Undoubtedly one of the most common complaints on the Second Life JIRA is the ability to have a separate body art/ tattoo layer. Of course this is not the only JIRA request regarding clothing layers on avatars. However, recently at Nyx Linden’s office hour, information was released that could dramatically change the way we wear our clothes.

Currently the clothes we wear are baked together and uploaded as six textures (head, eyes, hair, upper body, lower body, and skirt) to the servers, from where our friends and fellow residents download them to render our appearance. As well as this being done, a fail-safe has been in place, which also downloads from the server the separate layers, in case a baked texture is not available (this is why editing appearance can help you bake for other residents). Obviously downloading the unbaked layer textures, which are rarely used, is a demanding resource hog. However Nyx and BigPapi Linden are implementing changes to address this. In the future, hoped for release in RC 1.23, when you change your outfit, your client will bake one complete version of that entire outfit (including skin) which viewers will download only instead of that and the individual layers, as it does now.

Not only will this improve the speed at which you download clothing textures, as layers won’t be downloaded as well, it will also open the door for major future developments. You will be in control of how your avatar looks and in the future you will potentially be able to wear anything you want in a tiered manner. At the moment, if you wear tattoo’s on your ‘under’ layers you can’t wear actual underwear. Once the baking developments have been implemented and completed with a rollover period for older clients, you should be able to wear clothes anywhere, even if you wish, wear your underwear outside your pants.

Nyx also announced that as part of these changes, Linden Lab will also look at having a 4th channel in the baked textures, allowing for alpha masking (also another common JIRA request), meaning parts of your avatar will be able to be hidden. This development will hopefully stop transparency issues on many attachments, for instance sculpt shoes and prim avatars, providing you can remove the invisi-prims they currently use.

Content theft is one of the biggest problems facing Second Life. With the current system, all layers being downloaded as well, it opens the doors to special clients built to steal textures. Once these changes have been implemented single layer textures of other avatars will not be sent to the viewer, therefore clothing content theft will be made harder.

In an environment where Linden Lab are often brought into question over the grids stability and ongoing improvements, these developments (which should start rolling into place soon) will effectively kill two birds with one stone.