Male or Female?

I'm beginning to like my idea of an attachment more and more.

It could hold whatever information you wanted it to hold. If you want to be ambiguous about your gender, then leave that information out.

But it could hold other information. For instance, it could be configured to store a list of languages you speak. Then when you sit on something, it could give you instructions in your native language.

Oh, and you could turn it off and on whenever you like. Or simply detach it whenever you like.

Still thinking out loud here.

I've thought of writing a scripted version of the "avatar attributes" JIRA using listens, but it would be so much less efficient. The basic concept of a property list goes all the way back to Lisp 1.5, in the '70s, and it's something SL and LSL should have had from the word go.

I could see something like this (responses in IM if you're an avatar, in a response on channel 1337 if you're a script):

/1337@sex=male
Your Name's TagHUD: # You set your 'sex' to 'male'
/1337@species?
Your Name's TagHUD: $species:human
/1337Fred Smith@species?
Fred Smith's TagHUD: $species:klingon
/1337Fred Smith@species=human
FredSmith's TagHUD: # You don't have permission to set Fred Smith's species

@ indicates a request
$ indicates a response
# indicates a comment or error message

I agree that the attachment would be less efficient, but then you could probably have it written in a day or two. When will the JIRA be completed?

This has been the most usefull and creative reply so far. But I would like the script to know the gender of any Av, not just ones using special stuff. I have some ideas using return codes from some functions but don't want to post any code until I know it works.

So when a woman sits on a product you make and it runs the animation you deem 'appropriate' but that woman is a butch lesbian who prefers male animations, then what?

yeah that was basically the point of my green and yellow post.... there's too many possible answers the whole sex/gender/social_role mess in real life... in SL where any one of those can change with a click? it's downright scary. especially with the number of alt.life folks that are in SL.

there ya go

thank you but I am not addressing Sedona. And DanMan the OP has not address her idea either, which is more reasonable than just being thrust into an animation because your avatar is male or female when your gender may be totally different.

DanMan is who started this thread and is who I am addressing since he has not said anything remotely like what Sedona has said, which can be agreeable as long as clicking that box to say what sex i am when i sit down also in turn is an agreement to be animated so I am not having to click through multiple drop down menu's just to finally get in position.

We hadn't really thought it through as thoroughly as this, but I guess that's one of the reasons an animator with whom I work a lot chose black and red poseballs for her Dom/sub and vampire/victim furniture (so do a lot lot of other people, of course) -- there are clearly defined, but certainly not gender specific, roles.

Thinking out loud, as it were, one of our main concerns when we put together anims and furniture isn't so much who's the boy and who's the girl, even for the sexual stuff, but which of the couple is taller. I'm just wondering -- because I don't know -- whether concentrating on determining the avs' hights -- which you can easily do with llGetAgentSize, of course --wouldn't be a better line of attack.

Indeed, since male avs do tend to be larger than female ones, in general, this would probably be no more inaccuate a method of making an eductated guess about who's what than are any of the available alternatives.

I've never really considered, until writing this, how -- if at all -- I could use llGetAgentSize to help with positioning avs. I shall try to investigate the matter and report back -- anyone got any guidance they might offer?

I'm in full agreement with Briana over this issue. Animations that affect our body language are intensely personal, and the loss of choice in the male/female animations would hit me very hard.

My avatar is female, but in general the male animations in SL suit my persona the best. The female animations are usually extremely femme, whereas male anims are closer to the androgynous/butch identification that defines my character. So when given a choice, I always select the male anims.

Nobody is forcing me to buy furniture with predetermined gender anims, of course. But I offer my perspective as one reason why this approach is not suited to everyone. It would certainly lose me as a potential customer of any objects making use of this kind of script, and if it were widespread I'd end up standing a lot.

I would love to see SL animations develop in the complete opposite direction: divorcing animations for their need to be embedded in objects. Given that body language is so intrinsic to the portrayal of a character, I'd much prefer that each of us controls the way in which we sit, just as we do with stances and walks in an AO. The furniture that allows my AO to override the preset anims remains my favorite choice so far.

It appears to be the complexity of assembling and wearing AOs that places the onus on furniture makers and other content creators to provide something beyond the dorky LL default anims. Making that entire process easier to control would be a big improvement for everyone.

I once wrote a script for someone to use llGetAgentSize to position an avatar on a vehicle. I wasn't able to get really super results with it, and I don't think she ever solved the problem either.

