Skirting the Issue

I am something of a trousers wearer in SL. There’s a stunning frock or two in the Cortes wardrobe but I reach most often for the trusty denim. It’s partly because I know that when I sit down I’m going to end up exposing rather unlovely but necessary “glitch” pants beneath my lovely prim skirt. Don’t these glitch pants remind you of lurid 100% lycra sportswear haunting RL gyms? I also have to fight off flashbacks to my grandmother’s washing line in rural Ireland, circa 1973. So, when Dana sent me to explore scripted skirts, and after she explained that she wasn’t talking about the ones favoured by exotic dancers, I got all excited.

I wound up at NU Gear, the home of the recently launched Intelliskirt. This script promises the wearer to walk run, sit and fly whilst wearing a natural looking skirt. No more watching the fabric of your skirt drop through the bottom of your seat. No more unsightly glitch! What’s more, there are various purchase options available with the Intelliskirt. A single use costs L$50 or you can buy a multi use version for L$200. Considering that multi scripts for similar products cost L$2000, it seems a steal.

I rush home with my purchase, determined to revolutionise my wardrobe. Ten minutes later in the privacy of my own home, I am convinced of my own ineptitude. The instructions for inserting a script into a modifiable skirt seem simple enough but, drag as I might, the script doesn’t want to drop into my chosen prim skirt. Luckily, a friend responds to my whining IM and tells me to rezz the skirt, edit the linked parts and drop the notecard and script into the root prim. So now I possess a scripted skirt and I know what a root prim is. SL is educational!!

Once the skirt is fitted, the Intelliskirt does exactly what it promises and the most arduous part is the rotating and positioning for all of your positions. However, this will be child’s play to anyone who has spent an afternoon fiddling with the position of a shoe. Just don’t try it while you have an important IM conversation going on!

Encouraged but cautious, I venture out to explore other skirt scripts. Many are personal creations of the clothes designers and some scripts are copiable to other skirts. But I must say that I didn’t find one that seemed to allow the same flexibility to my skirts. So, all in all, I am impressed, but I’m still not moving out of my trousers for good. One of the remaining drawbacks is that with multi-pose HUDs, a scripted skirt is limited to one sit or one sit ground pose at a time. Change your sit pose and your skirt still retains the programmed sit position. Exposing those lovely glitch pants. Hmmm.