Hi !

It seems that after SL's September 24th 2019 update, the VixenTex plugin contained in the Vixen cuffs (especially the arms ones) tends to crash with a stack-heap collision, which means memory full. Nothing changed in the script but what used to work before stopped working after this SL update. I know the VixenTex plugin has always been borderline full on memory so to mitigate that I optimized it a little more and released an update for it.

The crash occurred when you go to the VixenTex plugin then choose a Preset, and to fix it you'd have to hard-reset the cuffs. Annoying.

With this hotfix, hopefully you won't get a crash anymore. I have checked the EleganceTex, HighbindTex and StrapTex plugins as well, they don't seem to be subject to this crash, only VixenTex. You can get the hotfix by doing a simple update of your Vixen cuffs (and collar if you want) at any of my updaters, you don't need a replacement since the issue is located in the plugin, which is in the main items of the Vixen set.




You can find an updater at the following places in-world :

My little shop

Dark Wishes

Roper's Dark Playground

Chorazin's main store

It looks like an orb floating above a pedestal, just click on it and follow the instructions.

Please note that Pak (where my little shop is) seems very laggy these days and this interferes with the update process. I recommend you try one of the other three slurls in priority. Chorazin's place is the least laggy of all.


Have fun !

Marine


PS : Thank you TotallyIn Corrigible for the heads-up !

PPS : If this script crashes because its memory fills up more than it used to, I expect other scripts to crash in the near future, and needing an update too. I'll stay on the lookout.

Hi,

Sorry for not posting these days and for not releasing anything. I'm still here and hard at work but the two projects I'm working on are big and are not finished yet, so I have nothing to show yet. But be patient :)

This post is about Linden Lab's latest changes to the pricing of the Marketplace, which you can read here. What I am interested about in particular is the fact that they cranked up the merchant fee from 5% to 10%. In plain English, this means that when you buy a product, the merchant used to get 95% of the price (the rest going to LL) and now they receive only 90% of it, for no return at all or any improvement in the service.

If you remember, 6 months ago LL had jacked up the fee of the process credit from 2.5% to 5%, which represents a significant loss per year. I decided back then not to increase the price of any of my products and kept my word.

But now this is beginning to accumulate. First the process credit fee and now this. And I suspect the fee will increase in the future since LL seems to think they have a margin, with Apple's and Google's fees being 30%. It's comparing apples to oranges, if you ask me, no pun intended.

Anyway, all this to say is that this time I don't know what to do. The calculation is simple : before Dec 2nd I received X*0.95 of any sale and now I receive X*0.90, so in order to receive the same amount of money as before, I would have to change the price of every product to X*0.95/0.90 = X*1.0555... Which means an increase of 5.555%. But that would put the cost entirely on the consumer, I would hate it if a merchant did that to me.

So a more just solution would be to divide the increase by two, so the consumer takes half of the cost and I take the other half. In other words, the increase would be about 2.777% only. In practice, that would mean the When You're Hot appliers would go from L$700 to L$720, for example. Not a big increase, but a noticeable one anyway.

I don't know yet what I'll do. I could also completely close my Marketplace store and sell only in-world but let's be honest, the Marketplace is where it's at. For most people, if a product is not on the Marketplace, it does not exist.

I've known about this change the day LL posted it to the blog but I stayed quiet, not really seeing a solution, and I still don't see one. I'm giving it a week to see how much this change impacts my income, probably not much but it won't go unnoticed either, I guess.

In other words, the prices of my Marketplace products won't change before next Monday (Dec 9th). After that... I don't know yet.

Marine

Hi !

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays ! I hope you've been naughty and Santa disciplined you *snickers*

I'm writing this post only to tell you two little things.

Firstly, about the Marketplace fees and what I said I would do after a week... well it's been more than three weeks and I haven't taken any decision yet because I've been a lazy slut very busy and frankly I haven't really noticed much of a difference in the money I got from the Marketplace sales recently compared to before LL increased the fees. There is a difference of course, but it's far from crashing my business so I guess it can wait a bit longer.

Secondly, I hear that Catwa finally added support for materials for the layers of the mesh heads that are not the skin. Better late than never ! However it does not seem to be possible using Omega yet so it looks like I'm going to have to make specific Catwa appliers. I don't know anything about Catwa appliers yet, I need to look into them, but at the very least I will eventually, and preferably soon, update my When You're Hot appliers with them, making them finally compatible with Catwa. It's not done yet, I don't know how much work this will represent, but it will be done and the sooner the better.


Have fun !

Marine

Hi there,

So, I said the other day that I was working on two big projects, and I wouldn't say what... until now.

One of these big projects was Maitreya Lara V5, for which I wrote all the scripts from scratch (we didn't keep anything from the V4 scripts save for the hands and feet animation manager). Not because the old scripts were bad, they were good and fast, but because they couldn't have been adapted to contain all the new features and changes. And boy there are a lot of them!

First of all, if you did not get your Maitreya V5 update yet, you can go to the Maitreya store and click on the redelivery terminal there to get the latest version. You can also get the standalone redelivery HUD that came in the Maitreya Lara Friends and Maitreya V.I.P. groups notices on Jan 31st 2020.

Secondly, please do not contact me for help with Maitreya because I won't provide any support since this product does not belong to me. There is a group for that, "Maitreya Lara Friends", the helpers there are very nice, helpful and knowledgeable. I won't give any details about the internals either as I'm under NDA. Plus I'm not paid for providing customer support anyway since I don't sell Maitreya Lara and I don't get a share on Maitreya sales. If you have a suggestion or a bug to report, please contact one of the helpers in the group, which may escalate it later if it is a valid one.

I'm not going to explain all the changes, they are explained in the manual that can be found here. But the manual doesn't go into much detail so instead, this post will be about some nice tips and tricks that are not obvious at first glance, and that may make your life easier. Lara V5 has a lot more features than Lara V4 and some may feel overwhelmed (although we did our best to make it as streamlined, consistent and fast as possible, more features means more stuff to know).

Bakes On Mesh in particular is a point of friction for some who do not understand what all this stuff means. I will do my best to clear out certain details below.

One thing you need to know is that you cannot break Lara. Feel free to try out stuff, if you don't know what a button does, press it. If you don't like the result, press it again as most are toggles. Try dragging your mouse over the sliders and see the result. Play with the colors. This is how you get to know, tame and own your Lara :)

And if something goes horribly wrong and you do break Lara, the Misc page on the HUD has a nifty little "Reset" button to start anew. And if even that doesn't work, it also has a nifty little "Redeliver" button so you can get a new product without having to go to the store.

If you're a regular of this blog, you know I will go into technical details. If you're not interested in knowing all that techy stuff, don't worry, just let your eyes gloss over all the geekiness and read only the fun stuff.

Lastly, I'm obviously not the only one to post informative stuff about Lara V5. There is a nice video that gets into detail too, you can watch it here. If you don't have enough time, a shorter video, but just as informative, can be watched here.

Ready ? Let's go.



The HUD

The Lara HUD is now an accessory, which means you do not have to keep wearing it at all times, unlike the V4 HUD (which was in charge of the animations among other things so detaching it would stop your hands from animating). All the core management is now done by the Body script contained in the mesh body itself. The layers, which are separate, are not necessary for the product to work either. As long as you wear the Body attachment, your body works and you see your skin. You can wear auto-hides, auto-shapes, use skin appliers etc, and they will all work. It's a good thing to know when you are struggling for attachment slots and/or need to lower your complexity or script footprint (and you wear mesh clothes or use BoM wearables, or you enjoy being naked). The HUD exists solely to let you control your body through manual changes, it is not necessary for the product to work.

If you want to move the HUD to another location on your screen, the best way is to switch to the Layers page (second from tab the left) and to edit the HUD. That way the edit controls are visible on your screen and you can move it that way.


