Avatar Uploading Petition, Avatars! Options

[Emotoxic]

Hello everyone! I've decided after a long time of thinking to create my Avatar Uploading Petition. You know how we can upload portraits n' stuff? Well I was thinking that we could upload our own AVATARS! Like we can create it, and then of course whoever accepts these things can look over them to see if they're appropriate, and then your avatar is uploaded. And a button on the furcadian screen is able to be toggled and then you can turn it off and on.



People who signed the Petition:



- Emotoxic
- Sapphiraka
- Alyby
- Cloud The New
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[Skyler Ieaden]

The lag would be staggering. Imagine entering a map like Naia with about 150 furres in it on average, and having to download all of those avatars at once. Your computer wouldn't even disconnect from Furcadia, it would simply crash and die! When you click a person you download their portrait at that point; with avatars they would need to be downloaded when you entered the dream. All at once. It just wouldn't work. (See Second Life for details on just how immensely laggy personalized avatars can make a computer)

[Emotoxic]

You serious? o_o Well. I didn't think there'd be lag?

[Oamey]

Ever play Second Life? It sucks, but they do allow you to mod your character. This could quite easily become possible if Furcadia had a better engine, but instead of Furcadia having to load just one little area of the map, or what is on your screen, I think the client has to load the entire map. So yeah, if we could have an improvement on the engine I would assume many other things would become possible. I mean, displaying a small 450x300 window should like... take no memory at all. I mean, that's like a really small area on your screen. You can load 100s of people, npcs, and objects in a fullscreen game like WoW at a rez of about 600x800 +. So ugh, I really don't see why this would be a lag issue if we got smarter with the way the server and client work...

[Emotoxic]

Oh I'm sorry, I really reeeeally didn't know that it would lag the game or anything o_o then how come portraits don't lag D:!

[Emotoxic]

And no I haven't played second life. I don't want a second life -.-

[Rat The Unloved]

This has been suggested over and over. Unfortunately, as furcadia stands right now (with the server -and- client side software) this sort of thing is not practical. As close as you're likely to get for a while is an "extra local" digo, which has been proposed and would allow you to upload one more local (two are allowed for free) to your dream.

[Auora]

Ever play Second Life? It sucks, but they do allow you to mod your character. This could quite easily become possible if Furcadia had a better engine, but instead of Furcadia having to load just one little area of the map, or what is on your screen, I think the client has to load the entire map. So yeah, if we could have an improvement on the engine I would assume many other things would become possible. I mean, displaying a small 450x300 window should like... take no memory at all. I mean, that's like a really small area on your screen. You can load 100s of people, npcs, and objects in a fullscreen game like WoW at a rez of about 600x800 +. So ugh, I really don't see why this would be a lag issue if we got smarter with the way the server and client work...

The reason why WoW can load that many things at once with little lag is because it has the stored object files on your computer, it doesn't have to download each piece from the internet, just has to recieve the tiny info that says "this player has these items, load these local images" which is faster then trying to download an image over the internet. FF11 had a similar structure and it made for fast load time and very little lag unless there were a lot of people moving around - and that was all caused by a lot of movements at once.

[Seley]

Oh I'm sorry, I really reeeeally didn't know that it would lag the game or anything o_o then how come portraits don't lag D:!

Portraits don't lag because they don't download at all unless you click on the furre who has a custom portrait. Avatars would have to be downloaded whenever somebody with a custom one walked on your screen - so you'd constantly be downloading.

[Gar]

Portrait file: 9k

Localspecies file(1 avatar): 100-300k

Ratio: 1 localspecies is 11-33 portraits.

'Busy' Map is 150 furres, assume 30% have custom avatars. So 50 furres. That's 5-15MB each and every time you enter any busy map. Maybe less if you see those same furres often. Maybe a LOT more if it's a 'rich' map with lots of 'custom avatar' digoed furres. Say 110 of them has a mid-sized avatar (200k) ..and the dream was 1.5MB itself. That's 23.5MB just to enter the dream. Don't you think that dream's popularity would fall off pretty fast?

The Furcadia client is 6.9MB...you're asking for dreams to be inflated to over three times the size of the default client!

Please note that doesn't mean this will never happen. But the economies of scale right now would speak against it.

[Damadar]

Background Downloading while their default avatar is on them. If you set a slider to download at a certain speed, (say, 2k for dialup users and 100k for Broadband users) the lag should be minimal, I imagine.

I've done that with download managers for big files I've pulled while doing other things; it helps a lot.

Using GZip as the compression method, I took Player16.fsh (a 593k file) and shrunk it down to 142k. It also took Player3.fsh (142k) and shrunk it to a 25.2k file. It wouldn't be -impossible- to add the avatars in an efficient manner.

Just because it is technologically feasible, however, doesn't mean you should do it. There are 20 frames to every avatar. Instead of a cursory glance, (which could be given to ports) for offensive material, DEP staff would have to come up with someone to sit there and look at all twenty frames of animation to make sure one of them isn't offensive.

