Features you want in the viewer that are way to complicated so will never happen.

[Conifer Dada]

22 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Shapes: add a whole bunch of new sliders to shapes that can also include bone rotation, individual bone control etc for much greater control of avatar shape. This one doesn't seem so complicated and could even be a retrofit, maybe include the extra controls under an 'advanced' tickbox or something and just bolt it on top of the existing shape system for those who want to use it.

I very much agree with this. This would be useful whether you use as classic or mesh avatar. Here are some new slider ideas that I can think of.

Avatar Scale - changes avatar size without altering any proportions.

Knee Height - moves the knees up or down the legs. 

Foot Rotation - so your feet can point outwards or inwards.

Neck Angle - upright neck or angled forwards

Shoulder Shape - 'up and square' or 'down and rounded'

Arm Angle - at-rest angle for arms can be moved outwards - useful if you have a fat avatar.

[Judas Shuffle]

Would be nice to install the various avatars into the edit appearence thing, so they can have all their own custom setups and sliders instead of a hud.

[Katherine Heartsong]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Extra water around the edges of the continents, especially Sansara.

This. There is no reason at all you should have to maneuver your sailboat along a 16m strip of open water to sail along the edges of any continent because some land owner is jutting their house and docks as far out as they can without embarrassing themselves and blocking passage fully (and there are enough of those types too). Every continent edge should have a full one sim open water Linden sim to sail though easily. This drives me nuts sailing long distances, the amount of squeaking through spaces I have to do.

[Katherine Heartsong]

6 hours ago, animats said:

We might get something else instead - AI tools to do the job.

There are AI tools that can make an avatar from a few still pictures. And there are AI tools that can make good still pictures from a text prompt.

"Victorian factory girl with dark dress and white apron." Generated by AnimeGenius in "realistic" mode, using GPT-4. Test for a possible NPC for a project in New Babbage.

Have any creators been down this road yet?

 

This too. OMG this. And what now?

"There are AI tools that can make an avatar from a few still pictures."

Where? PM me.

[Bree Giffen]

I'd like to see flexible mesh hair but I don't think it's possible in SL.

[Randy Pole]

Folders for the favourite places toolbar please

[animats]

4 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

"There are AI tools that can make an avatar from a few still pictures."

Where?

There are quite a few systems for that now. None yet fully compatible with Second Life. That's a conversion problem, not an AI problem.

• Ready Player Me. They are not as photorealistic as SL, and that's by intent. They implemented full photorealistic avatar generation and backed off, because of the uncanny valley problem. You can get something out of Ready Player Me that you can import into Blender and work with. It won't have an SL skeleton or UVs. The system is primarily intended for games designed to use its avatars. Their business model is that they will someday sell you clothing and accessories for your avatar.
• Fotor. Can make a 3D avatar from pictures, but mostly from head pictures, not full body. Can't get logged in there; all my anti-hostile-code protections (Linux/Firefox/Privacy Badger) are breaking their login system. A bit suspicious.
• Real illusion. A pro tool, costs a few hundred dollars. Used for film and game production. Has anyone tried this?

There are many more, so many that "10 best" spam sites have lists. I'm not recommending anything specific. Creators, please try some and report back. My art skills are good enough to make buildings, but not humans.

There are also new tools for turning un-rigged models into rigged models. See AccuRig. This looks interesting, and it's free. You start with a model in A-pose (standing, arms at sides slightly out from body) or T-pose, and AccuRig rigs the model semi-automatically. Turning its output into an SL skeleton will take some programming, probably.

This whole area has become much more automated.

As SL moves more towards glTF models, it will become much easier to use standard tools to make SL content. The 3D industry seems to be going to glTF as a universal import/export format.

Caution. Read the terms of service on these systems. Some of them restrict what you can do with what you get out.

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

 

Some of the things in this list may sound like insanely hard tasks but I've worked on projects like these (it's what I do for a living - take your old messed up codebase and modernize it to handle radically different demands than those you had years ago):

 

