RL has been seriously kicking my ass lately and it’s been keeping me out of SL a fair bit the last few days. It’s often a struggle between stresses in RL driving me to SL, and being in SL more than i should which raises the amount of the stresses in RL…

Oh, Chrissy says I should say something about her monopolising my time and only wanting to talk about herself. So I have. Oh, and how she’s always mooching money. Her words. She always pays it back though, and quickly.

I did manage to get online this evening for a decent while. It was a deliberate choice to de-stress even though it means I wasn’t able to get done everything I wanted to this weekend. I wasn’t going to anyway, but SL wasn’t actually a large contributor to that. Didn’t really do a whole lot in SL this evening either. Hung around FFF for a while, then the Forum.

I also released version 1.51 of my Chat Enhancer (it’s what I’m calling the RLV_Talker now). It’s really quite slick now. Fast, easily extensible… The framework I’ve built should let me create new capabilities easily, as well as re-use for new products. So far I’ve sold exactly one of the Chat Enhancers (Hi Re!) so it’s definitely a commercial success . When RLV 1.20 comes out though I’ll be able to eliminate a significant shortcoming. There’s going to be a feature that will allow my scripts to be notified when restrictions have changed. This will mean no more polling when nothing is happening, _and_ near instant response time when a relevant restriction has been added.

The next product is going to be an evil titler. Not just any evil titler though, this one is going to have a couple of very significant features. First, for anyone running RLV 1.19 or newer there will be an option to hide their title form them. Second, there will be a discrete mode where only people wearing my titler will see the “Change so-and-so’s title” spam. Finally, I’ll create a companion product that will broadcast a beacon to disable the titlers. This will be aimed primarily at places that are having talks so that the talk isn’t interrupted by “Change so-and-so’s title” spam during the talk.

Having the settings stored offworld is proving to be a great feature. When I delivered the update, my beta tester (Hi again Chrissy!) simply attached the new one and everything was set just like it was before. Sweet.

That leads me to some more ideas: A remote control so that you can change your sub’s name/title from anywhere in SL. Logging of name change activity is another. With the namelist a Dom(me) can provide a list of names the sub can use, but there’s no real way to enforce which is used at any particular time or to even know which was in use. With clever use of the offworld database that can be addressed.

Finally, the offworld database gave me an idea for how to do a product I’ve wanted for a long time. A real outfit manager for the #RLV folder. Here’s the use-case: You’ve got several outfits you like to put together from pieces in different folders. The easy solution is to have everything in a different folder for each outfit combination. The problem comes in when you’ve got nocopy items that are shared by two or more outfits. Solution? Well, there doesn’t appear to be one in SL yet. The biggest problem I see is user-interface. SL’s menu system really isn’t suited for this kind of thing. Not easily anyway. So what I’m thinking is to create a web-based system that will work with an inworld HUD. All the HUD needs to do is send a complete picture of the #RLV structure to the offworld database, and to have a list of defined outfits. Everything else can be handled by the offworld web-system. Might need to get handy at web-system development now…

Related posts:

1. So what’s new?
2. Updates delayed but coming
3. We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave…
4. A quiet sunday, but mostly pleasant
5. New product coming soon, and Chat Enhancer update coming too

5 Responses

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1. 

   Rygel Ryba

   I created an outfit manager called the LustBaby outfit manager that we have for free (search for LBOM on XstreetSL – it's in the FREE ustBaby HUD). We do use web based settings for some of our hypnosis equipment, but I opted to not do it for the outfit manager since it would end up bogging down the web server so much, there's no way I could afford to keep it free AND have to upgrade to a dedicated server. lol

   Here are some of my findings as I developed mine – maybe they can help you if you go on to develop yours.

