Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This is a big deal. I’ll get into what it means and what some of the possibilities are.
For years Second Life™ users have been asking for more bones. That would let users make avatars with tails that are easily animated. Or with more than 4 arm-leg appendages. We will be able to have a centaur with 4 legs, two arms, and a tail, something that is way complicated now and pretty lame. Or a spider with 8 legs.
Today we have a post from the Lab about changes to the SL Avatar. See: Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton.
What are the changes?
Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.
On my long ago first day in Second Life™ I was trying to figure out why I waddled and other females swayed when walking. It didn’t take long for me to learn about Animation Overriders, AO’s. I used ZHOA and then ZHOA II during most of my time in SL. But, there have been advances in AO tech since the ZHAO units were developed. Now we have another advance. I’ll take a look at it and whether it is worth the effort to change to a newer AKEYO NITRO AO. My review follows.
I don’t know when ZHAO first appeared. I found it 2008 when I first went looking for an AO. AO’s improved as the Linden Scripting Language improved. The Mono scripts reduced the memory load, but did little else to change how AO’s worked or their features.
I think most Second LifeTM modelers are looking for ways to reduce polygon count and still have good deformation for animations. his tip should help.
At the Second Life™ Developers’ meeting a question came up about whether it would be possible to sell experiences, the kind made with the new Advanced Experience Tools. There was discussion about the idea at the TPD meeting.
The answer is: it has been discussed within the Lab, they would like for that to be possible, it is a complex add, and currently no one is working on it. So, a ‘NO’, but with hope. I would say, very very little hope. It is high hanging fruit.
What about grid wide experiences? The Lab is waiting to see how the land-based experiences go. There are several hundred experiences in the system. Not all of them are in use or that have scripts associated with them. So, it is a bit early to decide how well Experiences is going to be adopted by users.
As the Lab learns more about the feature’s popularity and how people use it, at some point they’ll decide if adding grid-wide experiences is worth the effort.
Gaia Clary is asking what they concentrate their efforts on in regard to the AvaStar program. See: Decide about the Future of Avastar and vote for your choice.
