New Ruths for old?

by Tateru Nino Mar 30th 2008 at 2:00AM

Qarl Linden says that he's finished work on a new Ruth for Second Life. Ruth is the default avatar mesh that is placed by the viewer when it is told that a new avatar has come into range. The viewer then requests specific appearance and texture data that provides the unique avatar visuals for that person.

When this process fails, you often wind up with a rather confusing mixture of the female Ruth model intermixed with some features of the unique avatar. Among Second Life users that's called "being Ruthed."

Now, Qarl says, that the Ruth model has been updated for a potential future release.

"Ruth is now an amorphous cloud," says Qarl, "No longer an ugly dwarf." -- The new Ruth model apparently won't accept display attachments until it is replaced by a non-default shape.

It's not clear quite when the new Ruth is going to roll out, but the pace that changes are coming out of Linden Lab lately, it wouldn't surprise us to see it in the 1.19.2 release candidates (that are no doubt coming up within the next couple of weeks).

Thanks to alert reader, Sean Heying for catching this.

Tags: 1.19.2, qarl-linden, sean-heying, second-life, sl-ruth

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Adz Childs said on 8:28AM 3-30-2008

Thats really exciting. I think its clever to make it non-human.

Crap Mariner said on 8:58AM 3-30-2008

Mark my words - they'll bring back the old Ruth and re-label her Ruth Classic.

(At least they're not spending millions having Bill Cosby endorse this ill-fated change like Coke did.)

Nacon said on 11:08AM 3-30-2008

Ha ha... don't count on it. ;)

kanomi said on 11:44AM 3-30-2008

The new Ruth avatar should be Phil "Phil Linden" Rosedale so every so often you get your hopes up he has in fact, come to visit you, then you realize it's not him, and you start to cry.

Marianne McCann said on 12:28PM 3-30-2008

I wonder how this will affect the current ruth? Will new skin and clothing textures be required? How much content will be broken - or will any?

Tateru Nino said on 12:42PM 3-30-2008

We get the impression that this changes the _default_ mesh rather than the _base_ mesh, so technically nothing changes from the content side.

Essentially this provides a placeholder when your own avatar hasn't loaded or won't load.