Old and busted: facelights.

New hotness: setting your whole avatar to full bright, clothes and all.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars #OldAndBusted #NewHotness

I've noticed a trend in avatar clothing.

Single pieces of clothing and fatpacks with the same piece of clothing in many colours/variants have been superseded by outfit boxes with tops and bottoms over the years, almost always including footwear and often offering everything in only one colour. We've reached a point at which the former two are basically dead, as seems to be mixing and matching your own outfits. Granted, it doesn't help that clothes-makers often try to make their own mesh clothes incompatible with those by their competitors to keep you from combining tops by maker A with bottoms by maker B.

But outfit boxes themselves are increasingly superseded by complete avatars which add a mesh body plus a mesh head plus necessary HUDs, one shape, one skin, one eye texture and one hairstyle which often doesn't come with a colour HUD. As if you didn't have these already. Yes, you'll look like on the box art, but you won't look any different without out-of-the-box stuff or editing the shape.

These have been around since long before mesh and mostly targeted at newbies who wanted or had to change their look away from default Ruth and didn't know how. But nowadays, complete avatars are increasingly replacing outfit boxes.

Admittedly, that's even more convenient because you don't have to make the outfit work with your avatar if you replace your whole avatar. And right-clicking a folder with a complete avatar in it and then clicking "Replace" is less work than taking your previous clothes off, putting new clothes on, adjusting alphas if necessary and then saving the result as an outfit, not to mention learning what "outfits" in the viewer are in the first place.

Also admittedly, this means that your whole avatar looks different whenever you put on something new if you only ever wear complete avatars as they come out of the box. But over the last years, fewer and fewer users have actually put work into customising their looks anyway because they can't make the shapes that come with mesh heads, starter avatars and complete avatars any sexier.

There used to be a time when most users put work into their avatars by selecting or even modifying a skin, eyes and a hairstyle and editing the shape. But then they had a unique, individual look. You could recognise your acquaintances or well-known avatars by looking at them without paying the name tags above their heads any attention. A killer feature that's pretty unique to Second Life and OpenSim.

This is increasingly sacrificed to convenience and maxed-out sexiness.

I hope that the arrival of Maxine and Maxwell will not only kick-start the increased creation of native OpenSim clothes for these bodies, but since they start out with no clothes at all, cover the basics first with fatpacks.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #Avatars #VirtualWorlds #VirtualClothing #OldAndBusted #NewHotness

@Ryan Schultz Yes, two classics.

@David Farnell Around 2006 and 2007, there was that huge #SecondLife hype. It was all over the place, all over mass media. What #TheMetaverse tries to become now, Second Life really was back then. Big real-life brands went into Second Life, also hoping that they could harvest some of the residents' hard-earned Linden dollars.

The latter, however, never really came to pass. People didn't want to buy virtual remakes of Nike shoes, also because they probably weren't that close to the originals with the limited possibilities of 2007 anyway. They rather bought from in-world brands.

So the big corporations saw no point in investing into Second Life any longer, and they withdrew. With them went real-life news agencies so that news from inside Second Life broke away due to a sudden lack of reporters.

Eventually, the mainstream forgot about Second Life. Most people now believe that it must have shut down when the constant stream of news ended, i.e. around late 2008, early 2009. This includes most mainstream media, some of which don't even shy away from outright claiming or at least implying that Second Life has actually shut down back then. Five seconds on Google (as if mainstream media used any other search engine) could prove them wrong, but they are so firm in their belief that they can't be bothered to verify it.

And if mainstream media teach people that Second Life is dead and gone, both #Metaverse companies and the general public believe in it even more. People generally only learn about Second Life still being around when someone mentions that it is. Metaverse companies ignore it altogether instead of learning from it. Even if they do find out that it actually still exists because one Philip Rosedale says so, they still ignore it because they can't for the lives of them imagine that a 20-year-old virtual world has seen any innovation in the last 18 years or so.

@Aereyn This has happened to lots and lots of people.

They left not too long after the hype had ended. Then, many years later, they learned that Second Life is still there. They still remember their password or manage to retrieve it from somewhere. And they log back in for the first time in many years, of course expecting little to nothing to have changed because it feels to them like Second Life itself has fallen into some kind of stasis.

But it hasn't. Every last one of their favourite regions (by the way, it's no longer "sims") is gone. Almost all their precious, precious landmarks are dead. Replaced by what feels like a whole new world. Everything looks vastly different from what they were used to (and from the 15-year-old in-world pictures which mainstream media use when they do write about Second Life).

And what. The hell. Is. This. MESH?! Is that why you remember avatars' bodies looking differently, although your own avatar still looks like you remember it? Why people may even shun you? Is that why clothes no longer look like painted on? Why they do things you can't possibly imagine prims being able to do? And is that why you wonder how those new in-world structures could possibly have been built out of prims?

Worse yet, #mesh isn't the #NewHotness you think it is. It has become the standard for everything. The system body with its layer clothes and prim and flexi and sculpty attachments is #OldAndBusted.

I hope Maitreya Lara will work for you. For I hate to break that to you, but while it may seem state-of-the-art to someone who left when sculpties were state-of-the-art, from what I can see from outside, from what I've read, it's actually old-fashioned. So much about fashion advice from the mid-2010s. I think the hottest stuff when it comes to female mesh bodies is eBody now, that's the train every last fashion maker jumps onto.

The only place where Maitreya Lara still matters is the #Hypergrid of #OpenSimulator. This is where I reside; I've actually never been to Second Life. There it exists, not quite legally, as Athena, and the reason why it's still popular is because it doesn't have any serious competition.

Wenn nicht so helle Menschen am Löschknopf sitzen ;)

♲ @fefebot@despora.de: Old and busted: Twitter löscht auf Zuruf Links zu Raubkopien.

Auch old and busted: Twitter löscht auf Zuruf Links auf Artikel über Raubkopien (aber ohne Link zu irgendwelchen Raubkopien).<p<New hotness: Twitter löscht auf Zuruf Tweets, die auf gelöschte Tweets verweisen https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/15/free-speech-row-us-tv-channel-forces-removal-of-tweets, die auf einen Artikel über Raubkopien verweisen (aber ohne Raubkopien oder Links zu Raubkopien).

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