SLinking around the grid...

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, Gabriele Graves said:

BTW I'm glad you finally admit that masks are a pain.  I don't find my alpha HUD a pain after all these years.  Click, click, click and I'm done for pretty much everything.

 

There are two fundamentally different ways of getting dressed in Second Life.

One way is to have a single avatar which you dress in an a la carte fashion each time you get dressed. If you dress yourself this way you'll prefer using an alpha HUD.

The other way is to set up outfits with pre-selected coordinating items and swap between them using the "Outfit" panel. If you dress yourself this way you'll want to slam an alpha-hud body against the wall until it shatters into its hundreds of constituent pieces, which you'll soon regret as you won't be able to go barefoot because you'll be stepping on overlooked sharp bits* prefer using worn alphas.

 

________

*I broke a plate a couple days before Thanksgiving and I'm a little cranky.

 

[Qie Niangao]

Just a reminder that alpha masks were not a pain at all, back when we used them for the system avatar and every mesh clothing creator included the necessary alpha mask. And back then mesh clothing wasn't so smoothly fitted to the body so an alpha mask was pretty mandatory. Adding that mask from the same product folder as the clothing was much easier than what we later learned to do with the kludgy alpha-cut HUDs needed to make pre-BOM mesh bodies work.

Those HUDs turned out to be aggravating enough that the "auto-alpha" script was invented—but the body scripts are so primitive that removing one auto-alpha item is apt to switch off some alpha set by another still-worn item, and many clothing items are no-mod so it's impossible to remove their embedded auto-alpha scripts. Give me alpha masks any day—just don't make me hunt for them or make them myself (although god knows I've done plenty of that).

The best thing about the properly BOM-updated Jake body is that it comes with a modifiable version, so I can strip out all its scripts, thereby defeating auto-alpha for all clothing that tries to use it. 

Slink Redux—although still stupidly, superstitiously no-mod—doesn't have the auto-alpha mess. But that turned out to be a mistake: Because clothing creators didn't need to bundle pre-made alpha masks with their products as they did for system avatars, most didn't bother, and as a result folks never re-learned the easy alpha-mask way because they couldn't rely on it being easy.

[Blaise Glendevon]

I'm not going back to individually cobbling together alpha layers and hoping designers make them and not clip. Nah. 

[Theresa Tennyson]

23 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

I'm not going back to individually cobbling together alpha layers and hoping designers make them and not clip. Nah. 

No;  you're going to continue to individually cobble together small chunks of transparency and hope they correspond to what you're wearing.

[Blaise Glendevon]

37 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

No;  you're going to continue to individually cobble together small chunks of transparency and hope they correspond to what you're wearing.

It works, too! 

[Gabriele Graves]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Just a reminder that alpha masks were not a pain at all, back when we used them for the system avatar.

Yeah they were, there was just no alternative.

[Gabriele Graves]

43 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

No;  you're going to continue to individually cobble together small chunks of transparency and hope they correspond to what you're wearing.

I'm going to be able to have differently alpha'd arms too.

[SodaGnome]

I got some slink black ballet flats for my female avatar.  I loved those shoes. So much more comfortable than high heals. 

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

30 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

It works, too! 

Theresa Tennyson nods and smiles.

Of course it does.

[Gabriele Graves]

2 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

There are two fundamentally different ways of getting dressed in Second Life.

One way is to have a single avatar which you dress in an a la carte fashion each time you get dressed. If you dress yourself this way you'll prefer using an alpha HUD.

The other way is to set up outfits with pre-selected coordinating items and swap between them using the "Outfit" panel. If you dress yourself this way you'll want to slam an alpha-hud body against the wall until it shatters into its hundreds of constituent pieces, which you'll soon regret as you won't be able to go barefoot because you'll be stepping on overlooked sharp bits* prefer using worn alphas.

 

________

*I broke a plate a couple days before Thanksgiving and I'm a little cranky.

 

Strange because I also dress this way some of the time but somehow a couple of extra clicks that I might sometimes need after I've changed outfits doesn't make me feel the way you do.  It would be even stranger if an allegedly more painful process was the one I preferred.  Perhaps it's just a symptom of your crankiness. Hopefully it will pass soon.

[Theresa Tennyson]

35 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Strange because I also dress this way some of the time but somehow a couple of extra clicks that I might sometimes need after I've changed outfits doesn't make me feel the way you do.  It would be even stranger if an allegedly more painful process was the one I preferred.  Perhaps it's just a symptom of your crankiness. Hopefully it will pass soon.

Is it strange that *I* prefer an "allegedly more painful process"?

I wouldn't mind alpha cut systems so much if I could simply ignore them, the way you can ignore alpha wearables. What makes me cranky is that I can't. Even if I set up an avatar so that I shouldn't need to use a HUD at all (most of my Slink-bodied avatars don't use the full HUD; I can do everything I need with a single-prim HUD that I wrote myself,) I generally need to use the HUD for non-Slink bodies because a piece of clothing does some fool thing that I never asked for.
 

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Theresa Tennyson nods and smiles.

Of course it does.

Rowan Amore rolls her eyes.

99.9% of the time, does for me, too.  Options are always better than no options in my opinion and most other people's.  

Edited November 27, 2022 by Rowan Amore

[Gabriele Graves]

3 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Is it strange that *I* prefer an "allegedly more painful process"?
 

Why yes, yes it is.

[Lindal Kidd]

Oh, I absolutely love it when clothing comes with a custom alpha mask! It's by far the easiest way.

