Ayashe Ninetails

I'm not shopping right now, but if I do return to that, I won't be buying any PBR-enabled clothing unless we get stable lighting environments so the clothing looks consistently good in all locations/conditions (like everywhere else I've seen PBR being used). If that doesn't happen and we're still dealing with a mish mash of EEPs that change with every new location and alter how things appear (not in the right way), I'll continue saving money, I suppose.

Yeah, it's definitely got a rep for being weird. As soon as it comes up in conversation, people take sides in the discussion, with half saying oh yeah, I used to spend so many hours in that "game" doing this or that, and the other half like "omg, I've heard so many awful stories..." It's a divisive platform for sure. I haven't heard too much about SL's character creation process itself, but I'm not sure how many people outside of SL even know we've got a whole tool for new players to use now. They likely remember our ugly Ruth bodies or the earlier days of cobbling together mesh with standard size clothing. 😂 Yeah, gamers in general are super split between wanting MetaHuman quality vs. wanting pixelated 2D sprites vs. loving super-stylized characters. You've got fans of BG3, Once Human, Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, The Last of Us 2 vs. fans of Stardew Valley, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Core Keeper, Undertale, The Binding of Isaac vs. fans of Hades, WoW, Overwatch, Borderlands, Telltale games, Final Fantasy, LEGO games, etc., and there's some crossover, to make it even more complicated. I'm one of those who prefers to stay on the pixel and stylized side, myself, though I do find some of the more realistic games and characters genuinely stunning (I fangirled over Senua's character model in Hellblade 2 for days). And you can't please everyone. You gotta pick an art style and roll with it and deal with ticking off everybody else. I don't really think our particular style is enough to put large numbers of people off just given how varied things are in the industry anyway. I do think not having enough free options for the dressing/avatar basics might be a more significant barrier (I've seen newer games get slapped around for that before). Kind of, yeah. I'm thinking mostly of sandbox players who are used to being dropped into a world and have no trouble finding their own way, but one thing that does stand out here is the concept of private property. That can be really confusing and I've rarely come across it before, except in very rare instances. Wurm Online has a similar concept - player housing and settlements are made via deeds, but that's a very old game with a tiny playerbase. ArcheAge also tried something similar with land ownership requiring a subscription, but that game was a whole disaster and got re-re-re-re-released a bunch of times to handle issues. Outside of that, I'm not sure how often people would be required to think about such things. Definitely makes navigating around and finding things a bit cumbersome until it clicks.

Generally, I agree. Though for some, it's not about the visuals. There are enough SL videos (especially focused on shopping/sales/creating looks/decorating) on YouTube for people to see our current avatars and homes and things. Though you're right - once they jump in, it takes some work and time to go from starter avatar/starter home to fully decked out. It also costs money. Not having a way to easily put something together for free does put some people off. The larger issue for some is just the overall reputation of the platform. Most commonly, I see complaints about it being full of predators. Also somewhat common - it's for losers, everyone's old, the platform is dated, it's for perverts and a few "wow, it's still alive???" statements thrown in. It's a difficult platform to create hype around. Granted, some of the events and things (griefers, etc.) they reference are from way back in the day, but it sort of stuck in the lore. I also don't entirely think this sort of thing is unique to Second Life only. Meta's Horizon Worlds got trashed pretty heavily, too, though for much different reasons (though I'm sure all of the harassment articles didn't help). Last I saw, though, Horizon Worlds will open its doors to preteens as young as 10-years-old, so I suppose it won't be long before their next scandal.

My biggest concern with it right now is that bored, idle billionaires full of too much money and not enough sense are investing so much cash on the worst AI projects I've ever seen. That may just be my biggest peeve of the year. Just look at Grok (I don't have anything to do with that one nor would I ever) - you want to talk about IP infringement and dangerous content? Woo. I'm frankly surprised Disney and Nintendo haven't already open-palm slapped that one around yet. And what's even the goal? Making an AI with "a sense of humor." Nothing I've seen coming out of it is funny, but it sure is offensive at times. Dude. Just no. Rest assured, though, some companies do take ethics, security, privacy, and IP very seriously. Not enough of those exist, though, and we could absolutely use some more to help set the standard. *groan* I don't even let myself use ChatGPT. 😂 To be fair, I only tinkered with it once purely out of curiosity to test its roleplaying abilities and resistance to shenanigans. The less said about that the better. Though, I did toss it one point for not stumbling directly into generating harmful outputs when I asked it to take on the role of a certain Tate. Didn't sound like him, but points for not sounding like him, I guess. I don't know what I expected really, seeing that it also failed my Winnie the Pooh test, lol. It's so bad. 😂

Interestingly, there are some models out there with a more ethical focus that are being trained on public domain and CC data. Now, that does come down to the individuals doing that work being able to properly verify such things before feeding it in, but I can't imagine they don't have ways of finding and filtering that out somewhere at the top of the chain and I just do my part to ensure I'm personally doing my best to avoid violating anyone's IP (amusingly, it's my design training that taught me how to do all that - I've read way too many licensing docs in my lifetime for my own good). But yeah, on the whole, you ain't wrong. There are definitely some unethical players all throughout the industry. Big peeve.

