AO's, Animation Priorities, And Why I Hate You.

By "you" I mean YOU, PERSONALLY. Especially if you happen to be the creator of an animation overrider.


I'm begging you people, when you upload animations, to stop, and consider what priority makes the most sense.

For those who may not know, the lowest priority is 0, the highest (currently) is 4.
If two animations try to move your arm, the one with the highest priority wins. If they're the same priority, the one that started most recently wins.


STOP MAKING AO ANIMATIONS PRIORITY 4.

THERE IS NO REASON A STANDING ANIMATION OR WALKING ANIMATION SHOULD BE AT PRIORITY 4. Even priority 3 is over-doing it most of the time.

I'm sick of finding only P4 animations wherever I go. Only a handful of animation makers seem to have figured out the point of priorities.

When your standing animation can't be overriden, that means attachments that require animations won't look right. If I'm holding a sign, the animation in the sign should be able to play OVER my AO.

I want to be able to hold a gun without sticking it up my ass every 20 seconds. If that's not too damn much to ask.

Accessories should have higher priority animations. Weapons and anything else that use holding animations should not require you to either turn off your AO and hobble around with the default animations, or else get an entirely separate AO JUST FOR THAT ATTACHMENT.

I agree with a lot of this, however there is a reason for the high priorities in AOs. Recently pri0 was added as an option for uploading, and at the same time it seems some default animations were lowered in priority, but most of the animations you find are old enough to follow the old rules. Previously, the walk animation could only be overridden by a pri4 animation, which is why walks are always pri4. Standing is currently 0, but AO animations are typically 3, or 4 if they're complex (such as animal AOs). Generally, most animations are 3 because a lot of the default animations are 3, and you don't want those poking through.

I don't know if the priorities have ever actually been changed, but I know from experience that walking used to be very hard to override thanks to the different body parts having different priority levels.

A smart AO script would stop the default animation before starting the custom one. Simply playing over it is a bit of a sloppy way to do things imo.

I've noticed that SL will sometimes start replaying the "duck walk" on top of the AO animation, even using Franimation/ZHAO. I modded a copy of Franimation to check and re-kill walk if it started up again, but it's still coming back annoyingly often.

You do need to think a little about use here. I made a walk with a limp animation for ao use and set it at priority 3. Not long ago, I had a customer asking me for a priority 4 version, because when he moved his avatar down a slope, the default run animation kicked in and his character lost its limp. This obviously detracted somewhat from the role play - so priority 4 is sometimes the best option.

Unfortunately, SL often throws animations at your av, so even if the AO stopped it, it would stop it only after it had already been started, so you'd see a glitch.

The folks who wrote most AO scripts were pretty damn clever folks. If you think they missed something obvious, usually it's because you're missing something. Suggestions are always welcome, but accusations of sloppiness are out of order unless you really know what you're talking about. Want to discuss the ZHAO script in detail? Please feel free to study it and make specific suggestions.

I agree with your sentiments, and I do hope that the standard walks are no longer prio 4 so that what you say is actually feasible. I've never made anims for an AO, so I don't konw the details.

As an animator for poseballs and menu furniture, I always upload my anims priority 3, finding that works best in general. I don't remember the specific issues that caused me to stop using the default of 2. I don't use 4 so that it's available for just the kinds of things you mention, for example, allowing one to sip champaigne while seated.

It's still worthwhile doing it: I updated Franimation Overrider to deal with this and it was a major improvement.

The problem with that is that for many animation states the best or only way to detect when your avatar is in them is to check the animation. Stop the default animation, and you'll stop the AO animation too. I know, I've tried. It works for some things, others it doesn't. If you want to have a different animation for walking and for running, for instance, you'll have to detect animation state. The reason for that is because the other way to detect when to animate is a control event, but that event only detects button pushes, it doesn't detect speed.

I suppose one could use velocity detection, but since so much of the avatar's control is based on what animation state they're in even that probably wouldn't be that reliable.

You can keep track of the last standard animation that was started. That's what Franimation does, using llGetAnimationList(), llGetAgentInfo() and llGetAnimation() and a bunch of bookkeeping.

That's true, but last time I tried it, stopping the default animation changed the state, and caused the AO animation to stop too.

I'm pretty sure what I did was the equivalent of:

if(running "walk")
{
  llStartAnimation(my_walk);
  llStopAnimation("walk");
}

Even granting that the incredibly vague group of "folks who wrote most AO scripts" may well be very clever, that does not preclude them from being sloppy, or missing a better solution. Not that I ever said that all or even most AO scripts were poorly written. I merely suggested a better solution than using priority 4 animations.

I happen to think that ZHAO is a very good AO HUD. Especially the newer ZHAO II version. Whether they actually stop the default animations or not. I'd have to check, but I wouldn't be surprised if the current version did.

As for SL "throwing animations at your av", I can only assume you're referring to standing animations, since by default, your av cycles through about four different ones. However, all the built-in stand animations are lower priority (Priority 2 unless I'm mistaken). Other animations, for sitting, walking, running, etc, are easy to stop completely. They are triggered once and only once, by the very event you would have to use to start the custom animation anyway.

I sell only one AO, a "Basic AO for Guys" -- nothing fancy, just a walk and a bunch of stands. But I sell two versions: one priority 2, one priority 3. I haven't been tracking carefully which is more popular, but my sense is that both versions sell OK. I use the priority 2 version for myself.