Christina Halpin

Yes. I can wrote an animation to lower my eyebrows, and in-world it raised my eyebrows (or the other way around) Also, the happy expression on people's face that is called a smile involves a lot of muscles, not just moving the lips. Just curving the lips up can look like the Joker.

The request to animate my avatar appears behind any windows/menus I have open. As near as I can tell, it is very very common that a new menu or window appears on top of old ones -- in SL and everywhere else. The problem with opening a new window behind other open windows is that the person might not see it. I assume this is a viewer issue, but I found it in Firestorm and the SL viewer. I have problems getting people to accept permissions for something they want, and I am guessing this is a big part of the problem. Is there some reason for this? If not, can it be fixed? I think that would help me and everyone. Shouldn't there be a note about this on the RequestPermissions page (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlRequestPermissions ) at least telling people about this quirky feature?

Sorry for again misportraying you. Again, I think that using reset skeleton is bad advice in the context of appearing on its own. I intentionally created a deformation by animation persistence, and "reset skeleton" didn't work. I had to use "reset skeleton and animation". Is there any downside to advising that instead of just "reset skeleton"? A few other issues. I think you don't mean "jump" as a method of moving like running or flying (although I have consistently mis-guessed what you meant to say). I don't know where you got 1000 from (though it is close to the maximum draw distance of 1024 in my version of Firestorm). I think people are more familiar with how to log off and then back on than with whatever the technique is for teleporting 1000m up (to probably empty sky.). If I am at a dance with 20 people -- or even two -- I think you underestimate the difficulty of telling them what to do to correct how they see my avatar, and you overestimate the compliance rate.

I missed that. Thank you for correcting. So we seem to agree that by itself that reset-skeleton is a poor choice. I would argue the reset-skeleton option is dangerous -- the average SL user will expect it to do what it should do, and will get the illusion that the problem is solved. The easiest solution is to simply log off for a moment. That has an advantage over simply poofing for a moment because it is relatively straightforward to return to the same location.

My testing, today matched my previous experience -- the reset skeleton option fixed only how an avatar looked to itself, it didn't affect how other people in the sim saw the avatar. To fix how your avatar looks to other people, you can transport away and then back, or of course log off and back on.

People enter SL, their bodies are constructed, and they think of that as neutral. When an animation persists, changing their body, they want to go back to that original-construction body. If that's different from all zero's -- and I think it usually is -- they don't want to go to all zeroes, then want to return to their at-entry bodies. Fortunately, all zeroes probably comes close, and it might be good enough that people don't notice the difference. I am guessing that firestorm's undeform is all 0's and is the same as what Avastar calls "Neutral Shape." it gets my lip pursing, shoulder breadth, and jaw jut wrong. I don't like those changes, but they aren't that noticeable. I remind everyone that animations persistence is client-side.

I am playing a lot of animations quickly, many overlapping. When I shut down all the ones on my screen, my avatar was stopped mid-animation. I spent an hour last night trying to CREATE that effect, and I appreciate God's fine sense of irony. But is there actually any way to recreate this on purpose?

I just realized -- the program that uploads images to textures already writes in the description field. I just want to change what is written. So I am estimating it is a 5-minute job. This suggestion was, unfortunately, rejected. I am guessing the time crunch is evaluation. They said they regularly review previously deferred suggestions when circumstances change or resources become available." Nice, but there will never be as good of time as right now (because we are at the exact moment in time when scripters could not use that field but now can). Thanks again for everyone's help.

To me, it is nice to upload an image and have the texture be the same name. Our scripter just started showing visitors the image name, because that is an accessible field, so it would be momentarily awkward to have the width and height in the name. Momentary" is not an issue, but my scripting often uses the image name, and a longer name would at best be annoying. As you say, I do not know or see any problems with putting height and width in the otherwise empty description field. Could you explain again or point me to where that was described? Yes, this change will not help (or hurt) any pictures that have been uploaded, it will only help the future. (And my current pictures are fine because I tedicusly set the proper proportion by hand. Added: Adding the information to the texture name would work; giving the proportion instead of width and height would work. It's more important that this happen, so I did not mean to be quite so argumentative about format, sorry. In practice, putting the info in the description field -- if that is easy -- would make the change invisible to everyone but scripters and cannot interfere with any existing scripts.

It actually would be useful. (Look how long this answer is!) First, you don't realize how often people get it wrong. You don't realize how many people aren't even aware of the problem. And the solution is simple -- anyone who builds a picture frame in the future could have the object resize to fit the picture. Suppose I want my object to cycle through 20 pictures, which means changing size to fit the picture. You are asking me to rename 20 pictures. Or, my programmer is asking me to edit 20 pictures to add size to the description field. If I have 4 of these objects, that's 80 pictures. And I will probably make 1 mistake, though I will see it. And if I make it up to 20 of these objects . . . Now, ordinary people upload pictures SL. They don't know the simplest way to do things. And it's not obvious to them what size to make a picture that is 565x793 as an image and should have a height in SL of 2.0, the width is. Test how many people would even try to figure that out. I have probably uploaded 1000 images, so I know the quickest, easiest way to figure out that fourth number And if you can save just 2 minutes of my time for each, that's 33 hours. And, it is easy to script a frame to change size IF you know how the information about proportions is stored. If SL puts the picture size in the description field, that standardizes everything. If people create their own method, a scripter who is selling a frame won't know how the information is encoded. So putting the information in the description field, which is currently empty on download, would improve the SL lives of anyone who uploads and image or sees art on a wall or gallery.

I created the suggestion for a new feature (add for example 452x923 to the description field of a texture on upload). If adapted, it would be very simple to build a picture frame that automatically adapted to the picture's proportion (once this information can be read). And it seems like such a simple and safe change. Thanks to everyone here for helping me understand how my concerns fit in with SL, to encourage me to even make that suggestion.

I should have said this. There is such a thing as good composition in art. Picasso has it, Pollock has it, Van Gogh has it, and a lot of artists have it. When their pictures are displayed in the wrong proportion (aspect ratio), the good composition goes away. And the art isn't enjoyable. So, art wise, the frequent mis-proportioning of pictures is a real problem at SL. Most people don't consciously notice a mis-proportion, so you may be unaware of the problem and unbothered by it, but it is taking away some of your enjoyment of art. So the time-consuming and tedious act of getting the right proportions is a problem, and people make mistakes even when they care about this issue. So if there is an easy solution, it probably should be made. I will try to add to a ticket. (And I understand that "serious art problem" is semi-oxymoronic. This just seems to have an easy solution. Someone said that reading descriptions of textures has already been proposed.)

For me, I want an object to be able to find out the correct aspect ratio of an texture within that same object. So that would not seem to be a privacy issue for using the description field. And the description field is so freely offered to the public (for objects at least) that I can't imagine someone putting private information there. Is there any way to even fill the description field of a texture on upload? I assumed it was always blank. Pictures, I see, have a description. My guess is that a string like 1043x987 would be the easiest way to put the info into the Description Field. The numbers could be easily extracted, and the format would be very distinctive.

and that's an idea killer. Alas. Thank you!

I will do that if no one knows anything wrong with this request. Thanks.