Archive for April, 2012

Things have been going well for the most part, drawing chains is now handled from the root prim along with a primitive implementation of LockMeister V1.

I removed the “inversion” code which allowed two objects to “invert” the order they have been clicked, it felt like a good idea but it was way too confusing to use when the chain direction would reverse for apparently no reason.

I also ran out of memory. Which is bad…

Because of this, I’ve spent a part of the afternoon re implementing a lot of the code I had removed initially, (tell me about wasting time…). It wasn’t an entire loss tho, now all the “visual” aspects are handled by a child script now, so I have about 16k to play with.

That’s not much considering I still have to re implement the limb database and the animation code.

This little break was much-needed, ( I forgot to say in my earlier post that is was only going for ONE WEEK! ) sadly i didn’t enjoy it as much as i wanted, because i had to reformat my computer (backups, format, fuckups and reinstalling everything) which took about 3 days.

Since monday my time was spent on two things:

• Some changes on ethernia.net, let’s face it, this website is slow (EDIT: MUCH FASTER NOW!).
• More work on TouchBound.

On this second point i started the quite ambitious task of converting the TouchBound base code so an object can draw more than one chain, this is a very “hairy” task because 90% of the code only assume that you have the lock on one side and the chain point on the other.

Those changes would allow items like the chastity belt to exist ( I made a very nice sculpted one and simply shelved it when i realised how complex the script was going to be.

The initial goal hasn’t changed, I’m still working on reducing the differences between all the TouchBound items script wise, and relying more on lists and not if/else stacks.

It’s a pretty daunting task because I will most likely have to rewrite every single TouchBound objects in the end.

I want to thank everyone for their patience while I take care of this… and fail to release the new pony bridle…

Due to several events, my birthday, the french president elections, various trip to my closest relatives and some boring RL things I am obligated to do, I think I’m gonna take a little break.

Of course it doesn’t matter if I suddenly have an irrepressible urge to code.

I need to do some house cleaning in the TouchBound code and then propagate it to all the accessories before i get on with writing the bridle code, here is a sneak peek in no specific order:

1. DONE Move back from the satellite scripts all the code concerning setting prim appearances, there really is no reason anymore to have this in secondary scripts since llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast().
2. DONE Uncap the maximum number of allowed visible locks.
3. DONE Trash the old “Find link number by name” code and replace it by a plain list.
4. TODO Finish LockMeister V2 and implement it.
5. TODO Get rid of at least one satellite script.
6. TODO Propagate all the mentioned changes to all the TouchBound products.

All the textures are more or less assembled, I also made a lighter metal for the buckles and a few LODs, a big thank you as usual to Linden Labs for not supporting custom bump maps, specular maps or anything else that would let me use textures more efficiently.

Anyway, here is the result, and unlike SOME shoes designers, this is IN second life, not a pretty raytraced render in DAZ3D 🙂

I probably rendered … maybe 4 or 5 failed texture batches between Monday and Tuesday, between having the resolution set too low, various errors in the UV padding and several tests. I’m rendering the (hopefully) final version as I’m typing this post. I kept the eyelets painted on, it turns out they look fine as they are, added a little metal KDC logo on the neck strap for branding. Now I’m waiting for those renders to finish so I can complete the composing in photoshop and make the LODs for SL.

After that, it’s either i start modeling one or more bits or script the bridle first. (They are independent objects)

I also added a couple of scripts in my “Free Stuff” category if anyone is interested.

On a side note I am also slowly replacing the current delivery boxes for KDC products for a model that isn’t as easy to break.

Oh! I also have a Flickr page too.