Attention : the HUD is huge and one cannot move a HUD attachment's root prim further than 3 units away from the center of the attachment point (the movement is limited inside a circle when you try), so if you want to move it further you need to attach the HUD to another attachment point. For example, if you want your HUD to the right of your screen instead of left, you may need to attach it to the "top right" attachment point (it is worn on "top left" by default). It works but if doing so moves the HUD outside your screen, don't panic ! Edit another HUD that you're wearing and roll your mouse wheel down to zoom out until you see your Maitreya HUD again. Select it and move it so you can see it without having to zoom out.

I have tested it with the "top right" and "bottom right" attachment points and it works, but make sure that if the HUD is on a certain page (for example Layers) before moving it, you position it so that the same page is visible on the screen at its destination. Otherwise it moves in ways you may not expect and you may have to move it again until it does.

Speaking of which, the HUD stays consistent with the position you've moved it at except after a reset. It always goes back to a pre-defined position on your screen after a reset and you have to move it again once. This might be a problem and I have a few solutions in mind but I have not implemented them yet.




Alpha cuts

The first page on the Lara HUD lets you hide and show parts of your body. Each white face corresponds to a face on your body, or actually to all the corresponding faces of all the layers that you are wearing (skin included). For example, the big upper back face corresponds to that face on the body (skin layer), on the tattoo, on the underwear and on the clothing.


When you click on a face, it hides itself, when you click it again, it shows itself. Easy. This allows you to wear pieces of clothing that are either not perfectly rigged and tend to clip through, or to wear pieces of clothing that are meant to be tighter than your body, like corsets.

Maitreya also has what is called an "auto-hide" which automatically hides some parts of your body when you wear a piece of mesh clothing with such a script in it, and shows them when you detach it. Problem is, in V4 when you wore two such attachments that would hide the same parts, removing one would show the parts in common again, and removing the other would toggle those parts back to hidden. For example, if you wore a mesh shirt that hid your breasts and a mesh jacket that also hid your breasts, removing your jacket would make your breasts poke through your shirt, and removing your shirt would hide your breasts, leaving you with two holes. Not fun.

In V5 it no longer does that. You can wear a shirt and a jacket which both hide your breasts, removing your jacket would no longer show your breasts because those parts "know" that there is still something hiding them (the shirt), and will show themselves only when that something (the shirt) is removed.

The alias buttons (or group buttons) are still there, allowing you to quickly toggle whole parts of your body on and off, for example the upper legs, the belly, the back etc. I don't know it was the case before, but in V5 there is a simple rule to keep in mind in order to know how many times you need to click on an alias button to have that part shown or hidden. The rule is the following :

- If at least one face in one prim of the group is visible, then clicking on that alias button will hide the whole group. For example, if the topmost face of the front outer right upper leg is visible, even if all the other parts of all the other prims in the "upper legs" group are hidden, then clicking on "upper legs" will hide all the 8 prims of the "upper legs" group.

- If ALL the faces of ALL the prims of the group are hidden, then clicking on the corresponding alias button will show them all.



Layers

The most important change in Lara V5 is the fact that the layers (tattoo, underwear and clothing) are now separated from the body. Please note that although the skin is also a layer with a few particularities (not alpha-blended, not detachable, can't be hidden), I will not talk about it in this section, only about the regular detachable layers.

Firstly, the question that comes the most often in the Maitreya Lara Friends group, and by far, is "why is nothing happening when I try to apply a tattoo ?", and the answer is invariably "wear the Tattoo layer first". This change also led a few girls to say "this is too complicated now, it was better before". It wasn't better before, trust me. Sure, you have to wear the layers you need first (or all three if you prefer) but that's really all the additional work you have to do. In fact, since the hands and feet are now part of the body attachment, you don't even lose attachment slots since you gain 3 slots by not having to wear the hands and feet separately, and you lose 3 slots if you wear all 3 layers (which you do not have to do, if you don't use a layer, don't wear it, no sweat).

So, you wear layers, and the HUD is aware of what you are wearing. This is why the Layers page on the Lara HUD has changed completely and even has its own dedicated "Advanced" sliding panel (more on that below).


When you wear layers, they appear on the left part of the page, under "select layer". If you see nothing there, that means you are not wearing any layer so you can't apply anything. The order of the layers is always tattoo first, underwear second, clothing third. If you wear a the Tattoo and Clothing layers and not the Underwear layer, you will see Tattoo on top and Clothing below it, always in that order.

When you select a layer by clicking on it in the "Select Layer" area,

When you detach a layer (either with the cross to its left or manually from your inventory), normally the layer you detach sends a message to the body to say goodbye (so the body can then tell the HUD what layers are remaining). It happens sometimes, if you try to detach two layers in a row, that the list is no longer accurate, showing a layer that is actually no longer attached. There is a precise reason for that, it cannot be fixed so there is a "Refresh" button above the crosses to force the body's main script to recalculate the list of present layers and update the HUD with the current state of affairs.

When you apply something to a layer, the parts you apply to (you can use the Selection Mode tool to select which parts you want the next applier to apply to, if you don't want to apply to the whole body) are automatically shown, for convenience. However, if what you apply is a totally invisible texture (not just any invisible texture, it has to be the one from the library called "*Default Transparent Texture", called "NONE" in the appliers notecards), without materials, then the parts you apply to automatically hide themselves. This allows to solve a problem we had in V4 when using an applier to "clear" a layer, but it would not actually hide it, only clear it, so your video card would still have to render it as well as its shadow, slowing your viewer down in the process. The same "clear" appliers will now not only clear but also hide your layer, as you would expect.

Now, where has the old Glossiness slider gone ? Brace yourself because if you thought it was intricate before, let me introduce you to... the Advanced Layer Panel !


(You click on the "Advanced" button to get it to show, if you hadn't guessed already)

Before we proceed, please know that everything you do on this panel modifies only the currently selected layer in the "Select layer" area above. Each layer retains its own parameters so if you change the color of one layer then select another one, the color swatch will be updated to take the color of that other layer instead (but you won't lose the color you set on the former, they're all independent and they forget nothing). This means that unlike in V4 where the Glossiness value was the same for all three layers, you can now choose a different shine for each layer.

The Glossiness slider is there, as well as two other sliders that I will explain later. But first, I'd like to direct your attention to the Tinting swatch. This is the same control as the old Tint Skin color swatch in V4, except this one is for layers. That's right, you can now tint your applied clothes in V5 !

You can actually choose to tint not only the clothes themselves, but also their shine, by clicking on the "Glossiness" button (not the slider below, please don't be confused). The "Layer" and "Glossiness" buttons are toggles to tint the diffuse and specular textures respectively, if you're technically-minded.

The Advanced Materials section is where all the fun is. This is how you make your layer shiny just the way you want (along with tinting the glossiness, see above, if you're so inclined). The Glossiness slider has exactly the same effect as the one on the Layers page of the V4 HUD, except it changes the glossiness only of the selected layer.

Clicking on the Bump Map and Spec Map buttons turn the bump and specular textures on and off respectively, if you have applied materials on the layer. They work exactly like Slink : if you wear a latex catsuit with grain and creases and you turn Bump Map off, you will look like you're wearing a slick, latex skin without any crease or grain.


You know what the Glossiness does (if you don't, it's easy, the higher the glossiness, the crisper the shine), but Intensity and Environment are new in V5.

Intensity lets you tone the shine down without changing the crispness of the specular shine, it is technically a factor of the glossiness tint. If you left the tint to white, the Intensity slider is exactly equivalent to the Luminosity slider of the color swatch for the shine. If not, the lower the Intensity, the darker the shine, so the less shine you see.

Environment lets the layer reflect the environment lighting around you. It works extremely well with reflection boxes (including my own Env Box). In fact, the Environment slider for the layers and skin (see below) are one of the main reasons why I accepted to work on Maitreya in the first place. Environment is what makes your latex shine like latex should ! I recommend setting it to 20 for latex, not more or you'll look metallic.


Oh, you don't know how to set it to 20 exactly ? Not a problem, read on.

