Nonbinary avatar shape (and just more dynamic base avatar shape settings)
in progress
Zoren Manray
As many of us know there is a huge variety of avatars in Second life. It’s a wonderful part of the platform that just allows unlimited expression. However something very old remains from history, an unspoken unnoted legacy setting. Despite all the advancements over the years, the base/classic avatar shape setting still only allows Two Binary options: Male or Female.
This hasn’t fully limited expression though, many creators have found workarounds over the years. Many workarounds just involve setting the base avatar shape for non-human and gender neutral/fluid avatars to female as it allows more variety in size and structure due to odd bulkiness of the SL male avatar. And while it’s all good and fine they are still just workarounds for the lack of a gender neutral base shape. It also leads to one of the ways scripts can try and guess a users chosen gender (OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE) to end up with the wrong result and misgendering users in many cases.
If it was just a hard system limitation that would be extremely hard to fix this would be understandable why it’s left this way. However again looking at (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE) it seems to indicate it’s a RANGE from [0.0, 1.0] which if true means the base avatar system from the beginning has always supported a Gender range from Female to Male and yet the shape editor in the viewer still only allows only two options… Again the question is why?
Thus I propose a third gender neutral option combining mostly based on the dynamic range of size of the female avatar for backwards compatibility with the non overlapping male avatar sliders unlocked. This would solve the issues of a binary choice and allow even more customization of the basic avatar shape.
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Sammy Huntsman
I think another big thing to this, is to enable Male shapes with breasts and even flat-chested female shapes. Among the many types of bodies out there.
Honey Puddles
This may also be worth a look, along a similar vein.
Signal Linden
in progress
Thanks for write-up, Zoren Manray. This has been a longstanding feature request. We actually just received an open source contribution that may address this, which has been pulled into an upcoming maintenance release.
Zoren Manray
I just want to additionally stress again and repost the image from the LSL wiki: From examples I referenced it seems there is already a range built into the backend from the begining that we just cannot access due to binary [F or M] client settings alone. This option possibly might not require any restructuring on the database or server side. It appears to me it might only require the clients to be able to set the value other then [0.0 or 1.0]. How that will actually show up in world is another question, but IF it has always been designed to have a range it likely will still work as seen in the example. The positives being not having the choice of either a super light female or super heavy male base to then hang mesh avatars off of.
Vincent Nacon
I'm afraid that LL won't touch this because of the classic Ruth avatar. They won't ever touch nor make any update to it.
As for making dynamic range... I also have a feeling that someone will complain about it because some part of the sliders fell under their range, even if it's just a portion of it.
Zoren Manray
Vincent Nacon yes backwards compatibility means not too much can be done. However, I also make that point above in that the basic ruth avatar apparently has a range value already really at the least if there was a setting that could set OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE to even 0.1 and give access to all the sliders that don't overlap with each other that would be a nice improvement because there's some deform settings you can only do with a male avatar and some that can only be done with a female.
Vincent Nacon
Zoren Manray I don't think we should be getting gender data from avatar's shape, because there are cases where someone may not realize what shape they're using as they switch between different outfits. Instead, it should be coming from their profile data, but not everyone want to provide that or have it shown in public. It does need a careful rethought on this matter, balancing between personal preference and proper form of coding.
Zoren Manray
Vincent Nacon Well Yeah, I would also love to see an option in profile or elsewhere where someone could specify their pronouns as Neutral, Female, Male, etc. for the preposes of LSL scripts that might want to use that. if people don't want to provide that it isn't terrible as it could just default to neutral.