Programmatic Clothing Changes

I have recently created an avatar that, "animates its skin," but it is very clunky and was a real pain in the butt. I had to create a bunch of semi-transparent prims to attach to every bodypart, try to get the avatar contour completely covered (well, mosly anyway) without much sticking out into space, and it doesn't look great because it DOES create an aura, has jaggy overlapping areas, has to overlap the transparent texture with a skin in a way that looks okay, etc.

It would be really nice if we could programmatically change the texture of our skin/clothing. It doesn't seem like it would be detrimental for performance or anything because we can do the same thing with attachments. So, how about some LSL calls to change the alpha, multiplying color, texture and UV-mapping (even animation as in 'llSetTextureAnim()') of each piece of clothing (and skin/eyes/hair)? For that matter, being able to adjust the UV-mapping from the gui when selecting a clothing texture would be great too for those small little gotchas that can creep in (the default blank textures don't seem to quite cover the whole body, BTW; there are large annoying seams).

I suppose eventually being able to change other clothing parameters, or being able to, "attach," a pre-built piece of clothing like we can object attachments would be nice, but that would probably have larger issues associated with it as the actual vertex arrays might change and such.

Has this been considered? Do you see any major issues with implementing it? Am I bringing up a sore subject (if so I apologize for my SL youth and ignorance )?

Thank you for your consideration.

Hi Hewee--you may wish to do some forum searches about this, as there's much history. It's a good idea and one I wanted to do before: specifically, watching myself roll in mud and watching my clothes get dirty. Spider Mandala recalls such things.

I don't know of a current project to implement this--there currently isn't a scripted way to change clothing, but I'd suggest getting together with like minds and garnering support. For example:

http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=1718

I bet there are more.

Being new, a great benefit to you is to learn from the past and empower yourself. You sound very enthusiastic and I admire this.