See the "-" and "+" buttons on the left and right of each slider respectively ? They let you tweak the value of the slider by 1 unit if the slider goes from 0 to 255 (like Glossiness and Environment) or by 0.04 if the slider goes from 0 to 1 (like Intensity and Glow). Since 0.04 is equal to 1/250, which is close to 1/255, both types of sliders move at about the same speed when you keep pressing on "+" or "-". But that speed is sloooow. You may want to go faster. Press Ctrl-Alt-T to see invisible things in red and look closely at those "+" and "-" buttons please :


See anything weird ? That's right, the actual buttons are much wider than the "+" and "-" labels they cover. This is because if you click on the label itself, you increase or decrease slowly (by 1 or 0.04 unit each tick), but if you click outside of the label, but still on the button, then you increase or decrease 10x faster ! You can even click and drag over the button.

So to set your Environment shine to 20, slide all the way to 0 (the sliders are extremities-friendly and you don't have to click-click-click, you can click and drag, just like in V4) then click twice on the right of the "+" label. You'll hear two "tick" sounds and you'll know you're exactly at 20.



Skin/Base

This page is simple to understand : it lets you apply default skins, default HD nipples skins, change the shape of your nipples, turn them to HD (making them look better but this might not be compatible with all clothes, it is not controlled by the Alpha page and they may look weird in certain lighting conditions since they're alpha-blended), change the neck shape and size, like in V4, and switch Bakes On Mesh on and off.


Speaking of neck size, I often see concern in the Maitreya group about a line at the neck. There are several possible issues at play, here is how to fix them.

- If you are wearing the Lara mesh body but no mesh head, know that the rigged body and the system head are not rendered the same way (it's not the same place in the viewer code and not the same shaders, believe it or not). This is the primary reason for the existence of the neck fix, that is a special part of the skin layer that is alpha-blended, unlike the rest of the skin, and that allows for a smoother transition between the rigged body and the system head.

- If you are wearing the Lara mesh body and a mesh head as well, both are rendered with the same shaders so you probably do not need the neck fix at all (unless you use two different skins and you cannot find a good tint for one or the other to match well enough). If you turn the neck fix off and you see a gap at the neck, that means the neck sizes are not the same between the two parts. Edit your shape, set your neck size to either 0, 5, 7, 11 or 24, no other number, then click on the corresponding number on the HUD. Do the same with your mesh head if you can, and you will no longer see a gap, the neck will be seamless.


The Advanced Skin Panel (which becomes visible when you press, you guessed it, on the "Advanced" button), however, looks like the one of the Layers page on steroids. But fret not, it's just more of the same controls.


The color swatch, unlike the one on the Layers page, is tied to three parameters instead of two : the skin itself (so you can tint it and tweak your tan), the HD nipples (which color is independent from the skin one), and the glossiness (like on the Layers page). Please note that if you modify the glossiness color, it modifies the color of the shine of the skin AND of the HD nipples at the same time (we didn't have room for a 4th button just for the HD nipples glossiness color).

The lower panel, where the sliders are, is what you'll probably use the most if you're into materials. Before doing anything else, please note that the default skin appliers do NOT include materials, so if you use them and want to make your skin shine, you need to press one of the three "Materials Preset Skin" buttons.

I recommend the first one. It is different and prettier than the V4 one (which was already good). The second one is shinier, the third one is for water droplets. If you don't apply materials with one of these buttons (or with a third party applier that applies materials to the skin), you won't see your skin shine and the sliders will have no effect.


Likewise, you have materials presets for the HD nipples, and I invite you to press and test them for the same reason. Thanks to these buttons, you can have your nipples glistening wet :)

The big "Materials" button is for turning the bump and specular textures on and off. It is the equivalent of the "Bump Map" and "Spec Map" buttons of the Advanced Layer Panel merged together. If the skin applier you used contains either a normal map or a specular map, or both, then the Materials button will be turned on upon application (but you can turn it off yourself afterwards).

No need to explain the sliders again, they work the same way as the Layers ones. However, here is a little trick to help you make your skin look oily.

Simply tune the Glossiness and Intensity all the way up (the left and right sliders if you are using HD nipples, the left ones only otherwise), and set the Environment slider to 10 (click once on the right of its "+" button, remember ?). And wear a reflection box or an Env Box.


Aren't you looking all sexy now ^_^



Auto-hide

Not much to say there as people have known Maitreya's auto-hide since V4, except that the one in V5 has a new feature : you can recall its menu and completely reconfigure it by saying a command on channel 95. Some clothes creators tend to go overboard with their auto-hide and hide too many body parts that are not really necessary to hide as they wouldn't clip anyway, while others mess their auto-hide so badly that you see your skin clips through as if there was no auto-hide at all.

To do this, type "/95" followed by a part of the name of the object the auto-hide is in (for example "jack" for "My Sexy Jacket (pink)"), then a space, then either "menu" or "delete" :

/95 jack menu
      OR
/95 jack delete

The "menu" command simply switches the auto-hide back to configuration mode from finalized mode and lets you reconfigure it as if you were its creator. This allows you to correct the auto-hide if you find its original creator did not make it good enough.

The "delete" command lets you delete the script completely, useful if the product is no-mod and you really don't want or need an auto-hide in it.



Bakes On Mesh

Here we are. Like Naria in her video, I prefer to keep that subject for the last part because it's a big one. And it's not complex because of Maitreya, it's complex because it's complex. I'll try to explain it as simply as possible. But first, if you want to know everything, Linden Lab wrote a comprehensive (if a bit technical) page about Bakes On Mesh : https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/bakes-on-mesh-r1512/

Without your mesh body and without your body alpha mask, your avatar is the original system one. It looks blocky, low-poly by today's standards (it wasn't the case in 2005 but times change) but it has textures. More accurately, what Linden Lab calls the "baked textures", i.e. all the textures of all your system wearables (the inventory items with the clothes icons, they were the main way to get dressed before appliers and mesh clothes), merged together.


"Baked" together by the sim and served to your viewer (and to your eyes) as one single texture per body part. Second Life is not the only 3D platform to do that, if you know a bit of Unity, you might know that UMA (Unity Multipurpose Avatar) does exactly the same thing with its Overlays.

There are several of these baked textures, each one is for a different part of the body. There is the upper body, the lower body (those are the two that are used by Lara in BoM mode), the head (used by mesh heads in BoM mode such as Lelutka, so not relevant here), the eyes, the hair and the skirt. I'm sure I am forgetting a couple but you get the point.

So when you wear wearables, let's say a shirt and pants, the sim "bakes" (merges) your upper skin texture with your shirt and your lower skin texture with your pants then sends the textures to your viewer (ok it's not that simple, your viewer does have the separate textures in cache too but let's not go that deep). It also includes whatever alpha mask you are wearing in these bakes, to hide parts of your body too.

This is all well and good, but what does it have to do with the mesh body, since we don't see the system avatar while wearing the mesh body anyway ? The answer is "Bakes On Mesh", or "BoM" for short. The purpose of BoM is to let your mesh body display the same textures, as if your mesh body was your actual avatar instead of just an attachment like any other. It's actually a very clever trick from LL and a well implemented one too.

It works like this. You might know that some textures in SL are special and rendered in a special way. One of them is the texture specified in the About Land window of a parcel to specify what texture must render as media. In practice, all the viewers nearby render this texture not as a static texture, but as media (a web page, a YouTube video, whatever you see on the web). BoM works the same way, by assigning special textures to the mesh body. Instead of media, those textures render what is on your system avatar. Since the system avatar and your mesh body (Maitreya Lara or otherwise) have roughly the same UV map (i.e. the same way of mapping the textures onto the body), it looks like the system avatar and the mesh avatar show the same textures.

Before Lara V5, Maitreya released a special applier to turn your V4 Lara into BoM mode. Some called it a "BoM relay" but it was not a relay, it was for all intents and purposes a regular applier applying those two special textures onto your body, nothing more, and it worked just fine. Maitreya was not the only brand to do that of course. The problem was to go back to non-BoM, you had to find what skin you had applied to your body before using that special BoM applier, which could be easy or hard depending on how well organized you were. Some users had completely lost their skin appliers and they were stuck.

With Lara V5, you can switch BoM on and off at will by pressing the "Bakes On Mesh" button in the Skin/Base page, the applied skin textures are not forgotten and are re-established automatically without needing you to do anything.

