avatar AV body shape, and building light/sound suggestions

I had a few ideas for things that can improve SL )or at least make it more fun) these issues generally fall into two categories.

AVATAR BODY SHAPES: I had two ideas for the avatar body shapes. These ideas are as follows.

1. BETTER BODY FAT SHAPING: Many people I know in SL have tried to make a heavyset AV at least once using the features in appearance. Generally they reach a simple problem. The larger a body part gets (especially on a tall, bulky, avatar) the more polygonal it looks. Where this really ends up looking bad is on the belly of male avatars. Unless you make the male body shape shorter than usual, trying to make a male avatar heavyset in SL leads to an unnaturally square (if not cubic) belly.

2. ANDROGYNY SHAPE: This was inspired by a few odd shape issues me and a few of my friends ran into. the first was i met a few girls who wanted to have female avatars able to reach the max of height and bulk men do. one of them wanted to do it to get a muscular amazon woman look, another wanted to do a drag queen/unpassing tranny look. (I ended up doing one of those too, but had to do it with a male shape and a custom skin). I also met a few girls who wished their avatar had the male default walk without needing to go to AO's to make them walk in a less wiggly way. the final issue making me want this is that the first look i tried to get in SL when I was new to it. I tried to get a male shape with the female bust size options. Eventually i gave up as trying it with objects never looked right, and trying it with a female avatar altered to look manly lead to an avatar whose arms were disproportionately thin and who walked funny. So making a avatar shape able to reach both male and female body size/proportion options on a single shape would be interesting.

SL BUILDING LIGHTING AND SOUNDS: i had a few ideas for objects that can effect the areas light and sound.

1. SOUND PROOF WALLS: These would be useful for making cramped apartments where people can live close without disturbing each other. Or ways to place stores near houses without the public and private areas interfering with each other. (I knew of one person whopse house in Sl was by a mall with prize chairs, hearing the chairs in their house got annoying).

2. LIGHT EFFECTING PRIMS: In most areas the normal SL ambient lighting does a good job. But walls and objects that block the light, cast other light, or cast shadow could be good for feel. Can you picture a dark castle in SL dimly lit by torches, whose walls block away the outside light so the light gets dimmer away from the torches and dark away from them.

Sound and light-proof walls require an ungodly amount of ray-tracing.

Shadows can be faked, but typically look low quality. There are also a couple of inbetween meathods, sacrificing speed to get quality.

Sound...I don't know. Sound just works so differently that I don't know if there is an easy solution.

Lights:
One thought would be to make "light in a prim" what I mean by that is that instead of the prim radiating light outwards it could only illuminate the inside of the prim. If the light option had a negitive number option the light could be inward instead of outward. Also it would be nice to have lights that were non spherical.

Sound:
Would it be possible to write a script that kills sound within a prim?

Avitars:
An upgrade to the avitars is long over due, double the polycount and give us control of our fingers, it could even be done without making all the current skins obsolete(tho it would be nice to have seperate left and right arms, feet).

Currently: no. In the future: Unlikely.

If they can do reflections off rippling water, then shadows and light-proof walls shouldn't be too difficult!

Shadows are only dependent on the position of the light source. Reflections are dependent on the position of the viewer, who move around a lot more than the sun.

Shadows are dependent on the position of the sun, and the object casting the shadow. Calculating in realtime the shadow of a 200 prim object as it moves would take a lot more work than calculating some artificial highlighting effects on a stationary plane (the water), as an AV moves.

Not to mention that the reflections are in all likelyhood a rendering "hack" rather than raytracing (remember when they made reflective prims? Remember how they got them to do that? Render hack).