The best value AO to buy?

Cee, I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'try-out' stand, but I have a freebie pose stand I found on SLX that allows you to load your own poses and cycle through them.

http://uncensored.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=76601

Thank you, Ann - That works fine. I assumed this would only handle static poses, not animations. It does both. I want to load a bunch of animations to review in order to select those to be put in an AO.

Another vote for Abranimations here - sounds like what you're looking for. All preloaded and set up pretty well. I got the expensive on.. have the hud button sitting at the bottom of my screen. I just click for on/off ... works a treat

If you are on a budget, Celestial Designs does a series of Zhao-based AOs with nice poses and animations for around L$300. You can pick them up in Bare Rose.

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hi i use an ao from vista and i love it it has some natural lovely stand animations that are very snooth
ive tried a few others the abranimation flying ao made me look like a dying duck im surprised someone didnt shoot me down !

Unless you read deeply into the ZHAO documentation, you might miss the fact that multiple animations can be played at the same time. On the settings notecard, you specify these separated by commas, within the "|" delimiters.

One nice trick is to use the built-in animations--especially "express_smile"--to play at the same time the anim changes.

You can also include the built-in animations for stand, sit, walk, etc., in the lists, which may make the whole "AO effect" more subtle.

(The script fusses a bit when it loads a notecard containing the built-ins, but they still work fine.)

My pet gripe: Some otherwise appealing animations and poses from good suppliers have practically no Ease-In and Ease-Out, which makes them totally useless in an AO. The real gripe, though, is that there's no sure way to get this information about an animation before buying it, and even the animation priority is either unknown or only whatever info the seller decides to share. About all one can do is watch *very* carefully when testing an animation before buying, to make sure your avatar doesn't just jump to the animation immediately... and then test playing some known-priority anims on top, to see if they'll appear.

I've been dissecting the ZHAO II code a bit, and see a lot of places where it sure looks like lag could be reduced. (The very expensive llGetAnimationList() function, for example, seems to be called twice each time a stand changes, with an llGetAnimation() call, too.) And just in general, I'm thinking that AOs could be based on much less expensive function calls, and with much longer timer intervals set within motion (moving_start and moving_end) event triggers (though perhaps requiring a non-HUD attachment). But this Francis Chung code has been battle-tested, so maybe there's magic in things that superficially appear inefficient. So, guess I'm asking if AO developers have already explored and dismissed approaches very different from the Franimation core.

Hmm, that sounds like it could be better. I'll take a look, and you're more than welcome to send in an improved version.



Check the forum archives. I think Francis has talked about this, and I believe that using moving_start/end in an attachment does not work reliably.



Not me I tried a couple of things when I started with ZHAO-I, didn't find my ideas making any improvements or found that they broke something, and gave up on that line of thought.

Edit: I think the polling timer is now mostly just needed for stand/sit changes, and I don't think moving_xxx would catch that. The script reacts to collisions and key presses, so most stand/walk/fly changes should get caught there. And with 4 checks a second, the ZHAO-II timer is a lot slower than some earlier versions.

Yes! (Mine do that...)



/me nods again, not only do mine have smooth eases, the poses are designed to flow well from one to another. This is easily seen on the pose vendor. Also, they are designed to be smaller, to show up faster, so there's less chance of lag causing a delay and sudden "magical" jump...

Now you know more reasons why I made my own! LOL

Other things I wanted to improve, instead of changing poses exactly every 40 seconds, mine varies; instead of repeating to the exact same position, some of my poses have a unique feature (afaik) so your arms will be different next time around (and your head is always moving freely)!

That's a good idea

The pose stand idea's good, but if you don't happen to have one, you can do this without.

Just open up all the anims you want to preview onto your desktop. For each one, click Play In World or Play Locally. If you like it, put it into a "Keepers" folder. If you don't, put it into a "Losers" folder.

Hi.

I sell female, male & maternity AO's in my store @ True Blue Designs - Spangle 139/119/28 for $250L each.

Take care and if you have any questions please feel free to IM me
Nat

Yes, I am the same way. I realize that there are ways to get "the best" on my own, but I just can't figure out things like notecards and AO. I dug deep into my well of ability and included 1 sit poses, and 2 sleeping poses in furniture I had made. So tedious I never wanted to do anything like that again. And everytime I try to edit stuff like walk a/o's, I always lose them (I don't mean that I can't find them after I put them down, I mean that I get an error message that basically tells me: you big idiot, you shouldn't have done that, hahahahaha, it is gone now). I really hate having to drop something on the floor to edit it.

I can't let an AO thread go by without recommending ANA_Mations, and if you ever need in-world help with an AO, I'm happy to help you out