Archive for February, 2016

Those who follow my products have probably noticed a slight change in my product picture template, so I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to explain it a little.

Primitives where a nice and “simple” metric, the problem is that they did not account for many important factors. And I don’t think it’s enough to “just” present the prim count/land impact anymore.

Land Impact

This estimates the object complexity and the burden it places on the region, the physical shape’s complexity is what impacts this value the most, objects that are very small or very big are negatively impacted. It’s the replacement for the old primitive count, and while it is available for most products, there are numerous ways to lower this metric to a point where it doesn’t mean much anymore.

Script count

They have a huge impact on the health of a region. Many avatar accessories have more than 10 scripts to do seemingly mundane functions.

Script count is only one side of the story, it doesn’t tell us how complex those scripts are or how much strain they put on a region, but it will give you an idea of how much memory your object is using.

Draw Weight

This metric is a measure of how taxing this object will be for your (and everyone’s) graphic card and accounts for everything graphical including (but not limited to):

• polygon count.
• material settings.
• texture count.
• texture size.
• whether a mesh is rigged or not.
• animated textures.
• flexi-prims.

You don’t need to know the exact formula, a lower value is almost always better for your SecondLife experience. If you are curious about the draw weight of something you are wearing, simply right-click > edit it and click on “More info”, the “Display Weight” is what you are looking for.

How do I use this?

I Believe that, It is better for SecondLife as a whole if you have all the information available before you decide to support a designer. You don’t have to be a 3D expert to make an educated purchase, but designers should provide more data than the  primitive count.

Built to last by our local blacksmith, this cage has seen its fair share of use and abuse as shown by the amount of edge wear and the corrosion stains on the marble block it was erected upon.

Nonetheless, it will serve its new owner for a long time in exchange for a little bit of hinge grease and a touch of paint…

That’s right! Wait no more! It’s finally out!

• This is the first cage that supports the TouchBound padlock system, it features:
  fully custom mesh, materials and sounds.
• 4 anchor points for TouchBound compatible wearables.
• Expandable pose system with 9 poses included.
• Various settings for public and private use (auto unlock time, auto open, access restriction, etc…) aswell as 10 materials to customize it (UVmaps included).

As usual, you can find it at the KDC Main Store, the SecondLife Marketplace, and on the PrimBay

I’ve just released a major patch for the TouchBound System, the biggest feature is that it adds a new system that allow you to draw multiple leashes from a given person to a specific target, it can be an object with one or more anchor points, or another person’s wearables.

Because there has been a few slight changes in the item<->item communication protocol it is strongly recommended to update!

If you do not want to redo all your adjustments, you can simply copy the scripts over and update the version number in the description of the object, this is a script-only update.

The following TouchBound products are affected:

• All collars.
• The chastity belt.
• All cuffs.
• The paw mittens.
• All PonyPlay bits.
• The stuffed ball gag.
• All piercings.

That’s a total of 44 products, sorry for the inconvenience, I hope that you will enjoy the new feature.

I corrected more TouchBound bugs today, in fact I’m not even sure how long they have existed… Spooky.

That’s the issue when you rewrite half of a script that was fairly “stable”, you just replaced safe – bug free – code by fancy bleeding-edge – untested – code. I’d like to say it’s done, but realistically… it’s done until I stumble on another critical bug while preparing the items for update.

Finalised the textures of the cage, this time in natural sunlight (not in those pictures tho) I also made the anchor plates and they look perfect.

So far the colors are:

• Red
• Yellow
• Blue
• Pink (it looks like a unicorn exploded inside the cage IMHO)
• Black
• Olive drab
• Aged

Please post any color suggestion you may have (with an RGB value pretty please :D)

I’ve almost completed the new chaining system. It requires sort of an “election process” to decide which object will start pulling the avatar, I discovered that more than 2-3 Move2Target in effect on someone’s avatar lead to very bad consequences, event if they all go to the same target!

But this stuff costs memory and It’s dipping too low again so I spent a big part of the day scrambling for extra memory.

Again.

It’s so close to being functional, this is so frustrating.

I might have played Firewatch and it MIGHT have influenced this weekend project…

I spent most of yesterday making an animation system for the cage that can support an arbitrary number of poses, each with their own vertical offset, adjustable by the user.

That wasn’t exactly planned, but oh well…

I’ve done some preliminary changes to allow a given TB item to draw multiple leashes/tethers toward the same object/avatar, which is something that has been requested many times before.

It’s working, but i’m not 100% sure wether it is “bug free” or not. More testing needed.

Alright, I have to admit there is a lot more to do than I thought (wasn’t this cage supposed to be a “small” project?). Here is a little breakdown of what’s done (in green) and what’s left to do (in red):

• TouchBound Locking.
• RLV Relay support to restrict touch distance, tp, cage editing and prevent sit teleport.
• RLV Tracking/teleport of cage occupants on relog.
• Notecard configuration.
• Option to open doors automatically on unlock.
• Option to restrict locking by users and by group.
• Option to have the doors self unlock after a fixed time.
• Sitting with adjustable Z position.
• Custom sound effects for opening/closing/rattling.
• Sitting animations.
• Multiple chaining points inside the cage.
• Texture configuration.
• Final textures.
• Multi tether code for all TB items.

I’m dragging a nasty cold since the Global Game Jam, so my work output has been severely reduced.

Regardless, I’ve been working on a global TouchBound update to increase the flexibility of the chaining system. It’s a bit tricky to integrate within the core system.

I should probably complete the cage first, but the two are (very) loosely connected.