"Avatar Mesh" Prim

The problem: Prim animation is a joke. Due to the limitations imposed in LSL, the calls to rotate and move prims are hideously slow. They are this way for a reason - too many calls will bog the sim down, and are thusly reasonable, but the end result is jaggy animation, pieces of limbs or objects falling apart and, if you're lucky, reconstituting themselves at some point down the line. The larger the object is, the worse this decomposition seems to be.

You can, as I understand it, get around this by running two or more scripts in concert to escape the .2 seconds of sleep, but I would rather not break reasonable limitations and introduce sim lag simply because I want something to look pretty.

Contrast prim animation to the wonders you can do with avatars - a good animation override and some prims can turn a person into a very good fascimile of a bird or anything else (see Grendel's Children as an example of the kind of stuff I mean - not an advert, but they have the most realistic non-humans I have yet seen in game).


The suggested solution: Avatar meshes as a prim type. I know that avatar meshes take up a decent amount of processing power, but there's no way an avatar mesh takes up more than a 300-prim badly-animated script-laden critter.

If we were able to create an avatar mesh and alter it's appearance, skin, attachments, and AO, we could instantly have realistically moving birds, animals, npcs, monsters for games, etc, without the script lag of poorly-done animation. This would free up sim resources and we could thus move on to produce better AI for these creatures.

You would also free up sim resources by getting rid of unnecessary 'zombie' clients. I could be a bird providing atmosphere for a landscape, or a NPC in a game, sure, but the server still has to treat me as though I am an actual client and feed me network data, etc, which it would not need to do with a prim.

Second Life is a vast landscape. Oftentimes in my travels I will go an hour or more without seeing a sign of life other than poorly-done 2-d animals and birds. It gets lonely, it breaks the illusion that we're living in a real world, as the real world always has signs of life, and not just human life. I feel that anything to improve the number and quality of "living" creatures in the world is beneficial to everyone, and far outweighs what lag they will create.

In conclusion, I feel that the current method of animating non-client creatures is incredibly wasteful with resources, to provide an unsatisfactory result. With the basic avatar mesh as a prim type, we would have many of the benefits of being able to import our own creature-based meshes, with none of the drawbacks to this format, since the avatar mesh already exists on the client software.

One could probably make some pretty nice hair with 255 properly deformed avatar prims on the skull and 2 X 255 avatar prims on the ears and maybe a few other attachment points to add volume and body to the coiff.

Soylent Hair Is People!

Oh god....