What avi/pet sites do you like the most?
 

What avi/pet sites do you like the most & why?

I used to goto roliana & a bunch of other places. most pet sites are lame but im somehow still on neopets.

The only site I still go to after all this time is a little place by the name of Trisphee. It's not as active as it used to be but there's a lot of clever stuff you can do with your avatar that you can't really do on sites like Gaia -- and it hasn't sold out to the almighty dollar like Gaia, either.

I used to be around on Flight Rising and DragonCave, along with Moshi Monsters, but I've sort of lost touch with all three. Oh, and Club Penguin (Rewritten).

Right now Trisphee and Panth~

trisphee is actually my favourite over the others. mostly because it doesn't use flash (gaiaonline), has minimal advertizing and *INFINITE LAYERS*.

I've been on all of them at some point, but Trisphee is my favorite. I work over at Voltra as well, but I don't spend as much time there as I should.

Voltra looks interesting. I'll take a look at it.

Checked Voltra out a bit -- it looks neat. Not a lot of items in the shops, though, there's probably more than a few event items.

"Doesn't use Flash" was one of the driving factors in Trisphee's implementation, actually. Even when Flash was still popular on desktop browsers, it didn't work on phones, and we wanted to be smartphone-compatible from the start.

ye. a lot of stuff can be done in HTML5 now.

The avatar editor isn't even HTML5. It's compatible with Internet Explorer 7!

(The rest of the site requires at least IE9 for proper rendering, we ditched support for the older versions when we redid the UI, and the next update is going to drop support for IE9 and IE10 and only support 11. And maybe not even that.)

ohoh, nice.

idk anyone that uses IE7, though.

I kept misreading infinite layer as infinite lasers.

infinite lasers, you say? ;)c

I don't think anyone does. It's just that the old editor still supports it, because it's old and quite stable.

The new one does not, but it has lingering bugs which prevent me from releasing it as anything more than a "beta" option.

YES
more event items than anything else |D


I LIKE TRISPHEE THE MOST and it's definitely not because the question is being asked here

makes sense tbh.

i've never heard of voltra, what is it's main draw?

i was a tad tired last night, but will we be able to use the old editor if the newer one gets released?

We're not going to release the new one officially until it covers everything the old one can do. At that point we're not likely to keep the old one around because we intend to add more features and it'd kinda suck to have to keep going back to add them to two separate editors.

ahh, that makes sense.

small feet, big head
many rainbow recolors but not as much as trisphee

idk what avatar sites' obsessions are with big heads and chibified bodies tbh.

hahaha, i've hardly seen any sites that don't like big heads and small feet x'''D for sure it reminds me of that one goth site where everything was 20 shades of neon and raccoon-stripe ponytails were everywhere

the obsession though is actually hair. big heads means big hair and small bodies mean you do not have to commit to large avatars

Big heads are to have more room for facial expressions and makeup and stuff. Since faces are the most individually-identifiable part of the body, the detail there matters more than anywhere else.

yeah but things usually seem proportionally off in that regard, hence why i heavily dislike the style.

for sure it isn't for everyone XD

besides, there's a lot more than just the face to tell the differences between people?

heads in general work. at least when it comes to art and customization XD

Yes and no. Human brains are wired for facial recognition. It triggers more accurately and more rapidly than basically any other form of perception.

Sure, we CAN tell who someone is by other factors -- uniforms work for this purpose -- but for distinguishing which specific individual someone is, faces work best and everything else takes more effort.

not sure how to respond to that. i'm not good at remembering faces too well, but i can recognise them if they're in front of me?

plus there's that whole thing where you can't recognise faces no matter what.

also, Cube World is coming out soon.

this seems to be moving away from avatars and art and moving towards actual human faces which isn't quite the same at all, especially since the needs of the viewer is a bit different in each case. with aatars the faces change and so theme often becomes more important than facial distinction right away, in fact people seem quite willing to disregard faces if a theme matches close enough and 'body double' avatars are rarely told apart by the faces on them

i've also done some outside study and have noticed that identical faces are given a pass in both media and in individually purchased art. i have also seen and experienced individuals accepting the complete removal of distinct facial features when images are small enough as long as the integrity of the profile is maintained and it is done almost entirely through hair

of course if you watch anime you'll notice this all of the time. a specific face is picked for a few different characters and they are instead made distinct through colours and haircuts(which makes sense if you are trying to reduce workload especially since you cannot be lazy with hair regardless of the work in the face). as long as the emotions track correctly the rest means very little

Well, sure, I'm not saying that avatar faces have the same importance for identification. But we ARE wired to identify facial features. We perceive them as important. (This is in fact the explicitly-stated rationale for the design of Bratz dolls.) So art styles that emphasize the face and deemphasize other parts of the body are meant to provide a bigger canvas to play with in a place that people notice.

there is a distinct difference between emphasizing the face area and actually giving importance to faces themselves. in your bratz comparison the faces are intentionally given near identical faces. there is no importants given to making the faces distinct from each other because you use the colours to identify the characters not the faces. they need to have a 'like' face because the one face type they share is the distinction. you are not telling one doll from another you are telling a bratz doll from a different other brand of doll and that is not unlike how it is done in reductionist art(arguably avatar art is reductionist as everything must match at least a little bit to all other parts in style and execution)

what you are arguing is a different thing from what the conversation is about. you are not looking at this as an artist but as a consumer of said art. of course since my job is drawing characters and creating characters for others to draw so i will admit i am only looking at this from the artists' side and not the consumer side

No, I think I'm just being misunderstood. I'm saying that because we're wired to recognize faces, that means that faces make for a good place to do creative things.

well that was never contested X''D the conversation was about big heads, haha

Well, it follows: Because faces are a good place for creativity, big faces give more room, so there's a good solid reason to have big faces on an avatar site.

that is conjecture X''D justbecause it /could/ doesn't mean it /is/ and the numbers don't really pan out. look at avatar sites, at artoons, at non-realistic art in general and you will see a trend(over many decades, geographical locations and cultures) that reduces facial distinction and emphasizes unique(within the context of the current space) outlines. the shorthand for that recognition in human-shaped characters is generally art as we have very strong social attachments to hair in almost every culture and it is the one pert of the body that gives the most allowances for personal representation. it is socially encouraged that we mark ourselves by what our hair does and does not say about us as individuals and so is often provided as a means of making that distinction in artistic media. in fact it is one of the selling points of avatar websites that there are lots of types of hair for the users even when there is not much of anything else and hair is a widely-chosen item for recolours and set-breaking(it is also used in adoptables and cartoons to make distinctions between same-face/body characters)

Windlyn, Kingdom of Knuffel, Flight Rising, Marapets, Voltra, Pantheon, and here

on an unrelated note the crane game doesn't work on mobile

oh man, i haven't heard of knuffel in forever X''D

wow same.

Also idk if I replied to this thread before but Neopets will forever hold a speshul place in my heart. Their events were...madness. Plot heavy and somewhat difficult puzzles every time. And on regular days, lenny mcducking conundrum. Site even had a bank and their own stock market.