SL Avatars?

I haven't stopped by for any duration of time in SL for a long while, I like to pop by and see what is new. So I apologize in advance if I am posting on the wrong forum to ask this.

I guess something I've always wondered about secondlife is... is there any plans, whether short term or way way long range, to change the second life avatar? One of the most fun parts about SL to me was creating my avatar and customizing the look and interacting with people.

The only thing is, the barrier to having a really good looking avatar is pretty high if you want to do it yourself. There are some amazing skins out there, and even more talented artists creating them, but even they are stuck with some nasty tricks to get things to look 'right'.

Another thing I've always disliked is how difficult it is to interact with another avatar. I know pose balls have come a long way (syncing dances etc) and mobile hug/pouncing animation things get around a lot, but, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Some things I'd be interested in seeing in the future would be a rework of the sl avatar. I am not an artist, I i'm not a 3d graphic designer, but I do know what changing the sl avatar would do to the game. I guess I feel like now, especially with windlight, the avatars just stick out like a sore thumb.

I realize that changing the avatar would invalidate years of hard work on just about 75% of the items ever created in secondlife. Having a flag of which avatar to use would be a potential solution to this. Perhaps having several avatar meshes to choose from might be an option too. Overly tall, overly short, animal shaped, etc.

I realize the difficulty of the problem. SL is kind of fighting against in itself in that in order for it to work properly you have to limit the freedom (hence why people cant just upload their own meshes) because the amount of bandwidth needed to run everything is already ridiculously high as is.

I've always felt the strength of secondlife as a place to be and spend time, has to do with the people here. If I want to boat race, skate board, sky dive, race cars, level up in an mmo setting, play a hidden puzzle game or anything like that, there are already games out there that play better, look better, and have a more dedicated community. You go to second life to just see what people want to do with their brains, how they want to show who they are without a lot of the shackles of the real world to hold them back.

And then you want to interact with them after making friends, hence all the "stuff" sl has to offer (but is all subpar compared to a dedicated platform for most of those activities).

So, the way we represent ourselves, and how we do it, seems very important to me, and I think it does for a number of people, if you look at the amount of shoppers in clothing, poseball, and animation stores.

Compared to some modern games, the avatars, no matter what extremely talented artists can do, can't hold a candle to avatars you see in most modern games. Again, I understand that SL must be limited in what it can do, but that doesnt mean a little bit of helping DOLLARS from linden in the avi department couldnt help EVERYBODY.

Basic walk animation? It is horrible. You look like the t1000. Why is it almost required to have an animation override? I realize the technical challenge here. If you want to change your hight, width, arm length, your animation changes, joints are in the wrong spot, things clip through each other, yes, it is a difficult problem. It can be fudged though. It can be cleaned up, some of the AO's do a good job of this. Why aren't they worked into the client, they are such common items anyway, why not streamline it?

I know the next round of new games will be coming out supporting procedural animations, and I've seen tech demos of their models balancing themselves as the ground shakes under them and things like that.

Is there any room for things like this in the future? Will there ever be a chance I can click on another avatar, select handshake, have the client move a distance from each other, calculate the length of both our arms and any prims on the end of the arm, then have them both reach out and play a shake animation. The clients don't have to be in sync, I don't care if I shake someone's hand 5 sec before they see the shake on their screen, I only want to see that a person clicked the, yeah, lets shake button and see the animation.

Will this kind of interaction ever be build into sl? Will SL be able to abstract it so we can EASILY create our own avi to avi animations, with the SL client doing the bulk of synchronization work between the two clients, and leave the animation up to the creators?

Sorry for this having turned into a rant, I really like SL and everything it has done, but I've always been baffled by what seems (to me) the one of the most driving reason we all play (avatar interaction, avatar looks) seems largely ignored in any kind of future development plans.

Poseballs, AO's, SL Skin's , all feel...clumsy. It is a difficult problem to solve (is it even a problem?), but I was just wondering is there any push in this direction. What do you all think about this?

Lots of residents would like better-looking avatars.

