Medea Destiny
Some kind of cloth simulation would be great, I think everyone agrees on that. Except that it's computationally very expensive, and while it's practical in a game where you've only got one main character and care can be taken to avoid much simulation happening at any one time, SL needs to render up to a hundred (sometimes more) "main characters" at a time.
There's already a feature request in for some kind of cloth simulation tracked here: https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/weighted-clothing-material-with-collision -- in the thread people have discussed some things like collision volumes to stop the mesh intersecting, which was always a problem with the old flexi solutions too. All these things would be great, but maybe there's a computationally cheap way we can at least get part of the way? People have tried things using spare bento bones and animating, but that doesn't coincide with actual avatar movements, so it's really no more than a gimmick.
I admit this is a bit beyond my wheelhouse, but I had a crazy idea, spoke to a few people about it, and they seem to find it intriguing, so I'm bringing it here. I call it "Velocity Bones".
Imagine we have an extra (or maybe a few) bone in the skeleton, which mirrors existing bones, but all motion is
delayed
. When you move your avatar, the velocity bone starts moving a second behind the rest of your avatar, and stops moving a second after it. When you play an animation, the velocity bones will animate as per their mirror bones, but start a second later. This gives a bone that rigged mesh can be weighed to, which will be where you just were a second ago, and catch up with you when you come to rest.
For example, imagine a ponytail with the end of the tail weighted to this velocity bone. You move left, the ponytail will trail to the right. You stop, the end of the tail catches up with you. You jump down from something, it bounces upwards. You dance, the end of the tail takes a little time to catch up with the top of the tail, giving a basic simulation of inertia.
This doesn't solve collision problems, doesn't allow for things being moved by wind, but otherwise could provide us with something akin to what people used to use flexi for with attachments. We could have a cape flowing behind us, that moves dynamically as we fly. We could have moving hair. Clever people might even be able to put a bit of reasonably convincing movement into a dress with it. Best of all, it should be pretty computationally cheap.
As I say it's beyond my technical wheelhouse -- I'm not sure how practical it would be to split-animate a skeleton in this way. However people have been crying out for flexi mesh or
something
for years, and since the idea occurred to me I thought I'd throw it out there and see if it gets any traction.