Felicia Silversmith
Appliers are the scripts that allow you to wear clothes over mesh attachments. Those using Tangos and Phat Azz and similar attachments know about appliers.
The problem with appliers is many of the creators of mesh attachments are using their own applier, a custom script they developed. If you make system clothes via the clothing templates, you get a template from the mesh attachment maker and make textures for the attachment. It then looks like your clothes are fitting over the attachment.
The problem is everybody seems to be making their own scripts. The result is there are incompatibilities in how appliers work and how to make textures for the attachments. A big peoblem for designers is in knowing which face number is to be used for a texture. Is face #1 the breasts or butt?
There is resistance to making the Applier scripts open source. The scripts change the textures by sending a message on a hidden chat channel. If griefers knew the channel, they would mess with your clothes.
Another problem foreseen is someone creating a general purpose, but no mod script, to give out for free that harvests avatar information. The harvester would know the avatar is into buying mesh attachments and thus the owner would get great targeted marketing information.
Thus the idea is to use a communication encryption process that can be open source rather than a channel obfuscation technique.
An objection to open source is that anyone can them make a copy of the script and mod it to harvest texture UUID’s. It would then be a way to steal textures for use by other sellers that did not buy them.
I don’t see a good all around solution. Dishonest and sick people make it hard to create a simple solution.
In the SL Forum Felicia Silversmith is proposing a standard for appliers. See: Mesh Body Parts Standard (MBPS). I’m not recommending this standard, but I do think some standard would make mesh attachments with appliers more popular. Add your ideas to the thread and discuss the possible problems and benefits. This might start designers moving toward a standard.
There is script published in the thread. It is missing the channel calculation part.
Let me know if you know of a better standard or way to handle the Applier process.
You can learn more here:
Personally, I think just having a standard for how faces are used and which textures goes where would be a big help. But, I don’t expect this to be worked out any time soon. There is just too much diversity, which while chaotic is a good thing.
If the applier works by sending a chat message on a secret channel then surely the attachment must contain a script to receive and act on that message? And surely both the applier and the attachment are owned by the same person?
So it becomes trivial to script a check that the message is coming from an object owned by the same person as the attachment by comparing the results of llGetOwner () and llGetOwnerKey (listen_id), where listen_id is the id parameter supplied by the listen event.
The objection to using an open source script that’s been tampered with could be overcome by warning users not to use applier scripts that aren’t full permission. Yes, not everybody would know how to examine a script for dodgy code, but with proprietary no modify scripts no one at all can examine them.
Then again, I may be missing something obvious.
The reason for the standard is that it was hoped everyone would make their items compatible with a standardized open source version of the script. In that case the send and receiving scripts might not be owned by the same person. But, I don’t know any easy way to make that work without the possibility for abuse.