Since "how do I activate BoM" is also a very frequently asked question in the group, here is the answer :



So to recap : when you switch BoM on in the Skin page, your mesh body's skin layer stops rendering its applied textures, and renders the BoM textures (upper and lower body) instead. When you switch BoM off, it renders the applied skin textures again as if nothing happened. While in BoM mode, when you wear system wearables (undershirt, shirt, underpants, pants, tattoos, shoes etc), then you see them appear on your mesh body after a few seconds, after the sim has baked them for you. Yes, I know you don't bake your panties in your oven in real life, "bake" is just a technical term. Stay focused ;)

Is that all ? Not yet but almost. When you switch BoM on, you MUST absolutely remove all the alpha masks that you are wearing to hide your system avatar under the mesh body. In practice, this means the "Maitreya Mesh Body - Alpha" item that is contained in the "Maitreya Mesh Body - Lara V5" box. You might be wearing other alpha masks as well (some mesh heads such as Lelutka include body alpha masks as well). If you turn BoM on and your body becomes invisible, that means you have forgotten to remove your alpha masks.

Alpha masks are useful, however, because they let you hide some parts of your body just -- or almost -- like the alpha cuts on the Alpha page of the Lara HUD. I say "almost" because they hide only the skin, not the other layers, unlike the alpha cuts, since the other layers cannot be switched to BoM (that wouldn't make sense). For example, corsets often come with their own alpha masks to wear in order to hide your waist under your corset, making it look thinner. This used to work only with the system avatar, now it works with mesh bodies too since BoM, and it works with Lara V5 in particular (not in V4 even after using the BoM applier).

If you wonder "why should I wear the old alpha masks when I can simply hide parts of my body on the Alpha page ?", well, you would have to  do it manually every time (unless you use a save stick or an auto-hide), but more importantly, some clothes require to hide the body in ways that the alpha cuts cannot. Alpha masks are more precise and versatile since they don't care about how the faces of the body are cut.

Now, I know that some of you think "BoM is going to make appliers obsolete", but hold your horses please. BoM is just a new tool and it will not make appliers obsolete at all, for several reasons.

Firstly, the textures stick to the skin because they are de facto painted on it (like when you use your system avatar, the clothes are like painted on your skin, this is the same process), so say hello to Mr Butt Crack, Mrs Camel Toe and their kids the Perky Nipple Sisters. To avoid that, Maitreya included the BoM Add-on Parts (see below) that you can wear separately.

Secondly, BoM does not support materials so you still need an applier to add shine to your skin (mixing the two is not a problem since BoM only replaces the skin layer's diffuse textures, not the bump or specular ones). But in that case, your whole skin shines, including the parts that are painted by BoM clothes ! So, BoM is useful but not ideal, and certainly not the applier killer that some people want it to be.

Thirdly, BoM now authorizes the use of 1024x1024 textures while the system avatar can handle only 512x512 per body part (is it still the case today ? I'm not sure). This means that if you use old pre-mesh wearables, chances are they use 512x512 textures and they will look blurry. What was acceptable 6 years ago may not be acceptable now but it's up to you.



The BoM Add-on parts

BoM is very good for tattoos and alpha masks, that's its strong point. Thanks to the new BoM add-on parts, stockings, panties and bras are now also acceptable because the point of the add-on parts is to give a little looseness to your skin layer, as if the painted textures were not so painted anymore. Don't want a camel toe when wearing BoM panties ? Activate the "Pelvis" button on the BoM add-on HUD. Want a little looseness between your breasts when wearing a BoM shirt ? Activate the "Breasts" button. This HUD is easy to use but the "alt" toe-caps need some explanation.

There are two kinds of stockings that you can wear : opaque ones (socks and such) and sheer ones (the rest). If you wear them as an applier onto your underwear layer, no problem, the Lara Underwear layer is loose around the toes, its feet are shaped like socks (the Tattoo layer is different, it fits the skin closely and goes under the nails so don't use it for stockings). But if you wear them as wearables, i.e. on your skin in BoM mode, it will look like they are tattooed on your feet. If you activate the normal toe-caps on the BoM HUD, you will see your toes projected onto the sock surface of the BoM part... not good either.


What you want for sheer stockings is to see the stocking and the toes separately, so two surfaces instead of one.

To do this, you activate the "alt" toe-caps and you play with the tint if they do not match well enough to your taste right off the bat (it often does match without needing any intervention on your part). There are two faces that you can control : the extremity, that's "Face One" and a small line separating it from the rest of the foot, that's "Face Two". For each face, you can change the tint and the opacity independently. With the right setting, you will see your toes in a way you'll like.


For this picture I made Face 1 darker and Face 2 even darker and more opaque. This gives the illusion of a reinforced toe-cap part on the stockings, which makes it look even better.



Reordering the wearables

This is not a Maitreya-focused tip, but a general one that you might already know. If not, consider it forgotten lore. *g*

When you wear system wearables (shirts, undershirts etc), you may want one to render over another. In other words, you want to be able to reorder them without having to unwear one and wear it again to move it to the front of the stack.

To do this, simply open your Appearance window and click on the wrench button :


Then when you hover your cursor over a wearable that is not the only one of its type, you should see arrows. Click on one of the arrows to reorder. You won't see arrows if this wearable is the only one of its type. The reason for this is that you cannot make a tattoo render over a shirt, for good reason. But if you have two shirts, you may want to move one atop of the other and this is how you do it.




That's about it, but if I think of more tips & tricks, I'll add them here.

Have fun and enjoy your new Lara body !

Marine

Hi !

As you may know, LL has released their latest SL viewer with EEP features inside. This is a big change because Windlight settings become actual assets that can be given or sold, like shapes, while they used to be XML files stored locally before.

This is also a big change for the RLV because all the WL commands had to be updated to use EEP instead of Windlight. I couldn't do all this work myself because I didn't have the time, but Chorazin Allen who is in charge of Kokua did most of the work and ported it to the RLV :) Thank you Chorazin !

He also ported the latest feature from LL which allows for camera settings to be stored in XML files.

Now, before you download the new RLV, please be aware that there is a big bug in the SL viewer which made its way into the RLV (since it is based directly on the SL codebase). This bug makes a shiny surface a lot shinier especially when the specular color of the surface is not white. In practice, every girl with a mesh body and some shine looks like a barbie doll. I kid you not ! I even opened a JIRA ticket on the matter, hopefully LL will look into this and fix it because it is breaking content. For this reason, I am not replacing the current RLV (v2.9.26.4) which works fine, but if you absolutely want to try EEP out with the RLV, here is where you can download it :

Link on DropBox

The MD5 hash for the Windows version is :
d6603009d71368179187da992e36ac89

The Linux and Mac versions are proposed by Chorazin at this address :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/RLV/

PS : There are a couple new RLV commands for EEP to support the new sliders like "moisture" and "ice", those are not documented in the API at the time of this writing but they will be soon.

Hi !

Last year I've hinted about the two big projects I was working on. One of them was programming Maitreya V5, released in the beginning of this year, but I've been tight-lipped about the second one which took... nine months. That's three times as much as Maitreya V5, and it is easily more than three times as complex. And when I say nine months I mean all day, every day, no vacations and sometimes no weekends. It is a big one, my biggest SL project by far aside from the RLV itself.

And I'm proud to announce that it is almost finished ! The whole thing is working, I am now entering the last phase which is the making of the demo, the writing of the documentation and finally the release.

The name of the project is Xulabarthath, an old (and completely made-up) Lovecraftian god (*) that you will invoke through ancient and unholy rituals. You will invoke him to do what, you ask ? Well...

Remember Ellen in the New Life movie ?

Before you ask, she's fine, she's enjoying her new life... But that's beside the point. The point is to bring these tentacles to life so that you get to enjoy them too !

That's right, you will invoke some cousin of Cthulhu just to have sex with him. Ok, it might be a little more complicated than that but you'll sort out the details later when you're entangled in his tentacles, m'kay ?

