by How about this for a cool project! An Xbox fan has taken it upon themselves to rebuild the classic Xbox 360 Avatar Editor with a "full catalogue" of 21,425 items, accessible via a browser in the form of a website known as 360sona.
The creator shared their website with the Xbox Reddit community earlier today, highlighting how they'd been working on it for most of the year. They also revealed some insight into how they put it together:
"360sona is the Xbox 360 avatar editor running in a browser tab. The full catalogue is in it, 21,425 items across every collection Microsoft released: Halo, Gears, the NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB shops, the University collection, adidas, Puma, all the small third party ones. 2,644 props and every one of them plays its animation.
The rendering is the part that took the longest. The 360 drew avatars with its own shaders, its own skeleton, its own clip format and its own camera presets, none of which is documented. I reverse engineered the pipeline and rebuilt it in WebGL 2, and I test it by diffing my render of an item against the console's render of the same item. They match. So the armour you put on is the real mesh with the real textures, lit the way the console lit it, moving on the real animation data."
The website does ask you to sign in if you're interested in saving your creations (at your own risk, although it only requires a name and password - no email), but you can also just play around with the editor if preferred. It also makes sure to mention that Microsoft created "every item, texture, animation and piece of artwork", and therefore nothing "grants you any licence to that material".
Microsoft is usually happy to allow projects that celebrate Xbox's history such as the Insignia Xbox Live recreation, and this is certainly a fun little blast from the past with a ridiculous number of customisation options.
Perhaps Avatars might make a triumphant comeback in the Xbox Project Helix era? We'll have to wait and see.