Avatar Physics is now available to try with the new beta viewer. The whole thing seems odd, from Linden Lab displaying a sense of humour, Amanda popping out of the community tools user group meeting to post a blog post and the actual post being signed by Samuel … confused? You will be.
You’ll also want to check out the knowledgebase article before playing around too much, trust me, you’ll want to read this, otherwise your butt will be going up and down like the clappers, it was very un Drow like and extremely distracting I can tell you! I nearly walked straight into a Unicorn!
Now some people claim Linden Lab are too serious at times, too unresponsive, don’t understand their customers …which gets turned on its head with the blog post because it contains the quote:
“Of course, we continue to smash bugs and make strides in viewer stability and performance, but we figured that you would be much more interested in avatars bouncing and jiggling.”
Talk about knowing your audience! Now there are a number of settings, that I haven’t looked at, one of which is damping, which made me wary because I don’t want a damp butt! However I’ll figure it out eventually, when I’m less tired and have more time, for now, this is going to be fun! How much fun it will be once the novelty wears off remains to be seen but it’s a feature that has potential to be very useful, especially for machinima, it’s also great to see LL displaying such a good sense of humour!
Notice the note in the KB article though about attachment points. I’m not going to say that it makes enhanced physics useless but it comes pretty close since you’ll be forced to turn physics off and on every time you want to use certain …. ahem … attachments which will be unusable with physics on. That doesn’t even take into account that if the attachment points don’t move this will break tails on many furry av’s since the butt will detach from the tail and either leave a gap or collide and cause a texture collision with the attachment.
Yeah it’s at an early stage and will be in some cases one step forwards two steps back, I’m hoping it will be developed so that attachments and such like will work, I hope they don’t leave it at jiggle.