Speaking of tentacles, Xulabarthath's are not the ones in the movie which is a source of inspiration but not a base material, the tentacles we're talking about here look and feel a lot better, are rigged a lot better and can do a lot more stuff. Pardon me for staying vague, I just don't want to spoil the surprise.

The project itself is a game, no less. Hundreds of sounds, dozens of special effects, dozens of smooth animations and what's more, an A.I. (two, in fact). Not an actual deep-learning neural network AI of course, this is SL, but a video game AI created with behavior trees (which is what the best AIs in video games are programmed with) and that's much more than what we have.

I'm not dropping buzzwords here, I created an actual behavior tree engine for this project, and I intend not only to reuse it but also to share it so other people can make projects featuring some AI in SL as well. I'll elaborate on the subject after things settle and I'm certain the AI engine is stable enough. The ultimate goal is to allow developers to make their own NPCs (and why not an AI Dom/me ?) in SL. But that's in the long run, in the meantime Xulabarthath will be like proving grounds for this engine.

The result is that you will play with an entity that will do what it wants with you, having its own objectives but also taking into account your own reactions and preferences, provided it likes you enough. If it dislikes you, it may very well do the opposite of what you want, so behave ! You will be taken, forced and broken, but he may also tease you, make love to you and give you a great time and you will beg for more. It's (almost) entirely up to you.

Beyond the AI, the whole point of the game is to make you feel "there". Most of the effort has been put on making your avatar react to what's happening to her. She will be horny, afraid, winded, suffocated, forced, asleep, etc. Her breathing sounds change with her physical and mental state, and everything makes noise. The squishy tentacles, the steady rhythm of the monster fucking you... it's a whole experience. It looks like I'm dropping buzzwords again, but you'll see that this is not just words.

The good news

- It is compatible with Need For Seed and It's Not Mine, which means you will get messy !

- It is compatible with the Proud Girls.

- It detects if you are gagged (and/or blindfolded and/or bound), changing not only the sounds accordingly but also taking it into account in the AI. For example, the monster will not force you to suck cock if you're ball-gagged.

- Although there is an AI, it can be turned off and controlled by someone else via the included supervision HUD, so your friend can impersonate Xulabarthath (or whatever tentacle alien monster thing that's on their mind) to play with you.

The bad news

- The tentacles are rigged for the Maitreya Lara mesh body. That's bad news if you don't use Lara but since it would be way too much work to make variants for other mesh bodies, I'm afraid it will stay exclusive to Lara.

- It is better to use a Bento mesh head, especially for licking tentacle-cocks, but it seems to work with the system head as well. It just doesn't look as pretty and there is no button (at the time of this writing) to keep the system mouth open. I might do that in the future if it is a popular request, but for now it's not there.

- It will be expensive. I don't know the price yet but it will be probably L$2500 or so (certainly not more). It might look like a lot but you'll understand once you see all that it can do.

- It is NOT compatible with Vajayjay and other rigged mesh vaginas that are not anatomically correct, simply because the tentacles are rigged too and cannot be moved. If you want to use a mesh vagina with the tentacles, I recommend an unrigged one such as VAW.

Please don't ask me for an ETA because I don't know yet. It will probably (with a big emphasis on this word) be ready some time next week or the week after, maybe sooner than that, it all depends on how many more bugs I have to fix. And on RL too.

Before I finish, here are a few pictures to make you salivate.

 Notice that the tentacles can change textures and color, and the lights (which are part of the product) can change color as well. With the powerful HUD that comes with it, this lets you take the photos you want. Of course, what you see here is but a small fraction of what can happen to you during the game.

And here are a few videos too !

(the clicks you hear at the beginning is just me using the HUD buttons to command the tentacle)

(the sounds are random, not looped and not repeated, and there are MANY of them -- you can see an example with this fellatio, but it is true for every single situation in this game)

(please note that although the sound is slightly out of sync with the video, it was not out of sync in-world -- it is designed to stay in sync all the time regardless of the time dilation)

Have fun !

Marine

(*) Tu put things in context, Xulabarthath is one of the Formless Spawn (no he's not acidic), the offsprings of Tsathoggua, son of Yeb who is a Young of Shub-Niggurath who is the Goddess of Fertility, and the son of Yog-Sothoth who is an asshole. Iä !

PS : Yes, I've spent nine months making a hentai game. Normal service will resume shortly after this interlude.

This post is the manual for the Supervision HUD for Xulabarthath from Maison De La Marquise.

The Xulabarthath Supervision HUD ("Head-Up Display") can be used either by the owner of the monster or by a friend of yours. This post assumes that you are the user of the HUD, whether you own a copy of Xulabarthath or not.

The HUD is copy/no-mod/trans and is meant to be given by the player to a friend to supervise her monster. The person using the HUD to supervise someone else's monster does not need to own a copy of the monster themselves.

Please note : You do not need the HUD to play. It is a nice tool, necessary for a friend who wants to supervise your monster, but if you play alone you don't need the HUD to start, pause and reinit a game, as the book can do it as well. You do need the HUD if you want to change the configuration though (such as making the monster use your Proud Girls, setting the default anim etc).

If you use it on yourself (meaning you own a copy of Xulabarthath and you are targeting yourself), then you are called "the player", while if you use it on someone else (who necessarily owns a copy of Xulabarthath, even if you don't), then you are called "the supervisor" because you "supervise" her monster and her game. Being the player also makes you your own supervisor if you use your own HUD. It is possible for several supervisors to supervise the same player, but a HUD can only target one monster at a time.

As the supervisor, the amount of control you exert on her monster is up to you, from just a small influence to total control. In order to target and supervise someone else's monster, you must be authorized by its owner first, and you must be in the same region.

 

The Supervision HUD

The left column of buttons is the options and specific actions, the right column is for setting certain tentacles to chosen states (coil around the the right leg, strangle etc). Every button speaks for itself as it displays either a picture of the action or a text.

The bottom row of buttons is for the layout itself (except the left-most one which is for synchronizing the animation and the motion in case they get out of sync for whatever reason).

You can minimize the HUD by clicking on its top edge, and let it show again by clicking on the name.

Target

To target someone else's monster, click on the Target button on the top left corner of the HUD. You will be presented with a menu containing all the players who currently wear their copies of Xulabarthath and who have authorized you.

If you want to target a friend but her monster has not authorized you to supervise it yet, you must ask her to authorize you first. To do this, she must wear her own Xulabarthath HUD (the same as yours), target herself if she isn't her own target already, and click on the Menu button. She then clicks on "Options" and "Access" and adds you. This must be done only once, her monster retains who is authorized across different sessions. Once done, she can detach her HUD if she doesn't want to use it.

Menu

Clicking on the Menubutton brings up the menu of the supervised monster.

In this menu you can check if the player is restrained by regular restraints (RealRestraint or otherwise), and you can force those states to "off" or "on" as you will by clicking on the appropriate buttons to switch between "off", "as detected" and "on".

Please note that at the time of this writing, there is no way for the monster to automatically detect the Proud Girls, but maybe there will be in the future so the button is already a three-states one instead of a simple switch. Switching Proud Girls support on or off has an effect on several tentacles and on the babies.

For example, if she's ring-gagged but you want the monster to ignore her gag because you want her to still be able to suck tentacle-cock (the monster cannot tell the difference between a full mouth gag and an open mouth gag, all it knows is that the user's chat is suppressed), click on "Gagged" until the symbol is an empty square to force it to "off".

Clicking on Free anim brings you to the default animation to play when the player is free (not playing with the monster). If "Idle" is checked, then the animation will play even when nothing is happening, otherwise the animations only play when something is happening (the girl is winded, fucked, strangled etc). If "None" and "Idle" are checked, this means no animation will play, but the breathing will be heard anyway. Making sure "Idle" is checked ensures the gag will appear when clicking on the "Gag" activity button because the gag part is responsible for handling the breathing sequences (see the FAQ below).

The information also shows on the HUD itself on the "Default" line.

Clicking on the Options button brings you to the options but this button is only available to the player, not to the supervisor.

