MY Most Wanted Feature? NO MORE AVATAR!

After giving this some serious thought I have decided that what would SERIOUSLY make SL 1000% better and more fun would be.....

AVATAR OPTION

Here is what I have in mind....
You can choose between AVATAR and SPIRIT.
In Avatar, nothing changes from how it currently works.
In Spirit you are no longer an Avatar (bi ped humanoid) you are a single little blip and you can INHABIT OBJECTS!

Why would I want something like this you ask?
Well Ill tell ya!

I want my SL appearance to NOT be restricted to a bipedal humanoid form! If I want to be a chicken or a teapot or a floating peace sign, I should be able to be a chicken, teapot, or floating peace sign!

So here is what SPIRIT gets you....
You can ONLY inhabit a single object.
You cannot have attachments. (No need for them as you can build whatever into the object you want to inhabit.)

What does this accomplish?
Well for starters it does away withthose stupid standing around animations that force you to build attachments AROUND them or just suffer the way they can COMPLETELY screw up the look you are going for.

Sure there should be some limitations... for instance if you want with all your heart to be a flying house or school bus... you probably shouldnt be allowed to be an ACTUAL SIZED School bus or house. So lets say that if the OBJECT you want to inhabit falls within a 10x10x10 space... you can inhabit it as a SPIRIT.
And too there probably shouldnt be any .010x.010x.010 fairies or flys... so we limit the minimum to something you can actually see like .100x.100x.100.

Now I know this aint no UTOPIA, and not everyone will see the complete GENIUS of this IDEA, so I welcome your input to show me potential downsides I might not have thought of.

But for the love of all that is holy, Lindens, PLEASE let me be a spirit so I can finally make a decent looking MECH, CHICKEN, TEAPOT, SINGING SWORD, FAIRY PRINCESS OF LIGHT, WHATEVER THING HERE, that the pieces do not interpolate each other when I stand around doing stupid "Lookit Me! Im Really Alive!" animations.
Id rather be dead than have to contend with this problem anymore

I would love this also.

Even if they left the same collision detection, this would be awesome

Excellent!

This would be great! Heck I'd be happy with just being able to set parts of the avatar to alpha and have them invisible but work the same way they always do. Perhaps an alpha skin that made that portion of the avatar alpha

I could be a pair of walking feet, a moving hand (that having written moves on 'n stuff)...that sort of thing, it would be brilliant to replace my head with a head that floats a few centemeters above where it's supposed to be over an icky stump...or gaps between limbs...extremely thin limbs or body parts...

Set yourself alpha and model bones to insert in the places bones should be, don't forget to set them to be light objects so you can glow in the dark...awesome stuff!

Lumiere

okay those are all cool Lum, but they all deal with allowing alpha on avatar. Which in and of itself is VERY cool, however, I am stillforced to deal with those drippy animations.

I would SERIOUSLY like to be able to inhabit an object....
it would allow me to concentrate on making the best "WHATEVER" without regard for the animations or the relationship of head to body, body to legs, etc.

Although.... your alpha thing just gave me a neat idea for my next av MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I wouldn't mind both ways...

I would say make the Spirit a glowing particle (maybe of a 1x1x1 size), with your name still above it, you could then easily cover it up. However you'd be stuck to make things bigger than 1x1x1, which would be bad for some, but good for others because then it would be less likely to be able to "hide". I too dislike the restriction of being human, can never really be a realistic dog with that. Or many other things.

The whole reason why we may be stuck with human may be on purpose, as I've read elsewhere that Lindens want other uses to be instantly recognizable, hence why we MUST be human and MUST have human characteristics.

So while I would love the Spirit idea, Lindens may not ever want to do this. Think of it this way too, if someone has Names off and Mini Map off and you are a tree you can easily fool them. <-- Devils Advocate

The making of limbs invisible would be neat also, but you can't really have alpha textures do that as that would break alot of clothing. You'd most likely have to have a check box for each limb to turn it "off" and make it invisible. To prevent invisible avatars I would say have it so you have to have one main limb/part visible at all times, meaning you can turn your arms off, legs off, head off, upper body, but then your lower body must stay visible, something like that.

But that also would not get rid of the human animations we do. But if the Lindens are dead set on this whole human thing that may be the best thing we could get.

Chris, I think if attachments were done at the right points (fairly stable portions of an avatar's body such as the spine or pelvis) then invisible avatars would pretty likely do what you are after with the spirit idea.

