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

Meta, but fits with the name... related to this, the recent issue of the Metaverse Messenger also has an article on Page 6 by Sarg Bjornson.

One thing that already exists, (I've seen this done by Jillian Callahan and Jesrad Seraph) - Scripted water that triggers a particle-splash and sound when collided with. One of those things that added more realism and a nice effect, made me say, "That's cool, I'm surprised I haven't seen something like this around SL before."

I like this a lot too! And I had the exact same reaction you did. It definitely fulfills something we may take for granted offline.

I have a splasher attachment by BuhBuhCuh Fairchild that does something similar—I've customized it so when I leap into the water, it makes watermelon-colored particles fly out.

Being able to set the default camera position to in front of you looking at you seems like a real obvious wonderful thing that got left out to me.

I am so sick of looking at my butt and back, Ugh! Just thinking about it bothers me.

I'd like more fixed cam angles for sure—even There has a "mirror" to walk forward and look at your face.

Will come in handy with photo shoots, SLinema, other usages...

Let me send you my handshaker. It's working, but not finished. I gave up on the rotation stuff.

There's no way to virtually "give" something to someone and observe the handoff.

I want to hold something in my hand, then hand it to you and see it appear in your hand.

You may think this is trivial, but it would be nice for representing workflow.
People are used to handing pieces of paper to each other.

It feels good to give something to someone, then observe how it captures their attention for a few moments.

^ Vewygood for passing briefcases in the park too.

TWO EYE-IN-HANDS, SHAKING!

Lots of very good suggestions. Mine will seem piddly in comparison, but, y'know, I'd kill for a minimize button on the inventory window. x_x

Thinking larger, a fully customizable interface for the SL client would be a dream come true. (Apologies if someone else has already brought this up.)

I am not a builder so I don't care how hard these this might be to build. Hair like trees and ribbons should blow around having some kind of response to the environment. This could be added to dresses and other clothes that should be flowing. Hard hair is just strange.

Pose balls are great to sell but are not as nice as asking someone to hug. Less balls floating around and more internal animations would be very nice and much more real.

Shaking hands would be nice. Maybe if the 2 people wore rings that could come together it would make it easier.

Stone face is the call of the day in sl. Much easier facial gestures to the point where they are almost hard to get rid of.

Typing is taken for granted but I would love to have some kind of speech usage or maybe a recognition program typing for me. Perhaps some day instead of reading words we could hear voices; ours or an AI one.

No animal life. I know why not but the Lindens should throw around a few pigeons or something every now and then. Perhaps they could sell us a premade animal for every lot that stays there in the lot and wont add to the prims. We all hear so many animal sounds but never see any unless we become the animals which is kinda strange. I mean seeing a rabbit hopping around is nice but not with a title hanging over his head *Sith Lord*

Are there more than just 2 places for weather? Some places snow all the time most other places never have anything but dry sunny days. More weather across the map is would be more fun and interesting.

Is that enough? : ) I'm not asking for smell-a-vision just a few tweaks to suspend my disbelief.

Then again do we really want to make sl even more addictive!!?? : D Have fun all!

Will NO ONE stand with me on Smell-O-Vision?!?

I have made the startling observation, that there is no way for an individual to assist another individual in dressing themselves.

Of what good is a personal valet, if the man can't assist with my attire?

How many goreans would like their slaves to dress them?

How many pet owners would like to be able to dress up their pets?

Won't someone please think of the ponygirls?

There should be a way to drag clothing onto another individual and, after the OK is given in a permissions dialogue box, the clothing would appear on them directly.

^ You're onto something, especially when it comes to things like fashion shows where someone could do "makeup" and apply couture, while the model talks on her cell phone (i.e. answers IMs 'cuz she's such a star).

WOWZA so many great ideas here!

I keep reading this, hopefully some of these gaping holes will be filled.

Otherwise, it's kinda like a fruit store without apples, oranges, bananas, and maybe... watermelons.



RUR RUR RUR

That's a great attitude from a certain perspective, because sometimes, knowing too much and making technical excuses can limit you. Have both, I say!

Would I like pets in SL that are wiggly and floppy like There's dogs? Sure.

I would really like the vehicle/road system to work better, so I can drive around and explore. Last time I tried it my pink Jeep got stuck INSIDE a bridge.

I would love to see more animations for avatars that aren't poseballed. Facial expressions, hugs, handshakes, backrubs, etc...

