Here Comes An Epic Suggestion! :o, Making your own digos to use. Options

[Sapphirus]

I was wondering, can people create their own avatar/digos for their characters personally and be able to use them in furcadia? Like for a certain payment a month for them, and a payment of installing them onto Furcadia.



Like for example: a friend of mine made a perfectly done avatar of my character to use in her dream, etc etc. I'd love to use it outside the dream too; with her permission. Would be fun xD



I added the payment idea because without some sort of profit given to the DEP, that suggestion being a free feature by itself can be a money-losing situation because people would rather have their characters done instead of buying digos from the market..... ^^;

[Kamose]

This popular suggestion has been rejected on the grounds that it would create massive lag and would give players too much control over the appearance of main maps. See Frequently Suggested Avatars for other threads that discuss this.

In 2004, Talzhemir wrote an excellent explanation of why we won't see custom avatars. Although it's an old post, most of her points are still relevant.

2. FURREALITY

I'm against patching individuals' avatars in Furcadia because that gives more main-map control away than I want to. Furcadia is, first and foremost... furries. I've got nothing against walking teapots or stormclouds, but we're advertising ourselves as a "furry" place, and, by Mickey, that's what patrons are gonna get.

I'm grateful that Furcadia players tend to upload mostly furry animal portraits. Every so often, though, there are some non-furry ones. As long as they're not R-rated, we just smile, and say Thank you VERY much.

Having custom walkabouts on the main maps would be much more disruptive, though. I say this because the games I've seen that permitted it (for example, http://www.thepalace.com/) were chaotic and "twinky." By that, I mean, the avatars that people tended to choose were as extremely god-like as they could find, and sometimes they weren't a character, they were just a big picture of a
face.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with an anything-goes kind of game like that but if done on Furcadia, it would have severely hurt the potential for Strict RP.

(While they're an almost tiny minority, Strict RPers tend to also be the furres who give the most of themselves. I strongly want to give them something back if we can.)

3. DOWNLOADS: THE DREADED N-SQUARED OVERHEAD PROBLEM

Bear in mind that Furcadia runs on ONE machine. Every portrait being viewed for the first time is being spewed out the same byte spiggot. A portrait is 10K. A small avatar such as the bunny is about 82K.

Viewing a portrait doesn't affect what you see when you move around the little scenery window. It takes a fast machine just a blink but a player on a slower connection (say dial-up) would be frozen for around 4 seconds each time a new walkabout was downloaded.

Now imagine what would happen to them if they walked into a Dream where 5 furres with custom walkabouts are standing there.

Bear in mind that, as this furre had to get 5 new downloads, at some point, all of those 5 also got sent copies of each other.

(If the number of furres is 5, then the number of downloads total is 5 to the second power, or, 25. N to the second power, or N-Squared. This is the dreaded N-Squared Overhead problem, where the resources needed for things you trade this way can skyrocket out of control fairly fast!)

When you buy a Port, you're partly paying for some DEP person to peek at it and okay it. But a bit of your moolah also went to defray the future bandwidth sapped by every time someone had to download it to look at it.

4. MUTUALNESS

For those who had limited bandwidth, I didn't think toggling Custom Walkabouts to "OFF" was a good idea. It solves the freezing problem but Furcadia is meant to have "mutualness", meaning, we all see the same thing. You could patch all your avatars to be fruits with big eyes and big feet but you have to go fairly out of your way to accomplish it.

Knowing that we are seeing the same thing brings a sense of unity with others in our virtual space. Experiencing different things drives us apart like a wall or wedge.

I wouldn't favor letting furres see the custom avatars but letting others turn them off. It kicks mutualness in the 'nads. Some furres seeing furres, and others seeing a giant talking apple, is confusing.

When someone turns their Music or Sound FX off, Mutuality has just been kicked in the shins. We didn't like adding it but we did see the point and we added the buttons.

[Sapphirus]

In 2004, Talzhemir wrote an excellent explanation of why we are unlikely to see custom avatars. Although it's an old post, most of her points are still relevant.

Thanks for letting me know Kamose <333