Monday, February 18, 2008

We have a winner !

Hi, just a quick post to say that Stephan Halley has found the solution of my little enigma :

Q : Who said "'cause I'm more stubborn than a donkey and twice as slow" ?
A : Abraham Simpson to young Homer in The Simpsons.

Stephan also precised that it was in Season 9 Episode 3, but frankly my culture does not span that far...

I said the winner would get a full shibari set but as this product doesn't fit male avatars well... he won the Serious Shackles instead. Along with a gag, for having said the exact episode.

Congratulations Stephan !

Sunday, February 3, 2008

RL v1.10.1, RR v1.13 and the wikis

I've been so busy lately I couldn't even find time to post on my blog. Sorry for staying silent.

As you already know, I have released RL 1.10.1 with many new features (and a few bumps), mostly aimed at furniture and cage designers. The more I work on this project the more easily I can separate different kinds of bondage toys. Attachments you wear, furnitures you sit on, cages you walk in. I'm sure there are more, but that's already a lot because they all are handled totally differently.

I am way too tired to post the list of new features here, but just so you know I have stopped providing the API to the viewer in a text file, and put it on the Second Life wiki instead so it's easier to read and to make sure you're reading the latest version. You can find it there :

RestrainedLife API

Right after that I started working on the next version of all the restraints I sell, mostly to get rid of some bugs but also to make them up-to-date with the RL viewer natively. I have also put a lot of work in reducing the spam for people who don't use the viewer. It had grown to become a big concern to some, lately.

And last but not least, the relay specification. Now that was a tough one. You already know that only objects owned by you can issue commands to your RL viewer, and this is for security reasons. Earlier posts on my blog were talking about how to let task IMs to control the viewer remotely, but it proved to be a bad idea. So a relay was in order, to repeat chat commands sent by in-world objects to the viewer. And not just any relay, a relay that would work with any furniture, and furnitures that would work with any relay. All of them implementing the same specification.

As we don't want another Lockmeister/Lockguard dilemma (furniture makers know what this mean), the spec has to be easy enough, secure enough and robust enough. I could use the precious help of Chorazin and we slowly tested the spec against a cage and a sample relay. And today I could test both at the same time, and it worked at first try ! This was a relief. I know this specification will evolve with time but I think we have solid grounds to have furniture and cages send commands to the user's viewer... I had a shiver up my spine when I entered Chorazin's cage and it suddenly prevented me from teleporting out, editing and rezzing stuff... I was truly stuck.

You can find the specification here :

RL Relay specification

It's a bit technical, but designers should have no problem to understand it. If it's not clear enough, I'll update it anyway.

And what about the Banishment Program ? I am not rushing on it, and I need some rest. Lots of rest. But I'll keep you posted.

Marine

PS : Still nobody found the solution to my little enigma... Here is a tip : it comes from a series. A very popular one.