How things improve in just four months

I don’t know where you looked for heel clicks at SLX, but it seems your investigation wasn’t very systematic. That’s the only possible explanation why you didn’t stumble on MY walk sounds . They are really affordable (50 – 480L$) and they are the best that can be found in SL – I suppose.

AtmoSPHERE

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with an ampersand (&). Sadly, I can’t get rid of it here on the blog.

In practice, I didn’t hear a difference…

Now for the synchronisation. That’s indeed the problem. Before we get “physical avatars” (a feature that might or not come out in 2008… the preview of those was done on June 2006 to a very select group of people…), animations are not really “synchronisable”. You see, they run on the SL client, but the server has no clue of knowing when the animations started or what they are doing. There is no way to retrieve, say, the position of a foot and know when to play the appropriate sound. That notion doesn’t exist. For the servers and the physical engine, an avatar is just a “blob” changing overall position, but the servers don’t really have a clue what you’re doing with your hands and feet.

So one has to work from assumptions. This means measuring how many paces an avatar does per second, using a few more popular animations and a standard avatar height. Give a little margin for the LSL script to run (which also consumes a tiny amount of time), and all you can come up with is an approximation. If someone is claiming to give you one for L$4000, well, what they’re probably including is a default shape and a walking animation, to make sure that the sounds are sync’ed as closely as possible with the movement. Still, sounds take a bit to load properly, as well as the animations, so the first time you teleport to a sim, they might still be out of sync for a while.

Seems like all walking sounds are just synchronized with specific animations, so your solution should be as good as they are.

Ok, but your script solution has two major downsides: First of all the original walking sound would still appear and second and way more important: The script is NOT synchronous to your walking! Of course you could syncronize it with the walking animation you use (if you use only one), but that would be no solution for shoe designers or for people with multible walking animations.

You know, I was doing alot of research and testings with this damn walking sound and simply could not find out anything about it. The original one magically syncronizes with your walking and running animations to perfectly match your footsteps. All I could find out is that it somehow is connected to the original walking animation which starts the sound (overwritten or not).

So what I expect from L$4000 is a synchronous solution. But I have no idea if they found a solution, I am surely not going to try it out for that price!