   Even with the web database though… you're looking at a ton of different calls needing to be made if you are adding bits and bobs from various different locations. A really complex avatar rig is going to need a 2-3 second pause every 2-3 attach commands (especially for attachments – they really drag down the system). So on a really complex avatar, you're looking at 20-30 seconds "Change Time" in some cases. Still better than doing it by hand I suppose, but… it will bog out people near you as well. Best to get it over and done with quickly. There are also memory conditions just storing the names of 100 outfits (and all the other stuff going on – keeping the names of attachments in there too is going to cut down how much you can load off the web per call by even more – and you might have to do several calls to the web for a single outfit if the attachments have long names – a web call can only handle 2048 characters).

   The way I worked around it is to have a set of "base" folders that contain your avatar parts, unides parts, and outer layer clothes parts in it. This way – it's never more than three calls – one for each of those folders.

   You're right, though… No copy things are really a drag. One of the workarounds I have is with "Alt" folders. You have yoru base outfit – and can put yoru no copy stuff into that – and then have various combinations of copyable things in it. That way you can mix and match within that folder structure. Still not perfect… but better than nothing.

   Another add-on that I've been thinking about would use my developer's kit system (a way to make additional plugins for things – like I have one that is a remote control, one that changes you from night to day for werewolf transformations, and so on) to make an attachment that goes on and once attached IT knows where to find the specific RLV location of the no-copy item. Then you are only having the "by-item" attach for the no-copy items needed to complete the outfit. I haven't really figured out all the specifics on that one yet, though… it could adversely affect the "Stripping" and "Get into your Skivvies" part of it all.

   Anyway – good luck with your project and feel free to contact me in world if you need a sounding board. A lot of the things you're considering now are things I already went though.

   August 3, 2009 at 16:27
2. 

   Corvan

   Thanks for the thoughts, it does give me an interesting idea which may or may not be feasible, including (much as I hate the idea from a UI perspective) a notecard based system.

   One thing I've been struggling with a bit (and there may not be a good solution) is how to get the UUID of an avatar without them being present? I can easily get their UUID from a sensor scan, and also from interaction with the avatar. Anyone can see the UUID in the profile of the avatar when using different viewers, is there some way to query for an avatar's UUID? Being able to would allow ownership to be fully set up without the owner needing to be present.

   Come to think of it, that's not necessarily a good thing. Sigh. Looks like I'll need to rework how ownership is managed…

   August 3, 2009 at 17:04
3. 

   Corvan

   That should have said interesting ideas…

   August 3, 2009 at 17:05
4. 

   Rygel Ryba

   Only other way I know of is to "scrape" the user info off the web page call. Not very clean or efficient, but you can do it with PHP or ASP or something like that. For my web database, I just have them register on the site – then they come to a terminal in world and click it (like Xstreet used to do – and onRez and the like). It has their SL name on their registration and in world – so it matches that up and passes the UUID to the web site that way. Then the accounts are "linked."

   Like I said though – the main trick with the whole web thing is to manage the short data burts (you get 2048 characters per call) and the limit in outgoing requests (20 every 15 seconds if I remember right???). Plus, if your product gets really popular, that web traffic is going to cost you a bit of cash too.

   August 3, 2009 at 17:51
5. 

   Corvan

   Thanks, I was afraid of something like that.

   The call rate i think is 20 in 30 seconds, but either way it's not a huge amount. The amount of data per call is definitely a concern, I'm trading off the number of calls with the amount of data already. The new server feature supporting http-in might help there too.

   Traffic isn't a huge deal, I've already got a hosted domain providing 15Gig traffic per month and if these products become so popular that traffic is an issue, I'll be earning enough to cover the excess. Hmm. looking at the dashboard again, the monthly cap is listed as 15360000 MB. That's 14.6 terabytes. I think I'm fine for bandwidth.

   SL's http call limits are more of an issue to be worked with though. Still, it's fun to explore. If there was just some way for a script to write to a notecard, this would all be easily handled in-world.

   The best news for today is that RLV 1.20 has been released and it includes the notify feature I asked for. That's going to eliminate virtually any hint of lag from the Chat Enhancer.

   August 3, 2009 at 19:50