Play/Pause

Clicking on this button will pause and resume the game, meaning the low-level engine (in charge of moving the tentacles and playing the special effects, among many other tasks) and the high-level engine (the AI which sets the goals and reacts to the player).

Activities

An activity is a task given to the AI to execute it over time, instead of an immediate change of state. When you click on this button the following buttons appear next to the HUD :

Attention, if the AI is already running (i.e. a game is underway), these buttons will do nothing and you will get a message.

The first group of buttons, where there is only the "No Activity" button, cancels whatever activity is currently running.

The second group of buttons (from "Pleasure" to "Strangle") starts the complex activities. Select one and the AI will handle the rest. For example, selecting "Bind" will restrain the girl in different ways, more and more as you press "Bind" again after the last activity is complete.

The third group of buttons (from "No Gag" to "Elec. No limit") starts the simple activities, which are the base bricks of the complex ones. This gives you more control but those activities are by nature shorter.

The fourth group of buttons allows you to stop the active tentacles with "Calm Down" (for example if the girl is being fucked in the pussy, the tentacle will retreat to only coil around her leg) and withdraw all the tentacles with "Withdraw", making them all disappear.

Stats

 

Clicking on this button allows you to set the player's stats directly by giving you a grid of stats to set to 0%, 50% or 100%.

 

"Clear All" will set Energy and Awake to 100% and the rest to 0%.

Setting Energy to 0% will make the girl pant, setting Awake to 0% will make her fall asleep, setting Pleasure to 100% will make her cum (in fact Pleasure will be set to whatever value is high enough to make her cum because the more she cums, the more resistant to orgasm she is so her Pleasure has to be higher). If the Awake field on the HUD has two numbers, the top one indicates the threshold under which the girl falls asleep (this decreases as Drug increases). Likewise, if the Pleasure field on the HUD has two numbers, the top one indicates the threshold to reach in order to cum (this increases as the orgasm resistance increases).

Setting Pain to 100% has no immediate effect but the girl will have trouble catching her breath and her Willpower will be crushed.

Setting Drug to 100% will make her high (crushing her Willpower as well) and setting Gestation to 100% will make her give birth immediately (it is best to set it to 50% instead so the monster has time to prepare in case a game is playing).

Please note that you cannot change your own stats while a game is underway.

Textures & Colors

 

Clicking on this button allows you to change the texture and the color of the monster and babies, as well as the color of the pentagram and lights, and to switch the smoke on or off.

The first row lets you change the texture, all the textures are white except for the first one which is black with white veins. The white parts can then be tinted by clicking on a button in the second group.

The third group lets you tint the ambient light as well as the pentagram (if it is present), the first button turns the light and pentagram off entirely.

The last group lets you turn the black smoke on or off. The pentagram has to be present (worn or rezzed) for that.

Babies

Clicking on this button reveals all the existing babies plus a "Clear All" button (which is the only one visible if there are no babies).

Each baby has its name written on its own couple of buttons (one to show it and one to hide it), if a baby is shown then it will act on its own over time.

 

HUD controls

The left-most button allows you to re-sync the animation of the avatar with the current motion if it looks out of sync to you (you have edited an attachment, freezing your avatar, or you have restarted the animation, or you have minimized your viewer for a moment, or whatever you could think of). For example, if a tentacle is thrusting then the avatar will move accordingly and that requires to be in sync.

The next button allows you to switch the dynamic buttons of the HUD between the left and the right side, that way you can move the HUD where you want on your screen.

The other four buttons let you change the position and the size of the dynamic buttons (the arrows are inverted so that you "scroll" down or up, making the buttons move up and down respectively).

Tentacles controls

 

The right column of buttons each make several dynamic buttons appear to let you control the corresponding tentacles. The top-most one controls the blob (or "base" as it is called on the HUD) which is not the tentacles but the big blob of squishy stuff that keeps the girl in place.

Unlike the other buttons, these ones stay selected when you click on them, to indicate where the tentacles are. If you click on several tentacles buttons in succession, you will see them be selected in the same order, but at their own pace.

Some of those buttons put a tentacle into an active state, a state that makes the stats of the player change over time. For example, fucking the girl makes her pleasure build up and eventually she will cum. This happens regardless of whether game is running. Likewise, if the game is running, the states of the tentacles are periodically renewed, which may make a tentacle go faster by itself (the one in the pussy goes faster as the girl's Pleasure goes up). This does not happen if the game is paused.

Text controls

The HUD has been designed on a 4k screen, so the text might appear out of alignment on a lower resolution. In this case, you can click on one of the two red arrows (next to "RLV") to offset the text up and down.

 

FAQ

Here is a list of known issues and frequently asked questions, in case something confuses you about the HUD.

 

I am the player and I want my friend to control my monster. However, the target does not change when I give the HUD to them.

This is on purpose so you don't have to tell your friend how to target you. All you have to do (once they wear their new HUD) is to authorize them and they will be able to play with you right away. However, if your own target was not yourself before you handed the HUD over, your friend will still target them instead of you so you will have to explain how to fix that.

I click on the Gag button and no gag appears.

Hello there,

Wait, what ?... Who ?

Xulabarthath is, well... you could say a "monster". Or a "god" if you're into the Cthulhu mythos. Or an "alien" if you're into sci-fi. Its nature is a subject of debate, but what is certain is that it is full of tentacles. The big slimy kind. And that it loves to abuse women with them.

In a nutshell, this product is a game. You will invoke Xulabarthath, say what you want from him, and then... anything goes. The monster will have his own objectives and will try to fulfill them while you try to fulfill yours, whatever they are. But as your avatar has definite stats (energy, pleasure, pain...) that fluctuate according to what the monster does and how much you resist and yield, getting your way will not be easy. Unless, of course, your objectives align with the monster's.

If you resist too much, you will waste all your energy and Xulabarthath will have the upper hand and do what he wants with you, while appreciating you less because you're uncooperative. The less the monster appreciates you, the more often and the harder he will punish you, and the less he will take what you like into account, to the point of even doing the opposite on purpose. You don't really want that, do you ?

On the other hand, if you don't resist at all, the monster may like you more but he will have his way with you and you might not really get what you wanted in the first place. Especially if you cooperate while he's doing things that you don't like. The monster will think you actually enjoy it so he will do it more (since he appreciates you more for cooperating, he takes your opinion into account more, heh).

So the "goal" of the game is pretty much to keep some kind of balance between resisting and cooperating.

Well, the real goal of the game is to have fun, and I hope you will have fun while playing with Xulabarthath !

You can find the product on the Marketplace, it costs L$2500. I know this is expensive, but you will see that this price is more than justified. Please try the demo first !

Since a demo is available, this post is not meant to demonstrate the product. The rest of this post is the manual to help you learn how to use this product if you wish. This is why there are no pictures here (and also because I don't want to spoil anything). But the use is very simple : wear the items, click on the book, choose "Invoke" and the game begins. Read the manual only if you want details.

 

Please note :

- This product is designed to fit the Maitreya Lara mesh body only, with the MdlM Proud Girls if you want, but not the Maitreya Petite addon. It may or may not fit other mesh bodies such as Legacy, please try the demo before buying.

- A Bento mesh head is highly recommended but not required.

- Owning Need For Seed and/or It's Not Mine is a plus because Xulabarthath can use them, both of them can even be used at the same time for extra messiness.

- Wearing an Env Box or any reflection box is also a plus because most of the textures of the tentacles are shiny and slimy, so they look even sexier when there are projected lights around.

- There is an easter egg in the demo. The first person who finds it and tells me what it refers to wins a copy of Xulabarthath for free, either for themselves if they haven't bought the product yet, or for a friend of theirs if they did.

Manual

This is the manual for Xulabarthath by Maison De La Marquise. If you are looking for the manual of its Supervision HUD, you can find it here.