Alas it doesn't work, I had been thinking about this at work one day and gotten pretty excited about it all...rushed home and started mapping alpha textures to my avatar's skin to no avail...it just takes you to the default avatar skin texture.

Two suggestions that have nothing really to do with what you're looking for here but I've found to be interesting ideas to ponder:

#1 Make a really massive, prim heavy vehicles by wearing an attachment or attachments made of of MANY prims that cover the body, then put a vehicle script in one cubic prim and sit on it. This would lock up most of the animations of your avatar, not all of course, but many of them. Your body would be covered, and if you made your avatar as small as possible you might just get away with it. I've tried this with my Dalek AV with some success but I've been too busy with other projects to pursue it very far up to now.

This introduces other problems, like awkwardness in moving, but avatar flight in general can be rather awkward in world at times anyway, and always riding a vehicle may cause occasional difficulties in crossing sims.

#2 Load a script into one of the attachments of your avatar to put yourself in a different animation mode (flying, sitting, hovering, whatnot) to better hide your avatars body within the confines of your desired prim.

I really do wish we could render portions of our avatars alpha though, I can think of a lot of possibilities it would bring us.

Lum

Edited: I usually have to edit...it's the English teacher in me, can't let well enough alone.

ueah I have been down all of those roads with locking up my avatar in some other animation, but it really doesnt come close to what I want.

and as we all know it is all about what I want when I want it

Your idea about no attachments wouldn't work with what I'd use this for. I like to go around in a mech suit that covers my avatar totally, so I don't need the shell of the avatar to be rendered. However, I DO need the articulated skeleton and attachment points, because my mech WALKS. It'd look pretty stupid otherwise, like a flying statue more than anything else.

I also wish I could increase the height above my head that my name is rendered client-side, 'cause up close it disappears into my metallic cranium.

I agree with Alpha AV - I wanna be a ghost
or have no head
or Be just a head (Cheshire Cat)

Yeah who said in SL we want to be a male/female biped.

If we were a bone heirachy we could fit in many objects.and still be animated..opens up the imagination.

I could be :
a fly on the wall
the straw that broke the camels back
a ball (kick me)
a bike (ride me)
a cow patty
a tree
a bandaid
a door (thankyou for allowing me to serve)
a chair
hmmmm

I think the "fly on the wall" thing is one thing we'd need addressed. I'd like to have the ability to have some forced representation for "ghost" avatars, so that if I had my mini-map closed I could still see if someone was around.

Privacy -- that and other social and political rights. That's the real problem here. Avatars exist partly to indicate who or what is around -- so that people can make necessary choices as to what to do or how to behave.

If you're a "fly on the wall", I don't want to have the kind of conversation I had with the beautiful dominatrix that I met the first night I was in SL. (She was very nice, very open, I asked a lot of questions, and I learned a lot that I didn't know. . . . Such as: "Why do you keep calling me -Sir-?" All kinds of potential abuse situations open up if the avatar isn't recognizable as representative of a human being.

That said, I like the idea of ghosts, etc. Perhaps include a highly visible "indicator" to let everyone in the area know what you are?

Great idea, but only if you can inhabit your own prims only heh.

ok so what I see here is interest and thats GOOD!

Current issues that have been brought up:
a) PRIVACY:
Due to some people havnig issues with seeing "things" instead of "bipedal humanoids" I offer the following -
If you have names turned completely off you would not know that the fly on the wall is a Spirit Inhabited Fly and not just a bunch of prims that look like a fly. However, with a minimum inhabitable size of .100x.100x.100, thats a pretty darned big fly! But how about this? All Spirits and Spirit Inhabited Object appear on your map as a RED dot? I wouldnt mind that.

