Welcome to Gaia! ::

This is good thinking and definitely something to be applied as a third phase option in the site. It would bring in a large number of people and also give us a nice little graphic edge. Well done.

Yeah it would work about as well as gaia on dial up. If we have options to set the avatars so they don't move, people with limited internet could access the site without loading up animations, while still having the functionality for people with faster internet.

It's probably better if we don't worry about people with IE version 5 who are running on a network and sharing dialup. Maybe you're on dialup, I don't know. But if you make it good for people with good internet and have settings that cut it back for people who don't have good internet, it's going to be a lot more advanced than if we built it with 52k dial up in mind.

Yeah, perhaps it could be selected per post, or a drop down menu as such?

Having an animation that doesn't loop, but constantly streams from a server would take up a lot of resources sweatdrop

Having an avi constantly animated won't use up more resources than having it only activate once. Because for this to work, we're going to have to build some program that will take item data and build a gif image out of it, so weather it's looping or not, it should take up about the same amount of data to send to a user.

It's more of a problem for a user with a slow connection or users who don't want to be annoyed by things moving while they're trying to read, than the animation it'self. Although making the animation in the first place may take up a lot of resources...

It defiantly has to be up to user preference, and while we could have the option to play an animation per post, I'd think that'd just get tedious and the whole animation feature wouldn't get used.

I was thinking it would be useful if there was a way it could be activated once a user scrolls down and the image is on the page, but I'm really not sure if that's even possible. After that it could be set to be still and then animate every so often, or only animate that one time.
Having a button under the avi to force an animation would be useful too, if the user misses it and wishes to see it again. Actually, maybe a rollover to see the animation again might not be a bad idea, instead of clogging up the page with buttons...

Having animations to begin with could be an issue, I'm not sure of how it would all work, but I think it may take up a lot of space... Each item would have to have it's own set of animations and would have to overlay a set of corresponding dolls and hair and eyes and all that... but would the site be storing each animation, or would a server have to piece the information together each time it's loaded?
I'd say the server would have to piece it together each time a page is loaded, because keeping every possible animation with every possible combination of items wouldn't be effective use of our resources.

Before we start adding in options for how people want their animations to play, it's probably better to make a system where by the first frame of each poster loads in order and after that the animations in sequence load, then, to save on resources, from a posting settings menu somewhere users can choose weather they want to have them load fully, or at the first frame, which should be sufficient enough to convey an emotion anyway.

The animations themselves should be small in file size, well as small as we can make them. The problem really lies in how much power it takes a server to create these animations. I have no idea about servers... just lag's going to be a problem if the servers have trouble outputting 99999 different animations a minute.

What gaia does is save a single image file and link it to every place it's put so all it's servers do for that is basically find the appropriate image and send the link on.

There's the option of having a file of images for every separate user and as they change their avi, the animation files also change and it would work out similar to gaia in that way.

However, this method is restricting. Each user would be restricted to only have animations that work with every item. You wouldn't be able to have item specific animations. Like an animation for eating their cake they equipped wouldn't be possible if the cake was unequipped, therefore you can't give users eating animations without it looking like they eat nothing when they unequip it.
Also if you've equipped certain items to create a mood, it would all be lost when someone reads your post 5minutes later and you've changed into something completely different. Just like on gaia. I'd kind of like it if gaia made it so it didn't change the avis in past posts. Some people like it like that some people don't.

I'm not sure how far you guys want to take the animations, there are several options available, D : but not all of them are guaranteed to work without hiccups. I think this requires more thought, probably at a later date when we can test out servers or something.