This was said to roll out around the end of March, and it’s now April 3rd.
I still don’t know if these changes are good or not… I really hope this can be made optional somehow, because I’m really worried about all of this.
The new algorithm is nice.
The issue of flaring near the hands and feet can be annoying and I’m glad that’s being fixed.
The bulkiness of multiple layers can already be solved by setting the Puffiness of the top layer to 0, but setting Puffiness is a very manual thing that doesn’t even have a UI in the default avatar editor. Most people don’t even know it exists. The only way you can set Puffiness is by manually calling an avatar API or by using third-party tools. This new algorithm would essentially make this process completely automatic so that you wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore.
But if Puffiness already works, wouldn’t it make more sense to just change the default Puffiness value to 0 instead of 1? That would fix the bulkiness of multi-layered outfits for everyone, without ruining any existing configurations.
For reference, here’s the current API documentation for Puffiness:
Controls how much underlying clothing items inflate the current clothing item.
Valid range is -1 to 1. A value of -1 compresses the clothing, body, and all underlying layers such that the clothing itself takes the shape of the body. A value of 0 makes the clothing item fit as if it was the only piece of clothing being worn, compressing all underlying layers. A value of 1 (default) never compresses anything and infinitely inflates over underlying clothing items.
And the new algorithm does not seem to take into account the idea of using negative Puffiness values to further compress your clothes, beyond just deflating multiple stacked layers. Also, in some cases you might actually want to keep multiple layers fully-inflated as mentioned in some other comments here.
I heavily rely on negative Puffiness values for my outfits, so removing it would probably ruin all of my avatars. The only way I could realistically keep my avatar with this change is if I design some custom body to preserve the old fit of my clothes, but that’s just unnecessarily complicated and not something that I or most other users would even know how to do.
While not as significant, I’m also a little worried about the issue of flaring near hands and feet being fixed, because it’s possible that some outfit out there actually relies on the old behavior. It feels like a good change, but you never know.
It just feels too hard to touch LC fitting without affecting any existing outfits, especially since LC has been available for three years now. Really hoping the team can find a solution.