A built-in video capture option like in the Sims 2. Doesn't make a lot of sense for LL to try to push SLTV without it, I know I wouldn't have a clue how to film something in Second Life.

I don't know how it could work, but prim hair that has gravity and is affected by the wind the way non-prim hair is.

Perhaps I'm on crack, but I seem to recall SL does have a native video capture option.

However, this option sucks, so people use FRAPS anyway.

Thanks for the support on smell-o-vision! But really how about something much more fun, 3-D. It could be done and I am sure someone is looking into if or when it will become profitable. The only factors here are cost vs. wow-factor. But if I have to wear cardboard glasses count me out.

Also a grab motion would be nice. It works like this, you click to pick it up and you walk over and motion to pick it up and reverse for putting things down. This is a much better way to give and take gifts and/or dress or undress someone.

How about a removal of our ratings in our Profile which no one uses anymore. This could free the space for something that’s much more fun.

I have found a copiable rain maker which is absolutely fantastic!

An instant Object Recaller which when inserted in an object can return it to your inventory instantly. This would be great for lost objects. I was playing Santa and fell out of my sleigh on Christmas eve! Then a bug froze me and I had to relog. If it wasn't for a million elves none of the children would have gotten stuff for Christmas!

I would also like to pass on the idea I have found helpful. I keep notes on the world in my Profile. I also keep a Drama list in order to keep away from the downers of sl just in case I forget their names. Social life can get very complicated in sl and it helps a lot to keep notes that are not in someone else's Profile.

