs but the nice ones, I always take under my wing and pass on any help or advice that I can. Pass it forward. I think it is great that the noobs are getting a new look and walk. Espcially since it is being contracted out to sl residents.

Lissa

Echoed.

I personally don't use AOs, on the grounds of keeping my avatars as sim-friendly as possible. So for someone like me, this upgrade would be nice.


Nicer still would be an API to override the default animations outright, without timers and dirty hacks.

To everybody saying (paraphrased) "Isn't there anything more important they need to work on than default animations?"... well, maybe think about it this way. It is quite possible they have figured out what a load AOs place on the grid and that some (significant) amount of resources could be reclaimed if everyone wasn't using them just to cover up the default walk. I personally can't stand the vast majority of 3rd party walks and stands, they are presumptuous and absurd. I just want a smoother walk... so for me at least, if there was a decent walk available I could certainly (at least in standard bipedal form ), get away with no AO at all.

I am a proponent of having some sort of AO type functionality within the viewer with the ability to define your own custom sets of course. There has to be some way they can do that without it having to constantly poll your avatar to know what it's doing and apply the animation as the AOs currently do. That's just silly and an extreme waste of resources. If you've never bothered to notice, you can actually feel a difference when you put on an AO vs not wearing one at all. If there is enough difference to feel it with just 1 on a sim can you not imagine that they are a MAJOR cause of problems with many people all wearing them?

So with that said, I think they probably feel that AOs in general are causing some of the problems on the grid, thus making it important enough to dedicate resources in order to fix it. (and I think I basically reiterated what Jeffrey said, but that's ok )

I think they're more worried about retaining new users than the impact of AOs.. Right now, it's just about making the new-user-experience better.

Hopefully, once MONO gets out and stable, they'll put some resources towards getting animations better integrated with the environment..

Honestly, I don't really see how this could affect the AO's by all that much. If I don't like the new walk, I'm going to want another one. Plus, this changes only the walk, not the stands, sits and dances. I want an AO for those....

Yes, but in time. Some people will want a full AO NOW!! Some will get around to it, maybe.
I got by with just a walk overrider until a few months ago.
I bought an AO just to help someone use theirs.
Of all the animations that came with it I use
- one stand and occasionally a second
- falling
- landing

The Falling is brilliant. Backflips all the way down - way better than the default frantic ZOMG! AAAAAAAGGGGGGG!!

I could live with just a decent walk though.
I think we would have less people using AOs if the defaults were less insane.
Nobody owes the AO vendors a living.

On the other hand I have friends who TP in with a complicated ballet, and then fidget, scratch, yawn. It's their taste, and I dont question it.

BUT
- that Typing animation - the one where they lean back and to the side by nearly 45 degrees??
That totally cracks me up.

Yep.

The AO talk is, I think, mostly about how those sorts of scripts work. AOs have to do a really-surprising amount of work, all the time, to look good. Multiply that by the number of people in the area using AOs and starts to look like something that LL should really work on, both to make products like that easier and to make them have less of an impact on sims.

Hmm.. true. It'd be great if we could integrate the silly thing into the client. Something where we could drag and drop poses/animations we want and the client handles the rest. It has to send on other information, why not this?