Not to mention the bandwidth spike. DEP currently uses more than 3 terabytes of Bandwidth a month to host Furcadia as it is. Going with Gar's figures, (30% have a special Digo Avatar) and that avatar is 75k (for a 300k or so avatar file) you've an additional 3.75 megs. Now, 149 of those people will have to download that 3.75 megs, so that's going to pull 558.75 megs of bandwidth from DEP. And that's just one map. Imagine if you took 30% of Furcadia's population, (that'd be 20,000 people) with this digo. Just uploading those avatars would A gig and a half of Bandwidth, if I'm not mistaken, (I could be, I just woke up.)

Add to that every player that has to download an avatar, (Lets say that 50% of Furcadia's population will download 1k of thos avatars,) and you get an additional 225 gigs of bandwidth used each month.

If Furcadia is less than 6TB of bandwidth a month, they could very well be pushing the 6TB limit they've (assumedly) got at Layered Technologies. By going over said Limit, DEP could be forced to pay out up to an additional $500.00 or more each month to keep the game from being shut off at the server.

For now, this idea isn't a good one to implement. Lets focus, instead, on those group packages and that buddy list.

[Ten Lidd]

Eh like what everyone said. But you all forget a few aspects. DEP pays people to clear ports. Think how much more people they'd have to employ to check entire characters. Ontop of that. There's the download. Then there's also Furcadia's Database having to archive the avatar so that it doesn't have to waste bandwidth and time uploading the character each time.

So not only does it stress the User. But it causes DEP to spend alot more Bandwidth, man hours, and hard drive space.

Is that really fair for DEP just so maybe four hundred people can play either Custom or stolen patch characters?

[Gar]

Damadar, I completely forgot about compression, silly me. Yes that does change my figures to certainly less scary numbers..but the proportions are about the same

[Artex]

And let's also not forget that all these graphics will have to be loaded into memory and stay there with the rest of the graphics until you change dreams, possibly in a decompressed state (since transparent RAM compression takes quite a lot of processing power). In busy enough main maps, your client can take up over twice the memory it does right now. This practically makes Furcadia unberable for the low-end machines some people still have, as well as their dialup connection...

What helps places like WoW or SL with resource consumption nowadays is them using your graphics 3D acceleration capabilities and its VRAM to process graphics. Furcadia is not an accelerated piece of software, thus it doesn't matter what graphics adapter do you possess - most of its work is done with your present CPU and RAM rather than the graphic card's...

P.S. This idea can destroy the digo concept and people who bought their special form ain't gonna be happy about it... So either this particular feature would cost a lot more than the most expensive special form, and even so, people will quickly lose interest in the existing digos and would prefer to save for that feature instead. Therefore, all the wings/forms/ferians that DEP created can be effectively thrown away in the not-so-far future...

[Dreamless Dancer]

OPTIONAL:

Someone buys a custom avatar, they get a clickable tag in their description which announce the fact. It would be up to the person taking a look at them to click the link and do a background download of the avatar.

[Artex]

Well, that would be like having a LITA portrait in your description - you want people to see you one way, but you'd still know that the majority isn't even aware of the fact that you have one. I know I'm too lazy to click that desctag (provided that I wasn't lazy to actually look at their description to begin with)...

[Damadar]

That would be a risk the person would take when buying it.

I still don't think the idea should be implemented. At least, not yet.

[Trees]

No likey idea..! ):

[Felorin]

Since the start of Furcadia, this has been the sort of thing we knew people would like the most, if we could get it done. Of course with the kinds of bandwidth, storage, etc. on mid-1990s computers (especially our servers then), it definitely would have been too big a drain on resources.

Over the years, computers keep getting faster, having more RAM and bigger hard drives, internet connections get faster, and bandwidth from hosting sites gets cheaper. I've always been confident that some year, all those things will get good enough that we could put in features like custom avatars without bogging Furcadia down too much. I keep an eye on these things, so someday we'll probably support custom avatars in Furcadia. Just can't say when, yet.

I've seen games that implement things when they're just barely possible, and they turn out to be clunky, unreliable, and slow. My design philosophy is that I'd rather not put things into Furcadia until they can be done in a way that's smooth, reliable, and reasonably fast, so you all can have a good, fun experience.

[Maxwell Silvermaple]

On the one hand, this would be a neat feature, and it would be fun to be able to upload your own avatars the way you can in your own dreams. It has great potential.

However, on the other hand, I think it would end up ruining the look of Furcadia. Furcadia is supposed to be about furres, (mostly,) and I like that theme. But if you allow custom avatars throughout the whole game, that theme would be diminished, and you'd get a bunch of vampires, anime characters and Doom monsters, etc., roaming around the main maps instead of furres. It would become a hodgepodge of chaos. Not to mention that there would no longer be a point to buying digos that you could simply upload.

Add on top of that the fact that you just KNOW most of the avatars would be second or third rate designs, because creating good avatars takes time that most people wouldn't be willing to spend, and the visual quality of the game would plummet. I think custom avatars inside personal dreams is fantastic, and I use them myself. But I think that's where it should stay.