Feature Requests

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Update the Bake Service/Bakes on Mesh for 2k textures
In regards to the 2k texture project as a whole, updating the bake service is a very important part and I implore that the priority for this is raised. I know that this feature is planned. However from being at, watching and reading logs of various meeting groups, the Lab doesn't rate this as a high priority, and is seeking more feedback from the community. If 2k textures as a feature goes live grid-wide and for all viewers - and the bake service is not updated alongside it - creators of bodies, skins, skin-tight clothing and so on will abandon Bakes on Mesh and adopt the old 'applier' method to get those high-resolution textures onto the bodies. They will not wait for an eventual bake service update in the future. This is bad for everybody, as it means bodies will be encouraged to add or continue to support 'onion layers' which are poor for graphics and network performance. For those who don't know - onion layers are duplicates of the body mesh, made a tiny bit bigger so its textures lay on top of the layer below. This means more mesh to render and download. Appliers are also bad for creators and users of add-on body parts (replacement chests, thigh squish, hands & feet) as we rely on Bakes on Mesh to make our products functional at the base level - most bodies do not provide support for addons to plug in to their applier scripts and have not done so for years. I feel that the 2k texture feature should not go live for the official general release viewer(s) until bakes on mesh is taken into account and fully supported. Thanks for your time!
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in progress

Nonbinary avatar shape (and just more dynamic base avatar shape settings)
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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in progress