I thought, perhaps foolishly, that no mod hairs using a resizing script was as bad (and, as far as I am concerned, that’s already pretty bad) as it was going to get. It appears I was wrong, as now there’s clothing using these scripts too. That, frankly, boggles my mind. Perhaps even more so than with hair, only having the option to resize clothing imposes serious limits on the types of avatars that can wear the clothes. Lets say you don’t like looking like two meter tall stick figure? Well, if you resize a prim skirt to fit your hips, you will likely make it way too long by the time it has the right width. With most skirts (especially shorter ones, where the lack of width is more obvious), I sometimes need to stretch it just one way (rather than stretching it symmetrically) and then do a lot of adjusting of individual prims.

So, what about this prim resizer script? Well, as I said before, I am sure its a great idea for people who find editing daunting. Nothing wrong with that idea at all. Except, well, lag. One of the dresses that includes this scripts comes with a notecard that suggests working on a copy and removing the script from it once you are done resizing. Do we really need more scripted things that cause lag? Imagine if everyone has this in their hair, their clothes and their shoes (incidentally, I think it can probably work pretty well for shoes, because foot and leg shape is fairly standard even if size isn’t)? Because I rather doubt most people will remove the scripts. For one thing, it means starting over with a new copy if you want to make some small tweaks.

But even if it wasn’t for the lag (I am not sure how much lag something like this causes, it may not be that much after all), its still a lousy setup for anyone who is comfortable with the edit menu. If you work with the resize all prims option, you don’t get the option to resize only one side. If you work with the individual prim option, you can do the same percentage-based resizing as for all prims, and percentages aren’t exactly going to give you perfect accuracy, and you can alter position and rotation by typing in the new co-ordinates. That is a lot harder and a lot less intuitive than using edit to carefully stretch a prim until it is just the right size or to slowly nudge its position and rotation along to what you need it to be.

No, I am definitely say no thanks to having to work with percentages or with typing in values that you have to guess at because you won’t see until the prim moves whether it was more or less right or not. In addition to this, there’s of course the issue that you can’t otherwise modify clothes. I agree that retexturing of clothing is probably very uncommon, but tinting pieces or modifying the length of sleeves or of pant legs is something I see people discussing quite often. The more I see of this no modify trend, the less I am liking it. It is of course up to every designer to choose the permissions they want to set on their items, but I think this is a bad decision for all the wrong reasons, which won’t do anyone any good in the long run.