Do-It-Yourself Kits I'd like to see (Further Fandom Support)

Do-It-Yourself Kits I'd like to see:

- 'Megaman' Style Avatars (Both Classic and X series, possibly Battle Networks)

There is already a large fanbase of people who have their own megaman-themed characters. I would personally love to see some well-done avatars in this theme and style, complete with an animation override set for the particular movements and scripts for things like dashing and air-dashing, sliding, and maybe a friendly buster combat system. In the very least, particles to that effect. Bonus points if you can create a wall-jump script. Possibly use an animated 'texture' face (as most of the Lusk furries have) to further capture the proper style and look of the series. A series of these animated faces could be released in different looks (angry eyes, happy, robot, etc) to further help people customize. Everything would obviously need to be full Modify permissions, so people can re-color them and create their own characters with this as a starter base. Other parts could be purchased for larger Robot Master avatars or possibly smaller child-like avatars. (I imagine Ran would be a tiny, if anyone knows who that is...) Merge the various components with certain furry avatars and you'd have most of the Mavericks.

- 'Sonic' Style Avatars

There is a similarly large fanbase of people who've created their own characters in the Sonic universe, that I'd love to see supported in Second Life via a starter kit of various 'Fox' and 'Hedgehog' and 'Echidna' avatars. While this seems like a simple extension of the furry fandom, the style is very different. Custom scripts could be created to make the character appear to 'spin' when walking, for dashing, for general running around and jumping, etc. I imagine you could make a 'in-a-ball' prim around the avatar that is invisible unless in one of these states. Extra bonus points if you can create Knuckle's wall-climb ability. These would also likely need textured faces, to capture the style. Full mod permissions as well.

- 'Transformers' Style Avatars

There is a fanbase here. Do-It-Yourself car-transformer avatars and jet-transformer avatars and whatnot could all be created with modify permissions so someone could edit the prims attached to themselves and make their own vehicles. These would need to also include a set of customized animation overrides to make them look proper, as well as specific 'transformed-state' animations for when they are in their vehicle modes. If you wanted to get really advanced, you COULD technically make things like the Beastwars robots. Just make the normal walk animation, and then contort the body into the beast mode and make seperate 'walk' animations for that, which override when you are in that mode. Plausible, at least. I'm working on a concept for a 'Devistator' like vehicle, with five pilots, each controlling a different aspect of the vehicle. Gestault robots are theoretically possible as well. There is something I'd like to advise here though, and this goes for all that I'm mentioning. It's not as interesting to run around specifically as 'starscream' or 'Optimus Prime'. First off, I've yet to see a semi truck in Second Life, so how is that 'robots in disguise'? We need our own versions of these, to fit the world we are in. Wouldn't it be awesome if someone made a transformer avatar of , say, one of Cubey Terra's ships? To anyone else, it would look like a regular airplane. The name above it would just be assumed to be the pilot. With a non-transparent cockpit, they'd have difficulty finding out. When you transform you get to shock everyone, and you would actually be 'in disguise' and thus more properly in the theme of Transformers.

- Rayman

This is a smaller fandom, but I've seen it around and I think it'd be easy enough to accomplish. If you were careful and just shrunk the torso well enough, you could probably wear normal clothes too. But perhaps the invisi-prims needed to make the arms invisible would make that look odd and the whole thing would have to be prim-built. Either way. I mention this because it seems easy and because I'm kind of stretching to find more fandoms that people often create their own characters in. I'm a robot fan, if that helps elaborate the above.

- Combattable, Trainable, Collectable Pocket Monsters

I'm trying to come up with the best way to do this. They have to be cute, and non-animatable solid-state prim objects lack something there. Once I figure out how people do the 1-dimentional 'sprite' prims that seem to follow the camera, maybe I can figure out a way to use those. But that aside, the simple concept itself is easy enough. Menu-based fight system, turn based, not attached to the land so you and your pet could wander anywhere and find someone else with a pocket monster and battle. As with Transformers, I don't want to rip directly off of Digimon or Pokemon or any of the pre-existing franchises. I'd want Second Life to have it's own verison. Perhaps this isn't a do-it-yourself-kit-able thing, though. Not unless the base battle system had a set of pre-determined 'types' of monsters, and when you made your own model/sprite you just affix the code and set it up as appropriate.