Yeah...that's a good peeve. Co-sign. I've found myself wondering if there's a way to create filters in uBlock to automatically bury/block/white-out/delete/yeet the words "ChatGPT" and "AI" (and especially "Grok" and "AI Overview" and...) from the entire internet. I do the majority of my work in another browser entirely, so if that's possible, I could spare myself from having to see that stuff in my downtime. Zero chance I'm reading or viewing any of its output without being paid. 😂 Reminds me of the NFT days where you absolutely couldn't escape that topic anywhere on social media, either. Even running off into a game to escape wasn't safe because devs would be all like "SO GUYS, I heard you like games, so why don't we put NFTs in our games so you can NFT while you game..."

The Age section in the creation tool is where you'd set your character's overall size/age. Making a child is not done via height sliders. I believe there's...wait hang on lemme just look. Okay, so in InZoi, there's child, young adult, adult, middle-aged, and senior. There's some speculation that teen may or may not be added at some point. You select that option when making your character, and the clothing options on the right side change to the options that fit that particular age model (most should be the same generally, except for children). When users make custom clothing, they'll do it by age model. Resizing yourself via height/weight adjustments doesn't change the model you're set to. Clothes will still fit when doing that so you can have characters who are skinny/larger/taller/shorter. So essentially, when content creators start making mods, they'll pick which age group they want to create for. It's a bit more streamlined than SL because at least in The Sims 4, male and female clothing can be worn by any gender, too, so that cuts down on the workload as well. I'm assuming InZoi will also do that. So creators in SL are making for different body brands (Maitreya, Legacy, Belleza) + sizes (adult Jake, child Toddleedoo) + genders, but over in The Sims 4 and hopefully InZoi, they just create for "Adult" or "Child" and call it a day.

I think it's a mix. In some communities I'm in, the trend is to live in the character creation portion of the game and never actually do anything else. 😂 Some people I know of have earned reputations for reliably spending ages creating hilarious characters or straight up nightmare fuel in every game they play and they stay pretty faithful to that. Others players are the "hit randomize a few times and get into this game" type. I do think the activity is popular enough that it's become somewhat of a trend now for larger games in production to release a character creation tool a bit early, especially if it's seriously good. You can save and import that same character into the full game later, so there's no downside, other than having to wait. There have been several articles surrounding that, including one from IGN where a player joked that they'd spent 17.5 hours in the game so far and hopes Capcom adds a story mode. 🤣 My own process really depends on the game, but in The Sims 4, I actually did enjoy playing around with celebrities on occasion. I made an eerily convincing Lenny Kravitz and moved him into my neighborhood so I could befriend him. I also spent a looot of time making a host from a news network, then downloaded a user-made custom career track for her (Ministry of Propaganda into the Media Personality track), and essentially turned her into an agent of chaos across the airwaves, which was way more fun than I expected. If InZoi has that same level of customization and silliness, welp. I may have to overlook the photorealism. And yeah, InZoi will have templates. They'll have an in-game gallery where players can upload characters and families and homes they've made for others to download and use, just like The Sims 4 Gallery. I do get why these systems will almost never work for Second Life, given how we build ourselves quite literally piece by piece, spending money for each item along the way. I will say, though, there does come a point where someone like me, who practically lives for customization (which is what brought me to SL in the first place), has to start looking for other options or else I'll go broke, LOL.

Probably. This system is being pitched to Sims players and they already have very similar face-sculpting features in The Sims 4, so they're used to it. That said, though, deep customizers are fairly popular in general (BG3's and Dragon's Dogma 2's were hyped all over the dang place), with whole game-specific subreddits and communities dedicated to the nightmare fuel, erm, I mean celebrity and 3D character look-alikes people come up with. I'm never recovering from Black Desert Online letting people make a zillion variants of Michael Jackson and then upload them into the gallery of downloadable presets. I'm just not. I'm actually on the other end of the scale (surprise). Character creation is my favorite thing to do in games, and I'm guilty of spending a good few hours doing that and never actually playing the game in some cases (glances at Pathfinder: Kingmaker). Despite the over-realism, I've been super tempted to grab Dragon's Dogma 2 just to mess with theirs. I have zero interest in that game itself, but I've seen some wild creations that people make with that thing. Kratos, Geralt, and Gandalf never looked so good. 😂 I actually find those types of systems a lot more simple and far less stressful than Second Life's method of doing it, but I likely just burned myself out shopping and manually putting things together here all the time. That plus making endless avatars is not a cheap hobby in SL. That can also be a factor for some (certainly was for me - I had to quit doing that, lol).