• Actual normal movement controls like an modern action MMO. So I can right and left mouse click all I want without the entire world slamming to a brutal halt as outlines appear around something it's decided I want to edit because SL still thinks it's a CAD program and not a 'virtual world'.
  • - Build Mode ought to be a 'state' I enter into, different from 'use' mode, so that each can have their own complete UI rather than half-half split across one single UI.
• The ability have all my alts under one account with a universal set of in-viewer controls for inventory, land, contacts, etc.
  • Almost everything we see on the account page of the website could also be put into the viewer itself.
  • Because SL still doesn't get that having multiple "characters" is normal for probably the vast majority of users.
• Seamless viewer integration between inworld and MP shopping. They own Casper now right? So anything I buy through MP should show up inworld on Casper redelivery, and vice-versa. And when I am using the viewer I should be able to just "use MP" within it without popping up an old style non-responsive designed web-page.
• Media-prims feel dated. Lets get some modern React / Angular or some such code in there and make these seamlessly part of the system. I dunno what they should be like, I just know what I have doesn't feel right.
• Modern responsive design in the codebase of the viewer. The exact same viewer should be able to seamlessly work on desktop or mobile, auto-localize itself to the user's language, and have accessibility code built in so that if I am running something like a speech to text app or a text-reader it just 'handles' it. Even in a voice sim - real-time readback of the voice chat is possible - so do it.
• Mod support through an API hookup system. There's really no need for third-party viewers IF we had a proper API for hooking in Mods... Even Skyrim has a brutal ugly API that still half-way works from a decade ago. Sims 4 has a more elegant one, though it's still WTF-ugly, it works. Modern APIs could make this a thing of beauty freeing up half the time of teams like the Firestorm if they were just modding the viewer rather than patching in changes to a code-fork.
  • It'd also handle security issues like the Phoenix scandal of a decade ago if some things in the API were just black boxes or more restrictive.
• The ability to flag an avatar's maturity rating and/or maintain multiple profiles depending on maturity rating the person looking at your profile had set themselves to see.
• Auto-translate built into the viewer - any text I see should be able to auto-translate to my localization.

 

These items won't happen because:

• Big budget changes
• Change resistance. Users get very reluctant to major changes in a system. Proper leadership in branding is needed to handle that and show users the benefits of change as well as easing in the change at the right pace and with as little need to 're-learn' as possible (ie: imagine if the V3 change of a decade ago had been mostly under the hood, with controls to ease in the new UI - rather than an abrupt visual departure. It might have gone over a lot better. In fact some TPVs exist only because that was the path they took).
• The wrong implementation of some of these could be disastrous. A proper software architect to prevent that is... a big budget hire.

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by UnilWay SpiritWeaver

[AmeliaJ08]

22 minutes ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

 

Some of the things in this list may sound like insanely hard tasks but I've worked on projects like these (it's what I do for a living - take your old messed up codebase and modernize it to handle radically different demands than those you had years ago):

 

• Actual normal movement controls like an modern action MMO. So I can right and left mouse click all I want without the entire world slamming to a brutal halt as outlines appear around something it's decided I want to edit because SL still thinks it's a CAD program and not a 'virtual world'.
  • - Build Mode ought to be a 'state' I enter into, different from 'use' mode, so that each can have their own complete UI rather than half-half split across one single UI.
• The ability have all my alts under one account with a universal set of in-viewer controls for inventory, land, contacts, etc.
  • Almost everything we see on the account page of the website could also be put into the viewer itself.
  • Because SL still doesn't get that having multiple "characters" is normal for probably the vast majority of users.
• Seemless viewer integration between inworld and MP shopping. They own Casper now right? So anything I buy through MP should show up inworld on Casper redelivery, and vice-versa. And when I am using the viewer I should be able to just "use MP" within it without popping up an old style non-responsive designed web-page.
• Media-prims feel dated. Lets get some modern React / Angular or some such code in there and make these seemlessly part of the system. I dunno what they should be like, I just know what I have doesn't feel right.
• Modern responsive design in the codebase of the viewer. The exact same viewer should be able to seemlessly work on desktop or mobile, auto-localize itself to the user's language, and have accessibility code built in so that if I am running something like a speach to text app or a text-reader it just 'handles' it. Even in a voice sim - real-time readback of the voice chat is possible - so do it.
• Mod support through an API hookup system. There's really no need for third-party viewers IF we had a proper API for hooking in Mods... Even Skyrim has a brutal ugly API that still half-way works from a decade ago. Sims 4 has a more elegant one, though it's still WTF-ugly, it works. Modern APIs could make this a thing of beauty freeing up half the time of teams like the Firestorm if they were just modding the viewer rather than patching in changes to a code-fork.
  • It'd also handle security issues like the Phoenix scandal of a decade ago if some things in the API were just black boxes or more restrictive.
• The ability to flag an avatar's maturity rating and/or maintain multiple profiles depending on maturity rating the person looking at your profile had set themselves to see.
• Auto-translate built into the viewer - any text I see should be able to auto-translate to my localization.

 

 

LL: employ this person

I love lots of this. It really could be so clean and modern without breaking old things.