Avatar appearance doesn't appear to be high on the priority list for Linden Labs. Landscaping is the sexy issue at Linden Labs, so we have glorious sunsets now with a lighting system that makes avatars look worse.

Your observations aren't new, and a lot of people are going to agree with you. You need to find a way to convince Linden Labs, and not the residents using the forum.

I think it's harder than that.

Let's say that tomorrow Qarl -- creator of sculpies and the new cloudy ruth -- or some other Linden comes up with a good mesh. It looks good and smooth. It doesn't have those awful ankles or bumps on the shoulders. It doesn't fold in as much with small avatars. Everything looks great!

But that howl you hear isn't approval. That's every skin, clothing, hair, animation, avatar, and other seller currently in world, gathering the torches and picthforks because every thing they sell is now borked. All those clothing and skin textures will have to be re-created from scratch, at best.

FWIW, I tink their best bet for the future is going to be in allowing more than one mesh. That way people can continue to use the existing goods as desired. Either that, or allow a sizable grace period where the "classic" and a "new look" are both options. Otheriwse, it'll make the outcry about Havok 4 or Windlight breaking things look like a drop in the bucket.

Aye! Since Day 1 I've been wondering when they'd ever get around to updating the standard Avatar Mesh.

But I also realize that doing so would kill off a vast majority of skins out there now.

Land maybe the Big $$ item, but Skins seem to be the meat-and-potatoes of the "regular guy/gal".

All I hope for is a day when we an animate the fingers!!!

Oh yes. I want dat. I also want to have an avatar dat really looks right for a kid.

Seconded.

Thirded!!

Some of us wanna make undead skins for the Kids too!

Agree 100% with Marianne. A new avatar mesh will be fantastic to have, but to do it, they will have to provide a way to select from multiple possible meshes. AND they need to find a way to speed up rendering times.

For example, if I am rendering a pic in DAZ|Studio, I can have the rendering software use a Victoria 1.0 avatar in the background, with a mesh similarly limited to our SL Ruth Avatar, and in the foreground of the same scene I can have the new Victoria 4.2 figure, with far better skin, a 100x higher polygon count mesh, and better clothes and hair. The app knows which mesh and skeleton I chose to use for each figure, and renders it accordingly.

But think about that in SL terms. You think some club vixen with thousand-torus "hoochie hair" and 20 pieces of bling and 5 face lights slows down rendering? Wait until a Ruth 2.0 avatar walks into the room, with 100 times the poly count of a Ruth 1.0 avatar, flexi hair and clothes that support collision and environmental interactivity, and attachment points for 20 attachments just for each hand, for all her rings and bracelets! The older graphics cards will stop dead in their tracks!

It's easy to pre-render high detail segments for games that offer limited options. It's MUCH harder to do it in a freeform, interactive 3D world like SL, where ANYONE can create content.

It would be possible to update the mesh significantly and still have backward compatibility with many skins and clothing. On the other hand, doing the best possible updates to the mesh might necessitate scrapping everything old and starting fresh. There is more than one way to do it.

With other kinds of updates, Linden Labs hasn't shown that it particularly cares about maintaining backward compatibility, whether it's compatibility with computer hardware that it takes to run the viewer, or script and texture compatibility when it comes to Havok 4 and Windlight. It is not the demonstrated policy of Linden Labs to hold back on what it perceives to be a technological advance merely to maintain backward compatibility.

Thus, whether Linden Labs updates the avatar mesh really depends entirely upon whether Linden Labs cares about making avatars look better.

Personally, I think that if Linden Labs is going to make changes that require me to buy new things to stay in Second Life (whether it's new computer hardware, or new SL products), I'd like the changes to be something that I would enjoy a great deal (better looking avatars), rather than changes that don't really impact my experience with Second Life (gloriuos sunsets in Windlight).

There's a few things now in the mix. The default avies got a huge face lift, thankfully. I am so over meeting nubies who are identical. At least I can have the option to see a few new faces now. And this company http://www.realxtend.org/ which just launched into SL and is an avatar design company. In real life, that is their mandate. To move into online verses and try and create better avatars and experiences. Both these are new news, time twill really tell.