Avatars and Props
Everything about what's on your head: the outfit editor, where pieces come from, placing and sizing them, sets you've worn before, props left on the floor for others, and what a barkeep can do about a picture that shouldn't be in the bar.
- Opening the editor
- Where pieces come from
- Placing, sizing, removing
- Wearing it
- Worn lately
- Props on the floor
- Rules and limits
- Harry's look
Opening the editor
Four ways in, all the same window: Change avatar / props… in the look picker (the ☺ button opens the picker on a narrow screen), Change avatar… on your own head's right-click menu, typed /avatar, or just paste a picture anywhere in the bar or drag an image file onto it, which opens the editor with that picture already in. The window shows your head at 132×132 with every piece you're wearing drawn on it; the dashed square in the middle is your 44×44 smiley. The 2× button in the corner doubles the preview for fiddly work and remembers the choice on that device.
Where pieces come from
| Source | How | Comes in as |
|---|---|---|
| Emoji | The strip shows common ones and the ones you've used lately; type two letters in the box to search by name, or a name with colons, :beer:. Drawn with Twemoji at 44×44, the same on every screen. | a prop |
| The bar's props | The 1995 set: party hat, martini, sunglasses, pirate hat, halo, bow tie, mustache, crown, cigarette, wine bottle, beer, cards, top hat, bunny ears. Cropped to their ink on first use and placed where they were drawn to sit. | a prop |
| An https address | Paste an image URL in the box and press Enter. The bar fetches it through its guard (public https sites only, images under 8 MB; the barowner may keep an allowlist of sites). | an avatar |
| A pasted picture | ⌘V / Ctrl+V with an image on the clipboard, in the editor or anywhere in the bar. | an avatar |
| A dropped file | Drag an image file onto the editor (the card lights up while it hovers) or onto the bar itself. | an avatar |
| Worn lately | Pieces and whole sets you've worn before. See below. | as before |
| The floor | Drag a loose prop from the room onto your own head. See below. | a prop |
"An avatar" means the piece hides your face: the smiley isn't drawn under it, and it's what most people mean by a custom avatar. "A prop" sits on top of the smiley. The box this piece hides my face switches the selected piece between the two; a pasted picture starts as an avatar, an emoji or a bar prop as a prop. Wearing a face-hiding piece takes wear_custom_avs (members by default); bringing a new picture into the bar by address, paste or file takes load_new_avs (clotheshorse by default). Wearing what's already in the bar, and the emoji and the 1995 props, is for everyone.
Placing, sizing, removing
Click a piece in the preview to select it (a dashed frame with a corner handle and a small × appears; the front-most piece under the pointer is the one you get). Drag it to move it; drag the corner to size it, from a quarter to three times, never past the 132 area; pieces bigger than 132×132 are shrunk on the way in. Remove the selected piece with Delete or Backspace, the × at its corner (there for phones and tablets), the Remove piece button, or by dragging it out of the window and letting go. Pieces are drawn in the order added; up to ten at once.
Wearing it
Wear this puts the lot on and closes the window; what you were wearing before is replaced whole. Put the piece on the floor leaves only the selected piece in the room, just in front of you, for others; what you're wearing is untouched. Naked (or typed /naked) takes everything off and gives you your smiley back. Cancel changes nothing, even if you fiddled. Your outfit is kept with your account, so it's on you at the next visit from any device, and a reload keeps it.
Worn lately
The Worn lately strip remembers the last sixteen things you wore: each piece on its own, and, when you wore several at once, the whole set as one tile with a doubled edge. Click a single piece to add it to what's on the canvas; click a set to put that outfit on in place of what's there, exactly as it was. The strip, like your recent emoji, is kept with your account on the bar's server rather than in the browser, so it follows you from a desk to a phone. (Earlier versions kept it in the browser; the first visit after the change hands that list up and forgets it.)
Props on the floor
Props can be left lying in the room for other people, which is most of the fun of them.
| To | Do |
|---|---|
| Put one down | Hold Option (Alt) and drag a prop off your own head; it lands where you let go, just behind the people. (A plain drag on your own head carries you around the room.) Or Take off … on your menu / typed /takeoff drops the topmost one at your feet; or Put the piece on the floor in the editor. |
| Share without losing it | Hold Shift as well as Option and a copy comes off; you keep yours. |
| Pick one up | Drag a loose prop onto your own head. Right-click (or press and hold) it for Pick up, Take a copy, Remove. |
| Copy one on the floor | Option-drag it: the original stays. |
| Move one | Drag it. Anyone can. |
| Remove one | Click to select, then Delete or the small × at its corner; or drag it out of the picture and let go outside. Anyone can bin a loose prop. |
You can never pull anything off someone else's head; they share by taking it off. The floor holds a set number of loose props (forty by default; the oldest goes when it's full) and sweeps them after a day (both are room settings). Barkeeps can clear the floor at once: /clear props, the floor's menu, or Harry, clean the room.
Rules and limits
Every picture that comes in gets a copy on the bar's own server, normalized to PNG with transparency kept, at most 132×132, deduplicated by content; browsers only ever load that copy, never the source site. A picture nobody has worn for six weeks is tidied away. What comes in is decided by the barowner on the Pictures tab: pasting and uploads, addresses, emoji, each on or off, and an allowlist of sites for addresses. A barkeep with ban_props can take a picture off everyone wearing it and ban it from the bar (Take that picture off them on the wearer's menu); a banned picture can't be brought back in by anyone. A ✱ can't be part of a name and isn't a prop; it's the barkeep's mark, drawn in its own face.
Harry's look
Harry's outfit is a room setting. Whoever holds room_authoring right-clicks him and chooses Change Harry's look…: the same editor, with his portrait in the middle instead of a smiley and no floor button. A face-hiding piece replaces his portrait entirely. What he wears is kept per room, and the Harry tab of the settings screen shows how many pieces he has on. Whether he has a head at all on the room's own picture (a ghost, a voice from a spot, or an avatar) is set there too.