I still play C64 games via emulator. Funny how it doesn't cut down on the terrible loading times at all.

Agree. This is where I'm at these days, as well. I'm a retro gamer at heart who actually still adores my 2D sprites and/or highly-stylized hand-drawn characters wherever I can get them (usually in the indie scene, where such things are still appreciated). InZoi is pretty and I understand the wow factor, but that whole MetaHuman thing is a wee bit too much for me. 😂 Even in SL I find myself using humans far less often.

Early copies of the complete game are in content creators' hands. There are quite a few gameplay playthroughs on YouTube. It's possible the feedback he's referring to is a combination of what was given by the public during the open Creator Studio beta playtest and the feedback given by the content creators and their communities on Steam, Reddit, YouTube comments, and their official Discord.

There's a lot of weird double-posting glitches on the forum over the last few days and it's making me lose my mind. I'm already brain broken today though, so it doesn't take much. Anyhoo, on topic, I haven't read the thread all the way through, but one thing the OP could do is have their girlfriend set up a home security system with a whitelist, if able and if not done already. When I had my plot, I kept it on a 5 second timer, one offense = parcel ban list, and only my closest friends on the whitelist (no ragrets) since I was up 3500m in the sky and someone would have to do a lot more than just stumble in accidentally. I've had someone cam-sit onto a pose stand right in front of me at another similar location before, which is why I started using one. Not a big deal for me, really (other than giving me an unnecessary jumpscare), and I don't give a rats what happens when I'm not on the plot, but if I'm in the middle of decorating or building or styling, it's distracting as all heck.

This is honestly something that drives me absolutely bonkers, especially as the industry continues to innovate in this particular area. I don't often struggle with neck seams and matching skins when I leave well enough alone, but as someone who wears a lot of tattoos around the head/neck, it can get to be a bit of an annoyance in some environments/lighting conditions. I'm also really, really, really over collecting a bunch of random human/animal/fantasy heads like some kind of Princess Mombi wannabe. The more new games I try out, the less inclined I am to put in as much time as I used to in SL customizing myself. I'm just kind of over it these days. It gets so tedious.

Okay ignore what I said about SL having a grab system built into the BD poser. I don't know why I was thinking that, lol. It's sliders, BUT, there are much finer controls in the options than we have access to in the normal shape editing tool. Both for rotating and positioning and specific parts of the face/body (you can position and rotate fingers, etc.).

If you've ever used a grab/pull character creator, it's so difficult to go back to sliders. The fine tuning is SO nice for creating unique faces. The Sims 4 (and possibly a few other games) uses both - you can slide OR you can zoom into the face, grab the nose, and position it. Or grab a nostril, or grab an eye corner, or grab an eyelid, or grab the ear... Funny enough, Second Life DOES have a similar feature, but you need to use a viewer with a pose tool to access it. If you're in BD, for example, and hop into the Pose tool, you can grab individual bones or parts of the face and position them. I've moved eyeballs around, eyelids and corners, mouth corners, parts of the nose, etc. The downside - this is only for posing. Once you leave that tool, your face is going to snap back to normal. 😂 Edit: Wait, am I wrong - is that a slider? Gawd my memory is kind of terrible and my coffee isn't strong enough. Lemme hop in and check, LOL.

You can compare character design systems across different games (and genres). It's done all the time in the industry. Black Desert Online is an MMO that uses the same grab/push/pull system for customizing faces and bodies that The Sims 4 and InZoi use. Dragon's Dogma 2's system could compare, in some ways, to Baldur's Gate 3's. Etc. They aren't the same kind of games at all, but there are a few standard types of creation tools that games utilize across the board (sliders, grab/pull, preset selections, etc.). Slider systems like what we have for shaping are still fairly popular, but grab/pull systems offer more targeted controls over tiny, fine details (grab an eye corner and position it, grab a length of hair and create bangs or longer side strands).

InZoi's character creation studio is what's being compared to our Senra avatar creation tool in the OP.