Quickstart

1. (optional) If your mesh body and/or head are set to use Bakes On Mesh (i.e. dynamic textures) and you are a RLV user, then move the whole folder to your #RLV folder. It doesn't matter where, just make sure that the Main object is at the same level as the "BoM Wearables" folder, in other words that they are both part of the same folder. In case you mess up and move things around, here is how the folder is initially organized :

2. (optional) If you can rez where you are, I recommend you rez the Pentagram object contained in the folder named "Pentagram (rez or add)", then you sit on it. If you don't, you can wear it instead so you will see the pentagram and the smoke anyway, you might just need to move it up or down manually. To rez it is preferable though because it holds you in place and you won't rotate by mistake after moving your camera. While sitting on it, you can press Page Up and Page Down at any time to adjust your avatar's altitude.

3. Wear the objects located in the root folder (Book, Blob, Head, Legs, Main). If the book is set to be visible, then you should see yourself reading it. If not, it is there but invisible in your right hand (press Ctrl Alt T to see it). Click on it and you'll get a menu.

4. Click on "Invoke". This will start the game. Have fun !

The cum

As pointed above, Xulabarthath can make use of your "Need For Seed" and "It's Not Mine" cum systems. If you own one of them, it is recommended to wear it, if you own both, that's even better, wear both.

In the case of "Need For Seed", Xulabarthath will behave like a "Feed Her Need For Seed" HUD, which means it will automatically open some appliers on your Need For Seed HUD under certain situations (like when he cums on your face), but you then have to apply yourself, he can only suggest the applier (there is no way to force an applier onto a mesh body or a mesh head without its user clicking first, sadly).

In the case of "It's Not Mine", that's easier, you just need to wear the "It's Not Mine" cum system and the "It's Not Mine Interface" object contained in the "(Optional)" folder of this product. That interface allows for an object to send commands to your cum system and control it automatically. In plain English, this means it lets Xulabarthath happily jizz all over your face and body without asking for your opinion.

 

The BoM wearables

The product folder contains two regular wearables in the "BoM Wearables" folder : a tattoo and an alpha mask. If you are an RLV user and have set your mesh body and/or head to use Bakes On Mesh, you do not have to wear them yourself (but don't forget to put your product folder somewhere in your #RLV folder).

If you are not an RLV user and use Bakes On Mesh, you will want to wear them manually. If you do not use Bakes On Mesh and you don't have a mesh head, you can use the Red face Wearable, but the X-ray belly will be useless for you.

If the monster can make you wear those items automatically and you can see them on your body (meaning you are an RLV user, your product folder is in your #RLV and your mesh body and head use Bakes On Mesh or you don't use a mesh head at all), you will see your face turn red while strangled and you will see inside your belly while you're pregnant.

If it cannot, don't worry. Those wearables are nice to have but they are absolutely not required for the game to work.

The HUD

The Supervision HUD can be used either by you to change some options and see your main stats, or by a friend to control your monster and play with you instead of letting you play alone. It is so complex that it requires a blog post of its own, that you can find here.

The persistence

When an update is available or if you reset the monster, you probably don't want to lose your progress, especially your babies and your level. So you can save and load your stats by wearing the "Character Save Device" (sorry but I did not find any more bland name to give it) and clicking on it. You then get a dialog to let you save or load the data.

You can also export the saved data as a text string that you can save into a text file somewhere. You can then import a similar text string later by pasting it into the chat on channel 1 (type "/1 " followed by the text string). Since the text string contains all the saved data, it is encrypted and signed to make tampering difficult. Giving the string to a friend will not let them import it into their own Character Save Device as the encryption and signature are personal.

Please note that you cannot save and load while playing, but you can import from / export to the chat.

The game

Here is how the game plays. The main engine starts a new turn every few seconds, during which it decides what to do next, makes its move, most of the time describes what's happening on the chat (only you can read the text, it doesn't spam other people around), then waits a little before beginning the next turn.

Sometimes, you are asked for a reaction. This takes the form of a dialog that you have 10 seconds to click on. Past that time or after you click on a button, the turn ends. Some buttons might not be available, if your stats are not high enough, they are blanked out. For example, if your Willpower is not high enough, you might not be able to resist much if at all.

Please bear in mind that resisting will not necessarily warrant an immediate punishment, especially if your level is high (but it will make it go down, that's always a punishment in itself). However, the monster will remember your lack of cooperation and it will come back to bite you in the ass later.

You might ask why sometimes you have only one button on the dialog, and why it doesn't choose automatically for you. It's true, it could. But then, you wouldn't see how helpless you are by being forced to pick the only choice that you are given. Heh heh heh.

 

The technical stuff

I better warn you beforehand : this product is heavy in terms of scripting. And slow. Its focus is not on speed (after all each turn lasts several seconds) but on the number of things it can do. Expect some slowness in slow sims though. This is mostly because the many scripts in it talk among each other through link and chat messages, because of course, a single script could not hold 1% of the features and data present in this product. So it is not designed to be used in public sims, it is designed to be used somewhere safe and not too laggy, by yourself or with a friend.

However, all the motions (typically the moving tentacles) are designed to stay in sync with their animations even in slow sims, even when someone TPs in or out, that's even the primary focus of the whole project, even before its AI. At least that part, the motions and special effects (sounds and particles), is very fast.

Speaking of motions, the product is made of rigged mesh attachments, not animesh because you cannot use animesh on rigged mesh, and you cannot wear more than one animesh attachment anyway. So the mesh objects are rigged to the SL avatar's skeleton and move in real time like in stop-motion (don't worry, it looks good), some of them deform in a cartoonish fashion (you couldn't do that with animesh) such as when a tentacle ejaculates. As pointed out above, motions (how a mesh moves), sounds, particles and avatar animations are synchronized automatically, and even if you manage to get them desynchronized, you can synchronize them again with a click on a button on the HUD. If a sound seems out of sync with its motion, for example breathing or moaning, that means your computer is having trouble downloading it fast enough. But nearly all the sounds are short so they should download quickly.

The player stats

During the game, your avatar has stats just like in an RPG :

- Willpower : Your overall ability to resist. It is calculated from all the other stats below. Without giving away the actual formula, the willpower is based upon the lowest value between Energy and Awake (even further lowered depending on how far the other stat is from 100%), but it is also boosted by the Pleasure stat, and lowered by the Pain and Drug stats. Under 50% Willpower, you will have difficulties to resist.

- Energy : Your breathing, your heart rate, your physical shape. The lower the more winded (and weaker). Resisting, being punished, giving birth and cumming consume Energy, resting restores it (slower if you're tired or in pain). Under 25%, you're winded and visibly panting. A low Energy stat crushes your Willpower.

- Awake : Your wakefulness, the lower the more tired you are. At 10% you start falling asleep, unless you're drugged in which case that threshold is lower. You can even be drugged enough that you won't fall asleep at all until you metabolize enough of the drug (this happens from 70% drug and up). Awake only goes up while asleep or while not playing, otherwise it only goes down slowly but steadily. It goes down faster when you're winded, strangled or tortured. A low Awake stat crushes your Willpower. Falling asleep more or less "resets" your stats (except Gestation) but you spend some time doing nothing but sleep. Also Xulabarthath doesn't like when it happens (would you like your sex partner to fall asleep right in the middle ?) so it might decrease your level. And don't expect him to release you because you fall asleep !

- Pleasure : The sexual pleasure that you're feeling. Normally, you cum at 100%, but you also develop a resistance to orgasm when you do so multiple orgasms require even more pleasure (and become more intense). Resistance to orgasm decreases over time. Pleasure boosts Willpower a little.

- Pain : The physical pain that you're inflicted. Punishments generally induce pain, which in turn lowers your Willpower and your ability to recover Energy. Being pleasured too soon after cumming also induces pain. There is no direct effect of being at 100% Pain, and that stat cannot go over 100%.

- Drug : The quantity of cum the monster has made you ingest. The more Drug the lower your Willpower. At 33% you start feeling fuzzy and your eyes cannot focus, and as your Drug stat increases, your eyes become more and more glazed over, until you clearly look high as a kite !

- Gestation : The monster is able (and sometimes willing) to breed. At 10% and over, you are impregnated and the stat will go up inexorably over time. I will say no more on the subject, you will have to discover by yourself. Just know that Gestation tends to be pleasurable but also consumes Energy, more and more as it advances.