Animators just cannot and, outside of personal or customised animations, should not plan for the height of couples, which is another matter of preference in SL and of course has no bearing on gender or sex in RL either.

My primary SL hobby is to configure home-made XPOSE devices with fairly complex twosome, threesome and foursome menus. The fun is to convincingly mix and match animations from many different animators in logical sequences or 'stories'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have found that cuddles and sex poses tend to present the most difficult problems.

The most serious matching problems stem from animators who work on the assumption that one av will be shorter/smaller as a matter of course. This is a pretty much redundant exercise unless the end-users are guaranteed to conform more or less to the proportions of the original models. Simply put, it increases the probability that many, I would even say most, couples will be unable to fit with a reasonable level of compatibility when animated.

I have found that, without a shadow of a doubt, the closest approximations of compatibility are achieved in advance using avs of similar height and proportion (I use the SL defaults of approx 6' 6" which then work reasonably well for any combination of avs that vary by 6" either way. Male-on-male, female-on-male and female-on-female combinations generally should not require more than a tilt for good animations to work according to preference. Consequently only seriously mismatched avs will fail to 'sit comfortably' on the pose combinations.

The result is rarely perfect but animation and avatar 'anatomy' in SL lack perfection in the first place.

Male avatar - "Female" shape selected. (^_^)

Nice. Still looks like a smart and sharp female to me.

Then again it's pretty clear, to my eye at least, that all avs are based on little Ruthie anyway. The proportions are always female, particularly with the legs where the knees are too low for a male no matter how much hip length is shortened to compensate. The waist is too high and narrow also but I find that can be fixed with loads of body fat, thickness and 'love' to bulk it out and hide it.

It's a shame that a separate av mesh for each of the sexes just isn't a practical proposition.

I can see this making a difference in choosing animations (for instance a hugger that brings an exceptionally tall party down on one knee or such) and may make some difference in adjusting lying poses that are properly paired for head height. I'm not so sure I'd want to apply it to D/s (what with all the tiny dommes) or guessing sex/gender/social-role (only in part because one party may choose real world realistic height, and another not).

can't think of anything specific to add.

I should have been more specific, I think, in what I described wanting to investigate, because it was the D/s stuff for which I wondered if hight detection might be a good idea. The Dom/me, whatever his or size, takes the black ball and the sub/be the red one, and it stuck me that it would be really nice to be able to do a bit auto-adjustment on the fly so that people don't then find themselves buried in furniture or floating in mid-air -- we know, for example, in some of our furniture that whoever is sitting on the black ball, whatever his or her size, is going to spend most of the time in various sit poses on a throne and whoever is on the red one is going to be kneeling, standing or laying nearby.

I suppose there are two sorts of alignment I need to consider -- the individual's offset from the ground or the throne, and, separately, their position relative to each other. Though, since all I'm trying to do is save people some adjustments (which can be quite entertaining to do, of course) when they get the furniture home, maybe the game is not worth the candle.

The idea of switching anims for kiss/hug attachments might be more worth pursuing. Most collars I've seen, for example, have paired anims that assume the av wearing the collar is going to be shorter than whoever they're kissing or hugging. This works well most of the time for my av -- 5' 10'' -- when I want to use my collar to initiate a kiss , but not so well when taller friends want to use their collars to kiss me. And just checking how tall the two parties are before you decide which anim to play for whom shouldn't be too difficult to do. /me heads off to experiment.....

Though a little off-topic at times, many of you have provided good information to my original question. And others have made points I did not consider. I would like to have an AV sit on my furntiure and run and interesting anim without having to go through a menu or have additional add-ons for it to work. And without using colored balls.

I don't want to insult anyone by forcing them into a female or male position. What I have decided so far is to default to neutral poses and gestures. If there is something obvious that the script detects showing the AV prefers to be feminine then alternate anims will be used. I want to make all of the anims I have created available.

More comments welcome....

a while ago i did see a object that could guess for about 90% certain if you where a male or female.
What they did was read out a lot of params (like avatar height, count of attachments (jewelry), body weight and many more) and calculate if your was male or female.

if you can find enough params and now how to calculate you can guess if the person is male or female (what i remember they told that they had about 20 params but didn't tell which ones except the above ones).

but even when you can make this script you always need a kind of override (dialog menu?)
because you never will be 100% certain.

I'm pretty sure that you can't get things like attachment count in a script.