Himechan

Well.. I can't really agree with you. You're basically saying "People are stupid and because of that, it's a bad idea". The same issues you're mentioning are there for mesh as well. People may create mesh that's not perfect, they may use their own mesh avatars instead of the standard avatar and people may get confused about it. As you do with mesh nowadays, you include a note in the product that it's a custom skeleton, include an optional note what bones it has. There is a very large incentive for using the standard skeleton because most of the products will be using that skeleton. If you're creating a human avatar, there's no point in making your own skeleton for it as there's already one and if you create your own skeleton, you run the risk of people not buying it because of compatibility issues. The point with a custom skeleton is to be able to make custom style avatars or, in the case where you can rez them, custom style animated objects, like a car for example. And if you use the same named / IDs of the bones as the standard skeleton, anything that works for the standard skeleton will also automatically work for your skeleton as it's mapped the same way. I don't think "people are stupid" is a very valid argument. People will want to create optimized and compatible products in order to be able to sell them to a broader audience. Where this cannot be applied, because their ideas are too outside the box, then a custom skeleton works wonders. Skeleton A will work just the same as skeleton B. Animating one skeleton isn't different from animating another, mechanically. It just requires support for dynamically changing what skeleton is used for what avatar. The slider limits will be set by the designer of the skeleton and a created shape will hold the information about the shape for the skeleton it was designed for. Basically it's about dynamic data size as opposed to static data size. Dynamic data size is a little less efficient than static, but it doesn't matter that much for today's processors. Or you can simply limit the amount of bones to a certain number and then have every skeleton be that number of bones if you require static data size. Bento is an improvement, but needless to say, it has it's limitations. You can't have a finger with 4 bones, should you want that. You can't have 2 heads and 2 necks. You can't put wings on your legs or your head. And you can't make a car (well.. you might be able to, but you'll have 1000 extra bones and you won't necessarily get the exact structure you want) So while I understand this won't happen tomorrow, I definitely think that this is something to work towards in the future. And frankly, it shouldn't be that hard. Would probably require around the same work as creating a new hardcoded skeleton and support for it, but instead of making everything static, you make it dynamic.

I recognize I'm late to the party, but this is clearly a step in the right direction to add more possibilities. I'm not sure it's entirely on topic, but it's about how I think skeletons should progress, so I think it's on topic enough. However I would propose that you make it possible to add a completely custom skeleton (mayhaps after this project is done). This will suit everyone's needs, regardless of what it is. There should be a list of standard joint and bone names or IDs that current animations and meshes will map to. But in addition to these, you could make whatever you want. Attachment points would be added to the skeleton by the designer and the viewer would download the skeleton information and dynamically change its attachments support accordingly. The current attachment points have their standard names and locations, but other can be added as well and scripts functions will return those names based on the custom skeleton. If an attachment point can be targeted by a function, it returns a -1 if it doesn't find it. In addition to that, please make it possible to rez skeletons inworld and dress them up with objects and animate them as you would an avatar. The skeleton object would have folders in its contents window for each of the attachment points and objects dropped in those folders are automatically worn and can be edited as a linked object as if it was worn on your avatar. Remove the object from the folder and it is removed from the skeleton object. And lastly, higher capacity for simultaneous attachments or a way to faux-link objects so that they are still their own objects, but are linked together so that they can be put on as a single object on an attachment point. But they still retain their own local link numbers. It's getting hard to wear modern complex avatars and add accessories to them due to the low capacity.