NO SHAKING HANDS—gaping holes and missing the obvious in SL

I started this thread after having a chat with Cottonteil Muromachi. It surprises me we don't have a more ready way to shake hands. Sure, we have hug attachments which certainly filled a void in the market, and I've seen bow anims (my preferred gesture), but shaking hands? Hahaha... out of the question. (If you've seen this in SL, please do let me know.)

This thread is designed to highlight what you see as obvious things currently being missed in SL, missing floorboards in the otherwise-firm foundation of the house. It could be content you've been looking for for a long time that you reckon would sell like hotcakes—yet no one has really done it!—or even features that are technically straightforward and simple to implement and would solve some really aggravating annoyances (good examples are the cache-clearin' button and Open ability for boxes in 1.7); or hey, interpret it creatively like you wanna! Feel free to bring back past faves you mentioned in other threads too, I wanna see if we can get some sort of unified field theory of "obvious misses" in here.

So: what gaping holes and obvious opportunities missed do you see in SL? I'm hoping maybe this will stir the stewy pot and maybe encourage those who can do, to do!

Oh I see this is for developers.

Hmmm.

Well, shaking hands is a good idea .. not sure it'll sell like hotcakes though. One of those things that might need to be integrated into the client in order to be used.

Maybe what we need is a feature where you can request someone to do an animation and it says what the animation is, like "Blaze would like you to do the Shaking Hands animation, yes/no?"

Something like that might work.

Otherwise, all that attachment nonsense is a bit overmuch, I think.

I think something that would sell like hotcakes is if we could agree on a good FPS protocol.

Unfortunately, there are a number of egos around that I'm afraid don't understand that open standards need to be egoless.

O actually I wanted to make it more openended than that—it sure includes devs but how do you choose to interpret it, personally?

It could include content developed by Residents. For example, the strange shortness of anime-content in a coherent location despite all the anime-lurvin' friends I have. They often ask about it, but something like SLAC is rare! (Historically there was Little Tokyo, no longer around. ) It seems like an obvious market to exploit, and I mean that in the best of ways.

I'll also point out something like Siggy Romulus's Emote-A-Rama for easy gesture chaining, something that can't be done via SL's own, somewhat difficult-to-setup (definitely not as spontaneous) system.

Those are just a couple ideas. I'm sure you must have some!

Ahhh good FPS protocol, more info 'bout that?

Actually, I think this is true, we need a better system to interact between Avatars. How about this:

llsynchavatars(key avatar, key animation, vector position, vector rotation);

llactivatesynch(string messageshown, float duration);

Well, let's look at how this would work: llsynchavatars does not do anything but set information for a certain avatar: Where we want them to be, rotation, what animation to play... It's not until llactivatesynch is activated that the information is used.

Why this format? To allow multiple avatars to coordiate! This would allow the possibility of complex animations between multiple actors. Dances, anyone?

Now, the interface is simple, script runs the above, and each party involved sees the message from llactivatesynch and a yes/no box. if they agree, then they walk/fly to the position (like sit does) and rotate to the proper position. the animaton (preloaded by the llsynchavatars to the clients machine) is activated, and the animation goes forward.

If the person wants out of the animation, then they just use the movement keys to move. This would work the same way as aborting a sit action.

Anyone want to add anything?

yeah but I think being a ak-47 toting smurf smoking a cigar would be really cool. Something you just can't get going on in Counter Strike too easily.

Oooh you're onto something Foolish.



Sounds like it's easy to start and stop. One thing I often come across, especially with new Residents, is the clunkiness of animated attachments getting buggered up, i.e. the ol' "I CAN'T STOP DRINKING!" in sheer terror. This has group variants too, like "I CLICKED ON SOMEONE AND CAN'T STOP DANCING!"

It shouldn't be a chore to... be dynamic.

The emulation of physical actions within virtual spaces is of great interest to me. What's already been done in the system and by Residents is a good bedrock, but not nearly as seamless as I've envisioned—better implementation of coordination seems so obvious to me.

It ideally would fill a great social hole.

<looks at Torley dryly>

Stop that and be good.

<whaps Torley with a rolled up newspaper>

Something comes to mind here. There's a saying, someone please correct it for me, it goes something like: "Once you've lived with it, you'll never know how you lived without it."

That's how I felt when starting this thread. I was thinking of things not yet added to SL, but once they are, they'll be warmly welcomed like they've always been there.

(They don't necessarily have to have the brightness magnitude of lightbulbs, but they do have to seal voids in the fabric of this gridverse.)

