Avatar sex detection.

Actually, I haven't seen much intolerance here, and where there was, the flames have been stoked by those quick to cry intolerance, and some flames were only sparked by those so quick to imagine it where there was none.

I think the problem with making a clean solution is partly due to those who need their gender choice to be a statement, but I'm far too jaded to care; I've done it all once and sometimes twice, and I find nothing more sexually perverse than politicizing sex.

Now I understand Yumi's point about selecting a female base shape for aesthetic purposes without necessarily indentifing oneself as female, but someone who chooses to complicate gender detection simply needs to accept complications right back.

Yes, you may be who you want and express it in your physical appearance, but that comes with consequence in SL same as in RL, so you might as well suck it up and get on with your life, without owing explanations to anyone for who you are. And show tolerance to the majority for being who they are, without getting defensive.

I certainly had no intention of flaming or any such thing and have used considered and polite language. I am a bit defensive of my rights, virtual or otherwise, it’s my experience that you have to be.

I just think “confused sexuality” is a poor choice of words. The term “confused” carries a distinctly negative connotation, and “sexuality” describes behavior, not anatomy or biology. Thus I thought you considered all things not strictly M/F to be “confused sexuality”. (We were discussing the entire segment of the population that would be harmed by arbitrarily assigning gender based on shape.)

Given the description of “confused sexuality” which you gave I believe “ambiguous gender” would be a better description. It’s a matter of semantics, though semantics are considerably underappreciated.

I will not argue for the inclusion of endless permutations of identifiers… merely for the ability at any given moment to identify myself as male or female, or to alternatively opt out of identification altogether. After all, if I choose not to disclose it, then my gender is none of your business.

And for the record, none of this discussion has anything to do with the gender of the person behind an account. LL has granted that particular an immutable right to privacy, even stating that it is a TOS breach to reveal someone’s private information, including gender, against their will. But, that’s not the issue.

The issue is simple, despite all this talk. Determining gender based on shape is not proper or adequate without allowing people to opt out. This is in part due to privacy issues. (How AV’s look and how they identify themselves can clearly be incongruous.) It is also due to flat out inaccuracies such as with child AV’s (which are nearly all female shapes) and other specialty, cross gender, or androgynous AV’s.

Additionally, asking to be able to select one’s gender as [Male, Female, or Unspecified] rather than having the arbitrary shape gender forced upon us is not an unreasonable request. Three user selected genders is adequate for all needs, and would probably be even easier to implement than getting the gender from the shape since it would be tied to the AV rather than something worn. (As previously mentioned, LSL doesn’t access any of the worn items.)

Facts.
1. LL has limited time.
2. This can be implemented by having everyone wear a object.

The only thing I see preventing it is two things.
1. The Wiki is down and thus it's hard to create a protocol page.
2. How can people trust scripts given to them.

We need a "No-modify but viewable" option for open source items so that we can give out the script without bad people modifying it.

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We have to pick our battles carefully.
Gender and other info sharing is one thing we have to solve ourselves.

I would like to see a generic info sharing device that could store all sorts of cookies indicating Gender, Species, RP Age, RP strength, RP armor, RP poverty, sickness, and death.

The problem with no-mod but viewable script is that anyone can still copy-paste, distort, and claim authorship. That's a risk of open source that is best mitigated by publishing as far and wide and conspicuously as possible, so that if someone does it, it'll be obvious that it's a hack away from what was intended by the release.

Doradiia, this subject came on the Scripters of Second Life group and it was squashed when we all had to realize this it just wasn't a topic for a scripting forum in any medium. We're more interested in how things function than how ppl feel about them or what they mean by it. We just don't care if genders are boolean or which one is called FALSE or which one is called TRUE, and if you wanted to enumerate them as XX, XY, and X?, we also don't care, as long as the query is possible as a reference for our script.

Doradiia, do you want to be addressed as she, he or it? That's what it comes down to. Until English becomes a completely gender-neutral language you have to chose one that you feel most comfortable with. Or do you like being referred to as "they"?

Actually, it's even simpler than that. All that matters is the one point in runtime where the script makes the check, and you can make any and all choices you like before and after. You may feel the need to explain yourself to people around you, but the script isn't going to listen. If you're going to waffle on that one point, then no script is going to be well designed for you.

The only point of bringing it up is to see to it that whether it get's implemented by LL or by coders that we be inclusive and have an opt out gender. I don't care if it's [Y, N, or NA] or what either, just so long as there is a symbolic opt out. If it comes via LL then it's very possible this could get rammed down people's throats who don't want to be identified by the abitrary gender of their shape. If it comes from the community then people can simply not use the device to opt out, but that also means they'll not benefit from it.

Particularly if this is community driven, there is no reason to disenfranchise anyone. Allow people to choose their gender, and to opt out of gender identification if they want to. This adds no significant coding or social challenges, but some people seem opposed to it in principle.

BTW, personally the only problem I have with any of this is that I'm in a F/F relationship and I don't want scripts automatically telling me how to sit based on my gender without any options. But I happen to know several people who would be even more affected than me, particularly the kids like my little brother who are all forced to wear female shapes.

Yes it is true that scripts do not care for social issues, but scripters should. How you code your scripts can be done in a responcible, and inclusive manner at very little cost to you... so why not do it? That's the reason I felt it important to post here. And btw I'm 100% behind the standardized AV info protocol initiative. BTW Open source is definately the way to go with it. For one, the scripts behind it don't need to be standardized, it's the protocol itself that does. There are soooo many uses for it I say we let the community decide how to use it and code for it.

