Whatever happened to Avatar Physics?

[Innula Zenovka]

Back in September, some of us were interested to learn that avatar physics wearables were apparently being tested in V2, so you could have an invisible layer,  worn as clothing, that controlled the jiggle of parts of your anatomy.    This seemed to me a far bettter way of doing it than the method used by many TPVs.

Anyone know what happened to it?   Is it still being developed?

[leliel Mirihi]

All I know is that we stopped hearing about it around the same time LL announced the teen grid merge.

[Rin Tae]

It is one of the things that seem to have been forgotten like script limits. And I guess mesh is still on the agenda only becasue so many people are poking and asking about it and refuse to give up even when it is beeing promised like since a year now.

So considering all that has happened I think it is safe to assume that avatar physics wont come into existence anytime soon (we got webprofiles instead *insert sarcastic 'woot' gesture here*). However they might be tied into the work that is being done on the mesh import but it is at this point all speculation.

It would be great for LL to be a bit more open about what they are working on and planning.

[Dana Hickman]

For me personally, this is one of the very few new things LL had been working on that I really cared about and that raised my enthusiasm level, and I'm completely disappointed that nothing at all has become of it. Another one is the puppeteering project that they back-burnered, cancelled, then removed the source code from the WIKI repository. BOTH of these made use of avatar physics, and both have also been demoed and shown working( !!! ), yet still there's nothing and I have little hope of ever seeing them. It's quite disheartening, and I think I'd rather have not known these projects ever existed, because now I have much less faith that any future changes from LL will be anything meaningful at all to me personally... since they already killed the only meaningful projects I personally cared about.

..but we'll have Facebook for everyone !!!     *dull monotone yay*

[Danny Nolan]

Yeah ... I thought LL was going to try and one up me? Tsk tsk. *Puts crown back on*.

 

JK haha. But anyway, I was actually hoping they would put this out. I did play around with their avatar physics client, and it was a great start. The wearable portion of it was a good idea. Letting individiual people decide how they wanted their avatar to animate (or at all) was something I couldn't come up with. And, factoring in LOD, and having an actual physics level slider was pretty ace, too. I just had too limited of knowledge with the engine and C++. And their math seemed more accurate.

It was, however, fairly buggy. And the code hasn't been touched for a pretty long time now. So I'm sure it's dead in the water by now. This company seems to have a knack for starting something and not actually finishing it. I believe their plan was to expand it to all kinds of different "parts" to animate .. but we know what the most important one is. And why not just release it with only one part, and then do the rest of them later. That'd be better than just never releasing it at all imo.

[Innula Zenovka]

Thanks, Danny.  Looks like your crown is safe for a while yet, as you say.  

I'd had a look at the jira before posting to see if there was any news there, and formed the impression that fully and properly implementing the idea had run into considerable technical problems, so I guess it may well be that someone's decided either it's not worth doing or that they'll do it later.   It's a shame, cos their idea making it a wearable so I can decide how I want to be animated according to what else I'm wearing seemed a really good one.

In the meantime, any chance of a V2 implementation of your method for Firestorm?

[Danny Nolan]

I feel like any problems they could have encountered, though, could have been fixed or worked around. The only thing I can think of is .. just some of the people who would feel that it would be distastful for LL to implement it? When I did it, the vote was pretty overwhelming, yes, but of course, there was always those who didn't agree to it. Such is life.

 

And physics for Firestorm is being discussed . Keep an eye out. 

[Innula Zenovka]

I'm not sure it's right to read too much into LL's starting to develop something and then losing interest or deciding it's too difficult right now or finding a new distraction.   I mean, they've got a track record for that sort of thing -- Windlight would be a good example of a project they started to implement and in which they then lost interest for ages, and script limits -- which I am grudging prepared to concede are probably more important than avatar physics -- seem to have run into the sand, rather.  

It may be that the idea got vetoed as "distasteful" but Occam's Razor suggests that it's rash to attribute something to LL's conscious and coordinated policy-making that can equally well be explained by understaffing and a short corporate attention span.

Great news about the avatar physics and FireStorm;  I really hope it materializes.

[Danny Nolan]

Yeah idk it's tough to know LL's inner workings. I'm just going off their history. A lot of projects started, not a lot finished; at least entirely. I'm not trying to trash talk them, I'm just saying that's probably what will happen with their avatar physics.

But yeah, hopefully firestorm will have my code in soon. I've been using 2.0 since it came out, and phoenix whever I create anything. Haha. So it'll be nice to have multiple clothing layers, and phoenix's features all in one package.

[Innula Zenovka]

Oh, my!  According to Hitomi Tiponi, who generally knows what's what in the V2 development world, we can expect "Bouncing Breasts, Belly and Butt arriving in Viewer 2 soon"

She writes,

The latest Snowstorm development downloads have these avatar physics settings in them. Expect an exodus to Viewer 2 and Viewer2-based TPVs to really start now!

[leliel Mirihi]

I posted that here yesterday. I guess most people have me muted.

[Innula Zenovka]

 

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leliel Mirihi wrote:

I posted that here yesterday. I guess most people have me muted.

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ETA -- Oops.. I see what you mean. I saw the news over at SLU, which I look at far more frequently than I do these forums, and updated my thread without bothering to see if it had been posted elsewhere.

Sorry.

........................................

 

How odd.  It's not showing for me, and neither did it come through on the rss feed I have for this thread.  All I can see is your original reply, of March 23,  to my post and this one.

[leliel Mirihi]

I wasn't really referring to you in particular. I just seemed like no one noticed my thread even accounting for how slow it is here.