 

[Ginger Cloud]

Modular UI that lets us detach elements and move them to other screens etc. Yeah, I know about the "April Fools" proof of concept Firestorm did. What a tease! 

[AmeliaJ08]

11 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

I'd like to see flexible mesh hair but I don't think it's possible in SL.

I thought maybe an extension to the bento skeleton with... say 6-12 hair 'bones' would enable something like this. Obviously animations etc would have to be compatible with it to move the bones but I think most styles could probably be covered with relatively few bones that could be moved for natural hair movement while walking etc. Make them physics enabled too!

 

[animats]

11 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

I'd like to see flexible mesh hair but I don't think it's possible in SL.

Anything that drapes is hard. You need physics with collisions during display, which needs much compute power. This is why long dresses don't work well in SL. Few games have full clothing physics, and even then, usually only on the hero character.

There's an intermediate step, though. When you dress an avatar, cloth physics should run, layer by layer from the skin out, and get all the clothing properly layered. No need for alphas. I've seen a clothing design system where this happens. When you change the hair, it fluffs out and then falls into place. That only happens during changes; after that, it's just rigged mesh. (Rendering rigged mesh is an amazingly simple thing mathematically, and GPUs do it. It's the setup that's hard. So anything that can be represented as standard rigged mesh is fast.) Bakes on Mesh, The Next Generation.

[Riley Brinner]

Oh yeh, also....being able to send lindens to other users on the website. Instead of having to login.

[Judas Shuffle]

21 hours ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

 

Some of the things in this list may sound like insanely hard tasks but I've worked on projects like these (it's what I do for a living - take your old messed up codebase and modernize it to handle radically different demands than those you had years ago):

 

• Actual normal movement controls like an modern action MMO. So I can right and left mouse click all I want without the entire world slamming to a brutal halt as outlines appear around something it's decided I want to edit because SL still thinks it's a CAD program and not a 'virtual world'.
  • - Build Mode ought to be a 'state' I enter into, different from 'use' mode, so that each can have their own complete UI rather than half-half split across one single UI.
• The ability have all my alts under one account with a universal set of in-viewer controls for inventory, land, contacts, etc.
  • Almost everything we see on the account page of the website could also be put into the viewer itself.
  • Because SL still doesn't get that having multiple "characters" is normal for probably the vast majority of users.
• Seamless viewer integration between inworld and MP shopping. They own Casper now right? So anything I buy through MP should show up inworld on Casper redelivery, and vice-versa. And when I am using the viewer I should be able to just "use MP" within it without popping up an old style non-responsive designed web-page.
• Media-prims feel dated. Lets get some modern React / Angular or some such code in there and make these seamlessly part of the system. I dunno what they should be like, I just know what I have doesn't feel right.
• Modern responsive design in the codebase of the viewer. The exact same viewer should be able to seamlessly work on desktop or mobile, auto-localize itself to the user's language, and have accessibility code built in so that if I am running something like a speech to text app or a text-reader it just 'handles' it. Even in a voice sim - real-time readback of the voice chat is possible - so do it.
• Mod support through an API hookup system. There's really no need for third-party viewers IF we had a proper API for hooking in Mods... Even Skyrim has a brutal ugly API that still half-way works from a decade ago. Sims 4 has a more elegant one, though it's still WTF-ugly, it works. Modern APIs could make this a thing of beauty freeing up half the time of teams like the Firestorm if they were just modding the viewer rather than patching in changes to a code-fork.
  • It'd also handle security issues like the Phoenix scandal of a decade ago if some things in the API were just black boxes or more restrictive.
• The ability to flag an avatar's maturity rating and/or maintain multiple profiles depending on maturity rating the person looking at your profile had set themselves to see.
• Auto-translate built into the viewer - any text I see should be able to auto-translate to my localization.

 

These items won't happen because:

• Big budget changes
• Change resistance. Users get very reluctant to major changes in a system. Proper leadership in branding is needed to handle that and show users the benefits of change as well as easing in the change at the right pace and with as little need to 're-learn' as possible (ie: imagine if the V3 change of a decade ago had been mostly under the hood, with controls to ease in the new UI - rather than an abrupt visual departure. It might have gone over a lot better. In fact some TPVs exist only because that was the path they took).
• The wrong implementation of some of these could be disastrous. A proper software architect to prevent that is... a big budget hire.

 

Loves some of these ideas still own my land with an avatar i dont use anymore  would be great to merge them together some how.

One of these vr worlds gave all times in your local time for events and everything

I love how i can edit text I allready posted in discord .

Wonders how sl would run if you could cache it all into ram, and I do mean all of it  LL could supply us all with a googleplex of ddr5 each