OK some of this is for the Lindens but I am not sure they are listening to all our millions of whining voices. If you are, reply to this and remember 3-D "yes", cardboard glasses "NO".

~~~Caden~~~

Caden Rolland wrote:
"We all hear so many animal sounds but never see any unless we become the animals which is kinda strange. I mean seeing a rabbit hopping around is nice but not with a title hanging over his head *Sith Lord*"

rotflmao

OK, now I know why I love Second Life so much more than any other potential multiplayer time sink out there. It has that one precious thing the others seem to lack...

Comedy.

LOL

The rings idea seems like a good one to me, since although I am not a scripter, it seems that it would be an easier problem to solve, to get two rings lined up and shaking, and the avatar hands just get dragged along for the ride.

What do the old hands think?

I heard a Linden hint at this in an interview. We should have programmatic (scriptable) avatar animations. Instead of having to upload a premade animation file, a script should be able to say something like llRotateJoint(LEFT_SHOULDER,0,3,0) to rotate the left shoulder joint 3 degrees along the joint's X axis or llPositionJoint(HIP,0,3,0) to move the hips. You get the idea. The position and rotation of all joints would be known. In real life, we call that knowledge the kinesthetic sense.

To perform an action, like a handshake, our avatar would attempt to move our hand toward a spatial target (the hand of another avatar). This could be done using kinematics.

Kinematics allows a joint to move naturally when related joints move. In the case of our handshaking avatar, the arm and body would move when the hand moved. Kinematics are doable. Vince Plunkett's AVIMATOR animation package supports kinematics. Okay, technically, I suppose our handshake might require reverse kinematics, which is harder, but you get the idea.

Even if we can't do k and ik, I think we could manage programmatic animations. Are our current avatars skeletal-based or just a collection of morph animations?

Writing the code in such a way as to enable people with vision problems such as the nearly universal visual difficulty "presbyopia", also known as old age eyes, probably doesn't strike the youngsters writing the program as being "cool", but - it would be a trivial piece of programming, with an immense benefit to many at a trivial cost in programming time and effort.

Of course the same option for customizing font sizes in other aspects of the interface shoud be available also.

To allow zero ability to accomodate this nearly universally acquired visual deficit goes beyond shoddy programming and into the realm of simply shameful.

Could our attachment points be put to use as a spatial target?

Allow QT streams to render unlandlocked on a HUD (hence only to a single person, but anywhere on the grid). This would allow for some really neat UI concepts.

Salazar, I don't see why not.


Alondria, amen to that.

And music too!

(1) Ability to turn off the typing sounds in preferences!

(2) llGetInventoryPrice

(3) llGetInventoryDesc

(4) llSetLinkedTexture

(5) Feedback from llGiveInventory (was it successfully passed? was the pass rejected? was the resident in busy mode?)

Regards,

-Flip

Torley, I am not sure why you decry the shortage of anime-related content when every bit of it would violate copyrights. What's up with that?

Here are a few carrots from my stewy pot: things missing from SL (in no order).

1. Facial animation capability. We need as much control over the avatar's face as we have over its body.
1b. Finger animation capability. When, oh when, will I be able to make an "air quotes" animation? Or a true "bird"? Or something that isn't stupid but still involves animating the fingers?
2. Multiple texture layers for objects with blending modes (a la Photoshop). I want to be able to apply multiple textures to a single face of an object, set a blending mode like multiply or overlay, then have these multiple layers baked into a single final texture like our clothing. Speaking of which...
2b. Multiple texture layers for individual items of clothing, skins, etc, with blending modes.
3. Upper body textures with two separate individual sleeves. We can make both pantlegs different. We can have mismatched socks. Heck, we can make half a pair of pants. Why can't we have control over both sleeves of a shirt? The upper body texture needs an overhaul.
4. The ability to examine an object and see a list of exactly which textures it uses. During creation I often texture with placeholders while I work on final textures, then apply the final textures later, or make changes to a texture and apply a new version. If I accidentally miss a single face that means every user who ever sees the object has to load both textures. Take a hypothetical build with 20 textures, each of which gets 3 texture updates during creation and you see there is potential for resource disaster if I am not very very careful. As a universal rule, those who want to be efficient in the use of resources need tools to enable effiency.
5. The ability to remove our wasted resources from the database. Over my SL career I probably have collected a few hundred waste textures during my uploads. The number is far less since we got texture previews (good one, LL) but still, no preview is perfect. The same goes for sounds, animations, anything we can upload. It would be nice if we could get rid of the resources that will never be used. No refund required.
6. Toes for avatars. SL feet are nasty and embarassing. Give us toes even if it requires swapping a mesh when we put on non-prim shoes. Our feet appear to be a discreet division of the avatar already so make bare feet with toes and beshoed feet using existing shoe textures coexist.
7. Like you were saying, support for handshakes, etc. It would be nice to have the ability (in LSL) to temporarily connect an attachment point of one avatar to an attachment point on another avatar. Hand to hand, foot to chin, pelvis to, ahem, pelvis, whatever. We also need some way for SL to interpolate animations while we are connected so that if I am short and you are tall and my object connects our right hands for a handshake, SL will reinterpret the object's handshake animation to maintain the link.
8. Multiple attachments per point. I want the option not to replace an attachment when attaching an object to an occupied attachment point.
9. Make llMessageLinkset() work attachment-to-attachment. The changed event appears to consider our avatars as a single prim in a linkset. So does the physics engine and its 31 prim limit for vehicles. So why can't we send link messages from one attachment to another attachment? Everyday we have to have attachments with open listeners listening for other attachments to say things when we could have silent link messages. With the proliferation of HUDs this is only a more vital issue.
10. AO functionality built into the client. Give us the ability to substitute our own animations via the UI.
11. Scriptable SL UI. I want to be able to make objects open people's profiles via touch events. I want buttons on my profile to communicate with my objects, give out notecards, serve as vendors, etc. I want to be able to put a script in my profile to check my online status and change parts of my profile as a result. This has endless possibilities once you start thinking about it.
12. Shared inventory folders. We need a special folder in our inventory which is accessible to everyone at all times. Our profiles would have a link to it, or better, would have viewable contents, like an object, which would correspond to our shared folder. Anything in my shared folder would be available to anyone in SL at all times, even when I am offline. Normal permissions would apply, but the obvious use would be to pass out freebies with copy perms. The folder could also contain user-defined subfolders.
13. Some form of symbolic linking. It would be great if I could have 20 copies of a piece of clothing in various places in my inventory, but they are really all the same one item in the database. Even greater would be if I could have 20 copies of a piece of clothing, even with different color and slider settings, but they are really all the same one item in the database with the differences noted. This latter would be far harder to apply to objects but basic symbolic linking would still be a good thing to apply across the board to all inventory items.
14. Far greater capability for notecards including HTML, RichText, inline images, LSL scriptable text links, scriptable dynamic contents, etc. Some of this may be made superfluous by HTML on a prim (when we can do all this on a webserver with LSL input and display the results) but I think there is still arguably some use for a more capable native SL text format.
15. The ability to write notecards via LSL. This is an ancient request which is still as needed today as ever.