Maitreya invented this "save stick" thing that supposedly saves your alpha cuts for a particular outfit. I try to remember to use them, but it's several extra steps. 1) rez a blank one on the ground 2) re-name it, 3) Take it back into inventory, 4) add it to the screen. Then get dressed, set up alpha cuts. When done, 5) Save All to save the body's settings to the save stick. Then just save the on-screen save stick along with the rest of your new Outfit.  It works, but bleah.

 

[Gabriele Graves]

46 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Oh, I absolutely love it when clothing comes with a custom alpha mask! It's by far the easiest way.

Maitreya invented this "save stick" thing that supposedly saves your alpha cuts for a particular outfit. I try to remember to use them, but it's several extra steps. 1) rez a blank one on the ground 2) re-name it, 3) Take it back into inventory, 4) add it to the screen. Then get dressed, set up alpha cuts. When done, 5) Save All to save the body's settings to the save stick. Then just save the on-screen save stick along with the rest of your new Outfit.  It works, but bleah.

 

That's not an apples-to-apples comparison though.  An apples-to-apples comparison is that either the clothing comes with autohide built-in or the vendor includes an autohide object to wear.  In this comparison the actions needed are the same, you add them.

The apples-to-apples comparison with making an autohide save stick yourself is to make the alpha mask asset yourself including texture.
 

[Lindal Kidd]

I wasn't making a comparison...my stream of consciousness writing got away from me.

I was making one statement (I love custom alphas), and then veered off into how Maitreya jury rigged a system for saving alpha cut settings.

The save stick system is sort of comparable to fishing around in a big list of pre-made alpha masks to find a set that works with your clothes, and saving those with your outfit.

[Qie Niangao]

Maybe it's because I'm using male bodies and we always get the worst of everything, but auto-hide just doesn't work right in any of the bodies me and my miserable alts try to use. It's not that they fail to hide areas, but that when an auto-hide attachment is removed, areas are revealed that were hidden by both that and other auto-hide attachments. It's as if the body's scripts are too stupid to remember that an area is hidden in service of multiple attachments. (A dynamic memory allocation analogy: it would be like GC-ing without tracking references.)

I daresay the majority of contributors to the scripting forum could implement an algorithm to do this right, so there should be bodies out there that do. So maybe it's just a bug not yet fixed in the bodies I have. (Off the top of my head, I'd query the attachments' scripts for a new census of should-be-alpha areas rather than the less-scalable approach of the body remembering all the current attachments that want an area hidden. Anybody know if a mesh body creator open-sourced their attachment auto-hide scripts?)

Even if this were fixed, though, I still find alpha cuts a primitive way to deal with the problem. Clicky, clicky, clicky and then maybe I've found an adequate representation of what should and shouldn't be hidden, or maybe the cuts are just in the wrong places to hide and expose areas needed for this item of clothing. So maybe more skilled attention is paid to fitting female clothing, compared to (many reputable brands of) male clothes, hence maybe females rarely encounter this other limitation of alpha cuts.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

I daresay the majority of contributors to the scripting forum could implement an algorithm to do this right

The simplest solution would probably be to store the state of all the sections as a bit field for each attachment/garment and have the mesh body/HUD store all those values in an array, then whenever you add or remove an item the body can perform a bitwise operation to combine the remaining values and calculate which sections should remain hidden and which should be made visible.

[Lindal Kidd]

3 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The simplest solution would probably be to store the state of all the sections as a bit field for each attachment/garment and have the mesh body/HUD store all those values in an array, then whenever you add or remove an item the body can perform a bitwise operation to combine the remaining values and calculate which sections should remain hidden and which should be made visible.

...reads the above and begins sobbing miserably.

"Now I need a degree in computer science to get dressed!"

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

4 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

...reads the above and begins sobbing miserably.

"Now I need a degree in computer science to get dressed!"

It's a lot less complex than it sounds (plus I'm pretty sure you could get a script to do the tricky "math" part so you'd just have to deal with the "what shall I wear today?" part of the equation).  

[Katherine Heartsong]

Autohide to me is awesome!

When it adds an extra alpha out right above the knee unnecessarily for a dress, it's a tiny pain.

When it FAILS TO TURN BACK OFF when the clothing item is properly removed (and there are too many of these) .. it's a HUGE pain.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[Gabriele Graves]

5 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Autohide to me is awesome!

When it adds an extra alpha out right above the knee unnecessarily for a dress, it's a tiny pain.

When it FAILS TO TURN BACK OFF when the clothing item is properly removed (and there are too many of these) .. it's a HUGE pain.

If that's Maitreya then the scripts are out of date in the product and the vendor should update them to the latest which many don't and that's on them for degrading your experience with their product.

It's a handful of clicks to get everything back to normal before you put on something else.   It's way over the top to call it "a HUGE pain" in my opinion.  It's a minor annoyance at its very worse.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Katherine Heartsong]

*sigh*

[Theresa Tennyson]

On 11/27/2022 at 1:04 PM, Gabriele Graves said:

 

BTW I'm glad you finally admit that masks are a pain.  I don't find my alpha HUD a pain after all these years.  Click, click, click and I'm done for pretty much everything.

 

That's for you. Now I'd be super-interested in seeing the certification you apparently have to determine what is a pain and what isn't for somebody else.

[Gabriele Graves]

1 minute ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

That's for you. Now I'd be super-interested in seeing the certification you apparently have to determine what is a pain and what isn't for somebody else.

Show me the certification for all the things you have asserted over the years first.

Oh and if you read carefully you would see that I put "I don't find my alpha HUD a pain".  It wasn't a statement about anyone else.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Gabriele Graves