When people talk about couples dance animations, they are usually talking about the syncronised pose balls you see on the floor at many clubs. They are slow dances or salsas or some other dance, they are designed to work inside poseballs and getting them to work in a HUD is often either difficult or impossible.

The reason they work in poseballs is because you can easily align two avatars correctly with a set of poseballs. In order for the avatars to look like they are dancing together, you really want them in just the right position with just the right rotation.

Now, HUDs can handle some syncronised animations, but they need to be designed to work with them. The best example of this is a hug animation. When you initiate a hug, the two avatars are squished together and the animation begins. These hug animations are designed to look right if the avatars are facing each other and squished together.

Will a dance work as a hug? Well, maybe, if you are lucky. If the dance animations just happen to look decent when avatars are facing each other and squished together, you can try it as a hug. And of course there are some couples dances that are designed to work in a hugger. Abranimations has some in their couples animator for instance, and those can be used in the EZ Animator Deluxe.

I suspect that most of the available couples dances that poeple would want to use, might not work very well, however. It might be worth a try, but there is no guarantee.

Here is what the macro might look like for a hug for dancing:

[NAME]Slow Dance|[HUG]dance_ani_his,dance_ani_hers,3600,TRUE,/me dances with [TARGET],would like to dance with you.,0.0

• The first part will make sure the name of the the macro on the button will be Slow Dance.
• Then it tells the HUD to start a hug macro. “dance_ani_his” would be the name of the animation the EZ Animator owner will use.
• “dance_ani_hers” would be the name of the animation of his partner.
• 3600 seconds is the duration of the hug
• TRUE means that the avatars will move together before the hug begins.
• “/me dances with [TARGET]” is the emote that will play when the hug begins.
• and “would like to dance with you” is the message the partner will see before the hug begins.
• 0.0 is the distance between the avatars. This tells the EZ Animator to get the avatars as close as possible before the hug begins.

This macro should all be on one line on your notecard, by the way. And the animations would need to be taken out of the poseballs and put inside the HUD. Putting the actual poseballs into the HUD does no good.

Will the EZ Animator ever have better support for couples animations? Well, maybe, but it’s unlikely in the near term. The problem is that you would need to rez poseballs from the HUD to make it work well, and the whole point is that people want to use their couple’s dances without rezzing poseballs. For now, I suggest keeping your couples dances inside the poseballs they came in and rezzing them whenever you want to use them.

For instance, if the name of the macro is “Wave”, you will be able to simply say: /99n wave and the Wave macro will play. Please note that these commands are not sensitive to capitalization. Remember it’s /99n and then the name. That ‘n’ is important.

I’ve also doing a lot of little optimization fixes. I’ve thought of something I can do which should speed up it’s operation. It will likely be something that most people won’t notice, but for those people who use it in laggy clubs, it should help.

Things are really winding down on the new features front for this release. I’ll be mostly working on the new update system this week.