Improving avatar animations

I’ve never liked Animation Overriders, just to stop myself from walking like a drunk duck, I had to go spend ages looking for one of those AO’s, spend money (as a Dutch person, I hate that), and then I had to fine tune it, remember to activate it all the time, deactivate it for certain objects, I had to walk around with some ugly button on my screen, etc, etc.

And being someone who wants her avatar to look as much like her RL me as possible, I wanted an AO that made me walk like a grumpy, tired 41 year old woman, not some sexy catwalk model.
There isn’t much of a market for AO’s like that.
In SL you’re eather a 20 something wild young thing, or a 90 year old granny.

Anyway, now that LL has recently changed the skeleton of our avatars to work better with the new mesh clothes that actually adjust to your body in stead of us having to adjust our bodies to the clothes, I was wondering if perhaps it was about time they also updated our custom animations.

I don’t know how old the custom animations are, I’ve been here for about 5 years now and I don’t remember them changing.
Our regular walk and especially our run, are rather silly.
I think it would be relatively easy to give our avatars some decent animations, there are enough very talented animators in SL who could do a great job here.
We don’t need much, just a more realistic and normal male and female walk, run and sit.
This way we also don’t kill the AO market, most AO’s offer a lot more options and most people in SL will still want to buy an AO.

But especially the penniless noobs will be a lot happier and us oldtimers will be less annoyed whenever we turn our AO off to cut down on lag.

I think this is a small job that could make a lot of people very happy.

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Fitting mesh clothes coming to SL!

This is great news and an improvement many people have been desperately waiting for for a long time.

Linden Lab announced that they are releasing the Fitted Mesh project viewer.

The idea is that this will allow mesh clothes to fit to your body in stead of having to fit your body to the clothes.

I am not that much into fashion and gladly wear the same virtual outfit every day for months.

But my avatar is based on me in RL and I am not a Barbie or catwalk model, so unfortunately every 1920s outfit I’ve bought would not fit me unless I was willing to change my body and as I spend all my time roleplaying, I don’t suddenly want to look completely different.

Also a much thinner avatar just wouldn’t be me.

So for the last couple of years I’ve been avoiding mesh clothes, but now it seems they may even fit me.

This viewer is experimental, so it could still be a little while before this goes grid wide, also it seems it will only work on clothes specially made to work with this system.

So don’t expect to suddenly be able to fit into all your mesh clothes.

But it is coming!

If you’re interested in the technical details, want to see some screenshots and read about how it all works, follow this link to the excellent article by Inara Pey on her blog here.

More Second Life improvements

Due to computer issues I managed to completely miss this latest news from Linden Lab about more improvements!

It seems like they have been doing a lot of good work fixing some of the issues people have been experiencing for a long time.

These improvements promise a much faster and more pleasant experience in SL.

And without wanting to sound grateful; About time!

Technically this does not improve the SL experience much but because the things you see close to you rez faster, it will feel like things have improved a lot.

After all, you won’t notice that a tree on the other side of the region is not rezzing till you actually get there and by that time, it has of course rezzed.

A huge improvement is also that regions you visit a lot can be stored in your cache and kept there, on your computer at home.

This means that those sims rez even faster.

Extra handy for people like me who spend 99% of their time in the same place.

But there is also bad news, apparently this was the final phase of the series of improvements planned by Linden Lab.

I think that most of us in SL would like to see this recent wave of advancements continue!

There is still so much to do.

For starters I’d like to be able to actually wear mesh clothes, 2 years after mesh was introduced in SL they still don’t work if your avatar isn’t shaped like Barbie.

Anyway, progress is good and I can’t wait to see these improvements.

Unfortunately the new viewer doesn’t work for macbooks with old operating systems like mine.

Here is the LL video introducing the improvements, in case you’ve missed it;