b) Spirit Ihabitation of Objects other than your own:
This should be a no brainer people. If you arent the owner, you cant inhabit it. Duh

c) Attachments
I thought long and hard about this and I feel there HAS to be a difference between Avatar and Spirit. Who would choose Avatar if they could be a Spirit, Inhabit Objects, AND have attachments? I dont think anyone would. SO there HAS to be a Downside to choosing Spirit over Avatar and that was the easiest way I could think of.
PLUS! I honestly believe that a Spirit that can have attachments is just a Griefer in the making. If you let people inhabit an object but do not allow attachments you cut back on the floating little blue orbs waiting for an opportunity to whip out their cannon and smack you across the sim.
With that said I am also in favor of not allowing Spirits to runs scripts either. So no little Mosquitos that can Rain Meteors on other people.
PLEASE BEAR IN MIND THAT CHOOSING TO BE A SPIRIT SHOULD BE AN OPTION AND YOU CAN SWITCH BACK AT WILL.
Im not advocating taking away ANYTHING from ANY Avatar.
Just limiting what your choices are as a Spirit

d) And a NEW reason I thought of for allowing Spirits to Inhabit Objects
ROLE PLAY!
If you didnt look anything at all like a bipedal humanoid it would make life SO much easier to role play in some respects.
I for one would find it a whole lot easier to role play a fly if I didnt look like a bipedal humanoid.
For ME anyway But I digress



I WANT MY SPIRIT FILLED INHABITATION!

Ok some thoughts...

Why even have "Inhabbit"? Putting things on your Spirit self should be just like your Avatar self, click and drag from inventory and/or right click select Attach. However, the difference comes as this... With an Avatar you of course have joints and limbs etc. With a spirit you have none of those, so you basicly can attach only one object to your circled self.

And I DO want scripted objects to be able to be attached, why? Because why should we be limited by that? People can already attach hell fire objects to themselves if they want to.

And as stated before the privacy issue would be pretty non-existant if you limit the size of the Spirit to a decent size. If they shrink down some object to .01 then it will be an object in the center of a giant blue particle ball or whatever. Just as we have Avatar size limits we would have Spirit size limit. In fact Spirits most likely would just be *one* size and couldn't be made any bigger and/or smaller.

I do not think a different icon for Spirits on the map is needed, that would just cause more confusion for people "Ok, the green dots are people, what are the redish ones?" "Those are spirits" "Whats a spirit?" yeah... all people, Spirit or Avatar should be a green dot.

I would like to see quadrepedal and sexapedal avs too.

** deleted **

But Chris, all I want to do is have an avatar that doesn't get rendered. It seems to me that there's no functional difference between an invisible avatar with something attached to one point and a "spirit." I just need the skeleton, you dig?

Enabling invisible avatars and enabling "permanent flying" without the concurrent bobbing around of joints that goes on during flight would probably do it.

here is my thought on trying to get this from
"HEY! Wouldnt it be cool if..." stage to
"Linden Labs announces..." stage

what I am trying to accomplish is to have EXTREMELY little for the Lindens to do here other than add an option for us to render our current avatars withOUT all of that stupid wobbly bobbly junk the avatars tend to do. Just give us the option to be rendered as a .100x.100x.100 sphere with a single attachment point at its center.

I am not trying to make this so daunting as to have them render 2, 4, 6, 0 legged base avatars AS WELL AS provide the option to render current avatars with the ability to alpha parts of them AS WELL AS provide the option to render any avatar without the option of incidental movements, etc etc etc ad infinitum.

Im just trying to get them to see that even with all of the current size, shape, and skin options the avatars currently have, its not precisely perfect for everyone that passes through SL. However, with just this one option as I have described it would open up an entirely new world of options within SL.

Again I reiterate that the option of attaching scripted objects can be allowed BUT those attached objects are not allowed to REZ anything. There... that should be satisfactory to anyone that wanted to do anything OTHER than rez bullets

Why shouldn't Spirits be able to fight though?

They should be able to take damage and give damage just as anyone else.

I would prefer it if the Spirits had *all* the capabilities of a regular avatar, but in single sphere form and only be able to attach one object.

I see why you are saying that, but I just don't think its fair and don't see how it will prevent any more greifing or whatever, you could cause just as much damage with a gun attached to an avatar now as you could as a Spirit with a gun. IF not more, since with a Spirit you could only attach one weapon, where as an Avatar can attach as many as disired.

I dunno, Oz... You can _easily_ have many varieties of weapon in one object, from a squirt gun, to a hail of bullets, to a full-on nuke. No extra attachments needed.

Plus a "spirit" has potential to make you a smaller target too...

Thats true but anything you attach becomes part of you doesn't it? So if you have a giant gun someone could target that and hit it and you'd get damage?

I'm all for taking preventive measures, but I just don't want any un-needed restrictions.

I still don't understand this reliance on actual guns.
I mean, a scripter has huuge potential for damage just standing there open-handed...

Durn these scripter mind tricks!