Why virtual worlds from the 2000s surpass those from the 2020s in avatar-making flexibility
Something that really sets #
SecondLife and #
OpenSimulator apart from newer #
VirtualWorlds is how they support creativity and how flexible they are. This goes all the way to #
avatars. No other worlds have avatars that are as customisable as in Second Life and #
OpenSim.
Now, before you're wondering: Second Life is not dead.
It's very much still alive. It has been online continuously for two decades now, and it looks a whole lot better than in all those pictures and videos from the heyday around 2007. And OpenSimulator is
a platform for virtual worlds that can be described as Mastodon to Second Life's Twitter, only without Elon Musk involved and actually almost the same look & feel. This, by the way, means that the #
Metaverse is older than you may think, and even the concept of a metaverse that consists of independently-owned worlds has been done 15 years ago already.
Anyways, back to avatars.
In general, avatars in virtual worlds are seen as something monolithic. An #
avatar is one thing. To be used as-is with everything on it. If you want to change something, you'll have to change
everything.
For example, a #
ReadyPlayerMe avatar is always one object. You can configure it on Ready Player Me, but it comes out in one piece with no chance whatsoever to modify it in-world, once it's converted and imported. If you're lucky, and if the world lets you, you can change the height, i.e. scale the whole avatar. If you want to wear something else, and be it a different pair of shoes, you'll have to go back to Ready Player Me, generate a wholly new avatar with the same settings except for different clothes, convert it for whatever world you use and import it.
In other words, if you want to be polite, and you want to take off your shoes when entering someone's virtual home,
you have to replace your entire avatar with a remake of itself minus shoes, that is, if that's possible in the first place. If you can do that on the fly right where you are, that is. Taking off your shoes or your hat is as big an effort as turning into R2D2.
If you want multiple outfits on otherwise the same person, you'll have to spend an afternoon on Ready Player Me, churn out a few dozen complete avatars, and if you have to convert them for your virtual world, spend some time on converting every single one of them.
In Second Life and OpenSim, you don't have to go through such trouble. That's because avatars are modular, and they're put together in-world instead of in an external editor. They haven't started out at this level of modularity and customisability; it increased whenever Linden Labs introduced new ways of attaching stuff to avatars. And in almost all cases, that stuff was made by users. This eventually even included custom-made bodies; Second Life and OpenSim avatars always have the so-called system body, but it can be rendered invisible, and then you can wear a mesh body instead that looks a lot better.
Now, the body is only that, a usually human body. Everything else can be attached and replaced separately just the same, be it clothes, be it shoes, be it hair, be it jewellery, be it other accessories, be it other body parts, whatever. This doesn't require a separate editor. This can be done in-world. You can actually do a striptease in-world. And you can do it all the way through with one and the same avatar. You don't need half a dozen complete avatars at different stages of disrobing.
To illustrate what I mean, here's a picture of my virtual self.
(@Mastodon users: The picture below this post should go here, and it goes here for everyone else.)I put this avatar together from:
- a shape
- a mesh body including head and limbs
- a skin texture
- a hairbase texture
- a body hair texture (barely visible)
- an eye texture
- hair as an attachment
- glasses as an attachment
- two-piece underwear as textures (not visible)
- socks as textures (not visible)
- a hoodie as an attachment
- a pair of jeans as an attachment
- a pair of shoes as two attachments
Plus some technical stuff:
- a classic hairstyle (which, in this case, creates a bald that doesn't interfere with attachable hair)
- four alpha masks to render a few places on the body invisible which would otherwise clip through the clothes
Add on top a HUD to control certain body settings and an "animation override" running in the viewer rather than being attached to the avatar itself that replaces the default movement animations with better ones.
And that's a male avatar. Female avatars can go even further. Also, it's normal in Second Life to have a headless body and a separate head.
It's also worth mentioning that I've acquired everything the avatar is made of in-world and not from some third-party online app. I've only imported the skin and hairbase textures, but after getting them in-world, exporting them and fixing them in GIMP.
All this can be replaced individually, independently from one another. And most of it (save for the skin, the shape, the eyes and the classic hairstyle) can be omitted entirely. Also, generally, everything can even be modified in-world without the need of an external editor, much less converting back and forth. My glasses, for example, started out as sunglasses; I've made them clear myself
while wearing them.
Even the shape is way more flexible than in other worlds. Again, sometimes you can only adjust the overall size, sometimes probably not even that.
Second Life and OpenSim have:
- 4 sliders for the body as a whole
- 11 sliders for the head
- 11 sliders for the eyes
- 4 sliders for the ears
- 11 sliders for the nose
- 9 sliders for the mouth
- 9 sliders for the chin
- 10 sliders for the upper body
- 9 sliders for the legs
That's 78 sliders to control the size and shape of a male avatar, and almost all of them can even control attached mesh bodies. And that still doesn't include the sliders for classic hair and classic "painted-on" layer clothes.
Why are they so many? Well, this goes back to the early days when basically the only way you could customise your Second Life avatar was by slapping on textures and tinting them. But when mesh came round, it wasn't simply used for one-piece avatars. Whichever parameter a piece of mesh, e.g. a head, could be rigged to was rigged to. So even when someone has made a mesh head in Blender, you can modify that head in-world with a few dozen sliders.
This, by the way, is one important reason why it's so hard to lure people away from Second Life and OpenSim into other virtual worlds: The latter tend to lack in-world building and especially avatar customising features.
