Skin JIRA – Update

Good news!

Also, something exciting looks to be in the works. Chip Midnight asked here:

What I’d love to see is for the addition of a new type of inventory object that’s a container for textures with alpha channels with permissions (in the same way that skins already are) that people could layer over their skins without having to have them modifiable. That would enable a strong secondary market for skin add-on products, tattoos, and make the clothing system far more flexible than it is.

The reply (here) from nyx Linden sounds awesome:

Progress has been made on that and more. We’re currently working on a number of avatar improvements including the addition of alpha masks to the avatar.

We’re also going to be enabling the ability to wear multiple items of the same type. So in theory you could have a “base” skin layer and add on additional layers for makeup, tattoos, etc. There will be some limits, but it should be fairly flexible. I hope to work on some documentation of the plans for the wiki at some point when things settle down.

IMPORTANT: A JIRA issue that everyone needs to vote on

EDIT: Update here!

If you’re not familiar with the Second Life JIRA, then this is your first introduction to it, and it’s an important one. Please take the time to read this post, and then go and vote on the JIRA issue it contains. I’ve posted a quick screencapped tutorial on logging into the JIRA and voting, and you can find it behind the cut.

JIRA issue VWR-12962 is a showstopper: that is, it majorly breaks a massive amount of content in Second Life. It concerns some new code that Linden Lab planned to insert into their new viewer, which changes the order of avatar textures and the way that avatar textures are baked, and causes huge problems for an avatar’s skin. The bug was caught by people using the nightly builds of the test viewer, and this JIRA issue was immediately raised.

What it boils down to is this: every single skin on the Second Life grid that is non-modifiable (which I would estimate to be 85% – 90% of the skins out there) will be completely messed up, because this code means the default makeup (that horrible messy looking lipstick, eyeshadow etc) will show above the skin and be baked down onto it (and since the skin is no-modify, you can’t get rid of the makeup). Modifiable skins will also be messed up, but in a different way. Modifiable skins are usually semi-transparent in places, allowing the wearer to increase colour and tint of areas such as lips and eyebrows, using the SL makeup as a kind of lower layer beneath the skin layer. Of course, since the code is going to put the makeup layer on top of the skin layer, those modifiable skins will be useless, too.

The typical avatar will go from looking like the guy on the left in the picture below, to looking like the guy on the right:

This JIRA already has comments from some MAJOR people in the skin design industry, from Sachi Vixen of Adam n Eve, Ivey Deschanel of Sn@tch, and Chip Midnight (who made the basic skin templates that many designers work from).

NOTE: This only affects the nightly builds of the test viewer. It will not affect the current ‘gold’ viewer (the main downloadable version on the Second Life website), nor any older official viewers or any third party viewers.

Add your voices to this. Linden Lab have responded and are working on this, but the more votes this issue gets, the better. Hop behind the cut to find out how to vote.