The important thing with any of these isn't simply that these are done, but that they are done well. A poorly-done or half-done version isn't going to cut it.

I'm sure there are more, and I'd love to hear them. What I'm talking about here are fanbases that exist that people often create their own characters for, and then providing a way for people to translate those characters into Second Life. Did I miss any obvious ones? Most of the ones that use realistic-humans needn't be mentioned, or I'd have brought up Star Wars and Star Trek. Those use the basic model and maybe just a uniform, which I've seen around. They're alot easier to work with, there is already basic second life support for human-appearance characters. I'm looking for seperate styles that can be introduced. Feel free to post your opinions and if possible come up with some fanbase styles I may have missed that we could introduce into the game.

I'd love for these to exist, but I'm new. I don't know half as much as I'd need to to introduce these. I don't care who does it as long as it's done well and in the proper style. I'm not bent on making money, I just want to see some of these supported. If they don't get made and I learn enough to make them, I'll probably do that. But for now, I'm turning it over to the forums here.

GREAT thread, Vilkacis... I can see what's going on here, and of course I am a YUGE fan of many classic videogames and robots of many kinds. It would be more-than-meets-the-eye!

What thoughtline train this gets me riding on, very quickly, is thinking of the brilliance of Lusk, how they pioneered the concept of furry avs with COPY/MOD/NOTRANS perms and how many unique variations we've had after that. The concept has carried over to newergen designers with some very, very beautiful artistry!

An upside to these DIY kits is you wouldn't be infringing on copyrighted material because you'd be making your own, inspired designs. They would give someone a nice solid base to work from, and give them confidence to expand their knowledge further while having fun.

Generally speaking about specific DIY kits, I'm an applauder of Cubey Terra's recent plane one. It fills a hole for those who want to get involved in aerial vehicles but felt too intimidated. Plus, the old "Simple Airplane" script wasn't being updated, so I'm glad Cubey took the initiative. We could make do with more great car and boat kits. Planes, trains, and automobiles!

I'd also like quality DIY weapon kits, like guns and swords. It'd have to be an elegant package, nothing 2nd-rate cobbled together. I'd imagine someone could start out greefing others mindlessly and then developing quite an imagination by seeing what a potent multimedia package of building, scripting, particle fx, and even sound fx coordination it could be. They set their sights on higher achievements—and then the process is applicable to other, NON-weapon products, which is how I see connexions on here.

Hmm. Marcos Fonzarelli might be the point man on developing these. I know that he's developed a veritech av (a NICE one!) that I believe transforms. Perhaps that could be made into a more generalized DIY kit. I suppose the difficulty in reaching elegance here would be in the arrangement of the body in the "transformed state." As you mention, likely a different anim would be needed for each vehicle type.

*Kage thinks*

Actually, that wouldn't be terribly hard to make the anims at all... I just don't know how to tweak an anim overrider to manage multiple user states (human/vehicle/cuisinart).

Food for thought.

This is something I think should be looked into. Creating a script that can handle multiple states of being. Because, in the case of a Veritech fighter, the Gerwalk (half-airplane/half-walker) mode could still have a 'walk' and 'jump' and etc animations, all their own. They would just involve the pose being bent-over or whatever is needed to lock them in Gerwalk mode.

But yes, definetly, we need an anim overrider that can manage multiple user states. Non-transformer people could use it for, say, different moods, where they move differently depending on how they feel.

...wait a minute. I grabbed myself one of those Wet Ikkon dealies a day or two ago, I seem to recall reading that it supports multiple sets, each with their own notecard. You have to type the command manually to get it to switch, but if we used the code from that we could reasonably make the script switch itself when the veritech switched modes... I think this is possible, I just am also not sure how to do it. But possible.