JackRaybold

Mesh bodies have selectable alphas. Why not mesh clothes? It's really the clipping that's the problem.

Not an uncommon attitude, sadly. It comes from an inability or unwillingness to recognise that revenue is directly proportional to effort.

So, here's a newbie's worm's-eye view, for what it's worth. As a serial newcomer here, I've been reading this thread with great interest. This is my fourth or fifth attempt to make sense of my SL avatar - each time I come back to SL because of an itch I can't scratch, and each time I've walked away in frustration. As a retired software engineer, I would like to suggest that the biggest issues for me as a newbie have been less about the stock body - as has been mentioned, there are plenty of excellent, easily-found free bodies around - but more about the lack of an interface standard for HUDs, and about the lack of interoperability between different clothes, even for the same body, often even from the same creator. I would suggest that one way SL could substantially reduce the pain for new users would be to enforce a standardised, integrated HUD layout for body and head creators. Jumping from the stock SL avi to completely alien concepts like BOM, mesh, rigging etc is tough enough, but having to learn the wildly variant idiosyncracies of different body/head HUD layouts (particularly heads) has been far and away the biggest barrier for me in transferring tentative, painfully-acquired knowledge between different products. I haven't see this mentioned to any significant extent on SL so maybe it's just me (it wouldn't be the first time), but as a solutions provider myself I know for a fact that, all else being equal, opaque, inconsistent, and idiosyncratic interface schema are the biggest reason for haemorrhaging userbases, absolutely bar none. Imo the first and major role of any environment administrator, real or virtual, is setting standards. I feel that until that happens, simply throwing yet more variants into the mix will add to the chaos rather than mitigate it. The second, related, point is that clothes touted as being for a given body must interoperate with other clothes supplied for that body, irrespective of manufacturer/creator. The creators of the bodies themselves must set the standard here, ideally through a certification scheme. As has been mentioned on this thread and elsewhere, boots clipping trousers clipping shirts and jackets is, or should be, an absolute no-no. And finally - I would like to see a set of simple, entry-level tutorials that step through the basics of avatar construction, object interaction, and grid etiquette before anyone is allowed to leave Welcome Island. That would at least give all new users a grounding in the basic principles of the world they're about to join, which is good for them and good for SL. In an ideal world that would be incentivised with a graduating bonus, but I accept that that might be challenging to implement without the potential for abuse. It is not a coincidence, I feel, that the greater majority of the people I've interacted with here on my brief forays have clearly been highly intelligent. This has been such a marked phenomenon (in distinct contrast to other online spaces I've encountered) I've even wondered whether the excruciating learning curve is a deliberate ploy to keep thickos like me out of the ivory tower. If that is the case, it's working. I appreciate that this thread was specifically about the upcoming NUX body and I apologise for straying off-topic. But the problems that the new body is supposed to solve demand significantly more complex and nuanced solutions than just introducing yet another fragment into an already-fractured problem space, imo. However, I also appreciate that SL is far and away the most successful 3D world to date, so it's obviously doing many things right enough to keep it moving forward. Just my tuppence-worth! Happy New Year one and all