Cloud Party™, the other virtual world, announced yesterday the development team has released a new feature: animated attachments, think avatar wings and tails. I suppose one could use the attachments for ears too.
The team warns against animating faces as they are working on facial customization.
Without digging into how they work I can’t say much. But, the new attachments apparently get passed emote information. They have a picture of wings drooping as the avatar slimps in response to the ‘sigh’ emote.
Cloud party is steadily moving ahead. Last week, or a couple, they released new ‘regions’. The land choices in Cloud Party now go beyond just sky-islands.
Slowly, or quickly – depending on your perspective, Cloud Party is getting all the features of Second Life™
On content creation, I’d say Cloud Party is far ahead of Second Life and getting even further away.
This animated attachments feature is unlike anything that exists in Second Life. For example, if one wanted a tail in Second Life that’s “animated”, there’s two options
1. Mark the tail prim (mesh and sculpties needn’t apply) as a flexi and play around with physics parameters.
2. Offset and repurpose default avatar bones in something like Avastar into a tail shape and rig a tail mesh to them. But this breaks the original purpose of whatever bones, and requires tail animations for bones that were for entirely other different parts of the body.
With Cloud Party’s animated attachment feature, the default avatar skeleton (or custom skeletons) can have bones appended to them for things like tails,m and store their own animations for idling, walking, running, etc. without any hackery.
That said Cloud Party isn’t catching up to Second Life fast enough in areas where it is actually deficient. Like social tools (vicinity based chat, groups and all group functionality), economy (cash out still disabled, trading Cloud Coins impossible), and policy (is adult content allowed? blood? gore? etc.)
For Cloud Party to be a success with Second Life users, it isn’t enough that the content creation tools are amazing and that its a ton more affordable. It has to become a drag and drop replacement for entire communities. Right now it’s not that.
They seem to be following the Blue Mars path.
I would add some more options on make tails: LSL -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SVIe-kLAVo
And the laggy keyframing
Now THAT is an impressive tail.