For example, I bet people would like to be able to code versions that could read the parameters off of a notecard and have the active notecard switched, like the franimation AO for their different AV's. That would be perfect for people who are part time furries, or change gender, or whatever....

Some people might want to script it so that it limits dynamically limits the info given based on who/what is asking.

BTW I think we should strive to standardize most of the variables we would like for it to store, such as gender, but not require it. Because we should allow the users to define how they use it, even up to and including defining their own variables.

ect... ect... We need not have one single script, we just need to clearly define the protocol for interacting with it and have at least one working version and then we just support scripters in making their own versions and extending the protocol.

hmm... In this event the gender thing might even be simpler. With the possibility of any variable not being defined in any given user's item we would want to script it with a generic "undefined" responce when it can't find a given variable, thus letting the asker know that the query was heard, even though there was no data to be returned.

So then you can define gender as purely [M, F] and simply null it out to opt out of identification. (Though an explicit undefined gender might be more user friendly.)

Is there a topic somewhere for the discussion of such a protocol?

The wiki is the best place to document protocols and sample code.

Wwe need a page where we can list commonly used channel numbers.

For this we need a protocol page and some sample code.

There is a question about page naming and putting scripts in the Wiki, but I feel it's better as long as we keep the edit list short or rebuild the page if it gets a lot of history or comments.

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As for implementing it, I would make it an invisible small cube that you attach to some open attachment point.

This way you can place it in with your Avitar pieces and thus it would be swapped out when you change.

The script could still use a note card, but it would use the inventory change event to trigger reading it.

I really don't see the point nor why it matters, I mean if you're overly concerned about how you sit on a poseball in a video game...*shrug*

I'm not saying it would be a bad thing to be able to identify yourself, I see it more of a "Who gives a..." topic

....but then again I do not practice the main forms of entertainment in SL, nor do I identify a gender in any way except for the shape of my AV....

I'd more prefer a tag that says "I -do- or -do not- participate in pixilated relationships"

I think that would have more of a purpose than a flag for scripts that only certain aspects of the game's content creators would really make use of as there are already ways to choose which gender's animation you want to use....just choose the appropriate poseball *shrug* I'd rather just have options coded into the script to allow you to change those to suit your own need so you don't have to go change a flag...makes more sense that way.

.....plus the relationship flag might get the silly kids that are joining en-masse nowadays to leave me the hell alone and quit hitting on me while I'm building or scripting on my latest starship

Both men and women avatars have different default walk animations, which are detectable with llGetAnimationList(). If your sit script has a sensor running that keeps track of the av's within range and assigns them a sex when it detects a walk animation, it can automatically choose the correct animation as you are suggesting. When a person leaves the range, you can also delete his entry so that your database only ever holds the sex for people within 20m or so ^_^ Of course, if you could not detect a walk animation before they sit (such as they are using an AO or like to run everywhere) you could simply offer the dialog box.

Now whether you should do this or not is a different matter, as it does limit the options that users have, and also contributes more lag than a single sit-animation script probably should (to be fair however, the majority of script lag comes from the script simply existing, rather than what it actually does)

-Kokiri

Heard that about the script lag, which is one reason I'd prefer to see LL implement it on their side. It may be a trivial amount of cycles added, but those trivial amounts add up when you have this feature that would see so much usage.

That would almost have been an elegant solution if users didn't complicate it through the customizations the very platform encourages...but it does beg the question of why LL would default a gender walk based on gender shape. Perhaps it's not so unreasonable an assumption.

The reasons behind different animations based on shape aren't so mysterious. The shapes have disproportionate skeletons.

Aside from that, yeah LL probably had no idea where things would go from there. They just wanted a user friendly way of letting new people setup their AV's and still offer a lot of customization. But it's still just art assets, and not a declaration of gender. LL quite correctly doesn't require the user to declare much of anything other than a very defined name.

LL's original intent isn't particularly relevant anyway. They purposefully built SL to be defined by it's users. I doubt prim hair was an intended use of prim attachments, or any number of other things. We're even using invis prims which is technically something of a bug, but it's darned useful.

AvatarSex is a variable in the debug console, under the Client menu. Why can't this be readable from scripts? People could pick numbers to arbitrarily enumerate any gender configurations, and settle on a convention. This would beat pinging ppl's genitals with wasteful listener scripts.

SAD DAY... I thought that the moment I read the initial question only to have you post it first

I'd actually like to see the "Male/Female" toggle in the avatar design tool turned into a slider.Where we can "masculinize" or "feminize" a mesh, morphing from the male avatar to the female. I'd also like ALL the options on the avatar.. facial hair, breasts, etc.

But then, I'd also like a bit more of a "poser like" ability to tune individual body parts (upper arms, ankles, etc.)

It would be quite nice to be able to make boyish girls and girlish boys.

No, because there is no known set of values, as llGetSpecies() has no known set of values (human, dragon, hedgehog, robot...)

Frankly, pink and blue balls (or similar) are the best option because they give the user the option to choose their role regardless of their avatar's properties. And it's a well-understood convention.

If you make any assumptions about the role a person wants to play based on attributes of the avatar, you will be making an overgeneralization, and some folks will not get what they want.