Depends whether or not it's a client-side only kind of thing. Assuming it is, then it'll function the same as inviting players over to visit your Minecraft home after you've decked it out with a ton of cosmetic home, garden, and ranch mods - they ain't seeing #@$! unless they've got them installed, too. The AI tools add another layer to that - if you texture a basic base game dress using the built-in AI tool, will others see the same design? Maybe?

Between Twitch and YouTube, I've seen about two-ish hours of actual InZoi gameplay. It basically takes the open world of The Sims 3 and the building, gameplay, and social features of The Sims 4 and merges them together into what Sims fans have been asking EA to do for absolute years - create a newer, more modern, open world Sims game without the best features being hidden away behind $1200 of DLC. There's a lot, but a few basic things: Customization is kind of bonkers - they added AI tools for texture generation for both clothing and furniture. You can swap from having a clean, modern city to a post-apocalyptic rundown city via a simple slider and that will change the look of absolutely everything in the world (buildings, furniture, etc.). Jobs are location-dependent, so there are different options based on where you move around to. There's a full driving system complete with traffic laws you have to follow. Zois themselves have a ton of interactions. There's facial capture for emotions/talking (looks a bit cursed to me, though). There's a "spreading" system where things like colds, flus, and even rumors can spread independently without any input from the player. There's also a weirdly in-depth relationship/cheating system for some reason, complete with the "where are you come home now!" angry text messages and set their clothes on fire interactions. 😂 Is it fun - yeah, from what I saw, if you're a Sims fan, this could be your game of the year. Plus, the building and decorating are really incredible with the ability to take a photo of anything you own and upload it as a 3D object into the game. Is it anything like Second Life - not quite. Maybe when small-scale multiplayer gets added after release it can offer a bit more of that. Right now, it's really just a more modern version of The Sims.

@James Samiam I like some of the ideas you've presented, despite me personally not seeing a path forward in that direction just given the nature of how SL works and how much would need to change. You might want to go ahead and submit some ideas for an updated character creation tool as a feature request over on https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests if one doesn't already exist and see if it gains any traction. I think there's also a similar thread somewhere in the General tech forum that had some more positive discussion.

That will all be taken care of by the modders. As I'm sure you know, The Sims 4 has an absolutely stupid number of hairstyle mods alone (not to even mention clothing and jewelry and accessories and everything else) scattered all over the internet for download on The Sims Resource, The Sims Catalog, CurseForge, Nexus, a zillion individual blogs, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. Some big SL creators are also making them (I own a few similar styles in The Sims 4 and SL made by the same people). I'm assuming InZoi will be no different on that front. Gigs of content incoming. I'm not in love with InZoi's graphics as I tend to prefer a more stylistic approach to game design. It's pretty, sure, but it's a beast to run. Not a fan of that. Plus, I dunno how easy it'd be for me to be a frog. 🐸

This is actually one thing that puts InZoi in direct competition with The Sims 4. People were so annoyed when The Sims 4 released without toddlers, then eventually added them in via patch a few years later, and then made a paid toddler DLC pack that contained Create A Sim and decor items for kids. People hated that so much. InZoi on the other hand is just like boom, here ya go, make any age ya want and here's all this cool stuff in the base game. So much this. You can go so crazy on the graphics with a singleplayer or light-multiplayer game. Things get real once you try and go beyond that. Black Desert Online somehow pulled it off (the character creator looks very similar to InZoi's and it's insanely flexible - people do celebrity-lookalikes with it), but I don't know how.

Ohhh trust me, I know. Their recommended GPU is an RTX 3070, which is what I've got. InZoi's Character Studio was pretty dang sluggish on my PC, and I've seen others on the Steam forums complaining that their 40 series cards weren't performing well, either. It's definitely in need of some more optimization tweaks, but it runs VERY heavy in general and I doubt they can minimize that. Not even a little. Totally agree with you. If you want InZoi graphics and gameplay, you'll have to go play InZoi. Personally, I'd rather play Paralives. That ultra-realistic style InZoi's going for just isn't my jam (even though you can overlay filters on top of the world to make it less realistic - meeeeh).

They have different laws and rules in place surrounding such things. InZoi uses cutscenes and fade to black when Zois get into bed and shows absolutely nothing. The Sims 4 is PG also, but adult content thrives via the mod scene. Those mods aren't allowed on Twitch, of course. People just stream without them enabled. Modders are already gearing up to make a Wicked Whims for InZoi. Adult content for these games all comes from the modding community. Even Minecraft has adult mods, but you'll never see those streamed (thank gawd). InZoi itself is full of non-sexual adult content, however. You should see the options that show up during arguments. Definitely not for kids. 😂