The main problems your going to have stand out once you've tried making things that allow avs to interact...

The sync things are fairly easy to overcome - but the big problems are:

1. There currently is no way to (easily and accurately) make an av turn to an arbitary rotation via an attachment. The script call to do so has been broken for as long as I've been scripting. This is a bigger deal than you would think - without it your going to have to 'line ups' like a some of the hug attaches do - or rez a ball in front of your av and stay put. Not being able to move in front of another av and then line up is a major stumbling block... I've been trying to see if llPointAt will ever be fixed or replaced.. so far no reply.

2. The great deal of editability we have for our avatars.. its great - and its a pain as well.. How do you know where AV A's hand is in relation to AV b? are they tall, short, long or short arms? big hands? small hands? The best you can do is make the anims with for a 'default average size' and hope for the best... I imagine this is the big stumbling block for making interaction a part of SL. 'Adult' animations are easy - the center of an av of anysize is the hips.. so bumping uglies - easy .. shaking hands - hard.

I think handshaking is a good one, Torley! I would have said "hugging" once upon a time, but I that has been replaced with an anim already. Yay!.

Hmm.. Naturally swimming. I would love that when I walked into a body of water, my body would start to take on a swimming animation. And bubbles coming up out of my mouth if I were underwater. I still think we should be able to breath underwater (I mean we can fly so why not! hehe). But water in SL has just never felt as "real" to me as other things. So I guess I think about it a lot and ways that our water could be more immersive.

Along the lines of handshaking, would perhas be hat tipping? I know at the country bar and dance club I go to sometimes, a lot of the cowboys there always tip their hats in greeting. And I'm sure it is not a gesture relegated to just cowboys.

Snapping fingers would be neat too!

That's all I can think of before coffee.

Yes. I can see this being a major issue to try and overcome. I realized just how much difference size of the AV can make when I hosted a kissing booth at the Relay for Life event. I kissed at least 50 AVs that day, and no two ended up in exactly the same spot. I got to kiss a lot of foreheads and chins that day. And some tasty noses too!

I can think of a few things. I was just thinking of them in fact, but then I read this thread a bit more and got sidetracked - you know... I don't think I actually know what a hotcake looks like... I suppose it must look pretty good.

I think we need a Torley in every sim

I endorse this product and/or service.

We are not going to see this happening anytime soon, simply because scripts are incapable of controlling avatar's joints. All we can do is execute a pre-rendered animation or pose, and hope its alligned correctly with the other person.

Hugs and others are easy to do since you can get away with alot of size errors and mistakes, but making a hand that touchs another hand is incredibly difficult:

We lack the ability to scan a person and get information on the scale of their individual body parts. We cannot tell how long is their arm and where it is currently positioned. We cannot tell even where our own arm is currently located at. And without the ability to have full control over our own avatar bodies beyond pre-rendered animation files, even then this data would be pretty useless.

In short, we are missing too many functions, abilities and data to make this happen anytime soon without resorting to something like poseballs to force both parties to face each other at the same position, rotation, and level.

Dockable toolbars and dialog boxes, chat windows that don't cover up part of the world.

Thin property bar instead of giant dialog box for the object editor.

Spell checking for text input.

Saving the chat log, saving just the chat log from a particular person.

Remembering the bug reports we have filed so we can easily refile them.

Good documentation on the interface, build editor, group rules, etc. instead of the crap we have now.

A "My Notes" tab somewhere would be nice. Something to keep track of who all you've made entries on. As it stands now, thats a cool little feature that is unfortunately not too usefull.

It would be great to be able to pop open a friend or customer's profile, put in a note of whatever it is I need to do for that person, close it out and have somewhere where I can go back to it easily- all the entries listed by name-of-avatar perhaps.

Of course, if there is already some way to do this and I have just missed it....well, I'm used to these sheepish moments.

Am I the only one who is glad people don't shake hands in SL? O_o

Copper! Time to bid that ignorance adieu!


http://www.bubblesnlights.com/2005/images/products/buttermilk%20pancakes.jpg


Mmmmmm ...
Must ... go .... to ... IHOP!
Must ... use ... boysenberry!

(I'm a "Citizens For Boysenberry Jam" fan.)









"These are the worlds all tattered and torn;
and hotcakes made for the still unborn."

~ R. A. Lafferty, ARRIVE AT EASTERWINE

For some reason that looks positively gross.

Yeah Torley, "shaking hands", suuuure. Good euphemism that is!