- Mood : This stat depends on your global responses (if you responded more positively than negatively during the game, your mood will tend to be higher) as well as on the current drug, pain and pleasure levels. It is not a number but a qualifier and determines your idle animation and breathing.

- Level : A very important stat which translates the appreciaction the monster feels towards you. It depends on a lot of factors, notably how well your responses are aligned with the monster's needs, how well you beg, things like that. It determines how much the monster takes your preferences into account when deciding something, but also his tolerance towards your resistance. "Girl" and higher is good, "Heathen" and lower is bad because the monster will gradually do the opposite of what you like. It is much easier to go down in Level than up, so you better cooperate ! Attention, the closer you get from the extremes ("Slave" being the lowest and "Chosen" being the highest), the lower the effect of the response, good or bad, in other words the closest you are from the extremes, the longer it will take to make your level change up or down.

The babies

Eventually, maybe not right off the first play, but at some point, you will give birth to one of Xulabarthath's offsprings. Its shape and personality may vary, but the point is that your baby will stay with you even after the game is over. You can even control it moderately with the HUD ! Well, you can only decide to hide and show it on your body, you can't control what it does because it's your baby, not a toy, it has its own free will ! Yes you can have several babies, but you have to give birth several times for that. Each baby is different and has its own name. No you cannot sell them, they're not pets.

There are only so many babies you can give birth to. Past this number, you will not be able to get pregnant anymore. There is currently no way to "dismiss" a baby if you want to go through the pregnancy again, except by starting afresh with a new redelivery without using the Character Save Device.

When you're out and about and want to bring your babies with you, you only need to wear the Main part (and maybe the HUD if you want to hide and show some of them at some point, but you don't have to keep the HUD on at all times). Some babies require you to also wear the Legs part if you want to see them. It is explained to you when you give birth. In order to start their AI and not the monster's, click on your book and choose "Babies" (this button appears only if you have given birth to at least one baby).

Now, here's a little tip for you. You want to take a walk outside with Iyalith and Zakur ? But you want them to behave and not tease you and make you look like a total slut before everyone ? Simply make them appear with the HUD but don't click on "Babies" on your book (or click on "Reinit" if you did). Then you can detach everything except the Main part and you're good to go !

 

The book

The "Book Of Eternal Pleasure" object is meant to let you start the game, but it is not otherwise useful while playing the game, and can be detached. You get the menu immediately when attaching it (or when logging on while wearing it), but you can also get the menu by clicking on it, even if you are RLV-restricted from touching stuff.

- Invoke : This is the way to start a game. It resets the monster and babies AI (if you have babies) and runs the monster AI again.

- Babies : Clicking on this button starts a game but only for the babies, not for the monster. It allows you to let your babies play with you at will instead of staying static. You can see this button only if you have at least one baby.

- Beg : Clicking on this button during a game lets you steer the monster your way a little, indicating what you would like him to do. If your begging matches what the monster likes, he will like you more (and acknowledge your pleas), otherwise he will like you less and possibly punish you, so use with caution ! This button is hidden if you're gagged.

- Reinit : This stops the two AIs and re-initializes the game (but not your stats except Gestation). It also removes all the tentacles. This will not make you lose any data such as your Level or your babies.

- Play : This switch allows you to pause and resume the game without needing the HUD. It does the same thing as the "Play" button on the HUD.

- Show book : This switch allows you show and hide the book while standing and not playing. When the book is visible, it also makes you play a "hold the book and read it" animation.

The RLV support

Naturally, this product has some RLV tricks up its sleeve. If your viewer is an RLV or RLVa one, and its RLV features are active, the monster will notice. Here is what it can then do :

- When the game goes through the invocation, the world goes black (I recommend moving to a place where the walls and floors do not have materials so you are really in the dark) and your vision is restricted to only your avatar and the monster. Your camera is also restricted to stay close to your avatar.

- When the game is running, most of the attachments are locked on you including the head tentacles that gag and blindfold you.

- When you're gagged by the monster, your regular chat is suppressed (not redirected, just suppressed). If you are wearing another RR gag at the same time, then the monster's gag will behave like a weak tape gag so the RR gag will supersede it and let you mmph normally.

- When you're blindfolded by the monster, the tentacle blindfold restricts your vision like an Opaque RR blindfold. Attention, it does NOT rez a prim to block your view because the point is to let you see yourself. In other words, if you're using RLVa, which at the time of this writing does not support vision restriction spheres, your vision will be more restricted only in the sense that your camera will be restricted to a smaller distance from your avatar, but that's it. If you want the full experience, you need to use an RLV that implements the vision restriction spheres properly, like the original RLV, Kokua or Cool VL for example.

- When you are strangled, if you are using Bakes On Mesh for your mesh or are using a system head and your Xulabarthath folder is somewhere inside your #RLV, then you will see your face turn red.

- When you are pregnant, if you are using Bakes On Mesh for your mesh body and your Xulabarthath folder is somewhere inside your #RLV, then you will see through your belly to see the baby in your womb.

- You can touch the book regardless of your current RLV touch restrictions.

The FAQ

Such a complex product is bound to raise questions and concerns. And sometimes you might experience bugs or be surprised by some difficult to understand behaviors. This FAQ section is here to help you answer your concerns and troubleshoot apparent bugs.

 

My eyes are straight, they won't move even with my mesh head HUD.

You're drugged ! Also, you need more cum so keep sucking.

Ok, I'm drugged but the white shroud over my eyes is not fitting correctly.

You're probably using a mesh head which eye sockets are not aligned with the system eyes, which the white glow is rigged to. Since there is no unrigged part, I recommend you turn the "white eyes" feature off with the HUD's menu. This will turn off the white shroud but will not let you move your eyes however.

My breathing is out of sync for a second.

Animations blend into others in a way that the transitions are not visible and you keep moving slowly and sexily all the time. However, some animations are higher priority than others (like orgasms, punishments etc) and have an "outtro" part located after the looped part. For example, after you're done cumming, your avatar visibly pants and takes some time to recover her senses. During the panting, her breathing rhythm changes too, because the orgasm ends when your Energy reaches zero (not when your Pleasure reaches zero), meaning you're always out of breath after an orgasm. But the end of the orgasm animation and the beginning of the "panting" breathing loop cannot be synchronized. After the "outtro" part actually ends, you will see your avatar's chest automatically take the rhythm of her ragged breathing.

Some animations stay active for several seconds after the stimulus ends.

Yes, this is due to this "outtro" part in some animations and it is necessary to keep it. Technically, an animation in SL is comprised of three parts : the part before the loop (the "intro"), the loop itself, and the "outtro" which plays after the loop is stopped. When the animation is stopped during its loop, it keeps playing the rest of the loop part instead of immediately jumping to the outtro (which would look weird and unrealistic), and with bad luck it will be interrupted near the beginning of the loop, which may take several seconds in some animations. There is no way to mitigate that. Some animations, like the sucking one are impacted the worst because they need some kind of "neutral face" outtro to repair some mesh heads like Catwa or Lelutka Evolution (for some reason Lelutka Origins does not need it, but it's there anyway), so the looped part is long. Without this "neutral face" outtro however, your face would remain deformed after the animation ends.

My rigged mesh vagina is not aligned with the tentacles.

I'm sorry to say that some rigged mesh vaginas are simply not anatomically correct, they're located where the pelvic bone is supposed to be. And being rigged mesh, they can't be moved, so your only option is not to use one of those rigged mesh vaginas if you're in this case. The pussy tentacles are aligned with the vagina of the Maitreya Lara body anyway so there would be no point in redesigning them for this. I recommend unrigged mesh vaginas instead, since you can adjust them the way you like. VAW is good, I've briefly tested Sapphos which looks good too (but I use VAW), I'm sure there are others.

My mouth is not aligned with the tentacles.

Some variations of the mouth tentacle are rigged to the mouth but others are not. For example, the "sucking cock" tentacle, which triggers a head animation, cannot be rigged to the head otherwise it would move with the it, defeating the purpose (you want the tentacle to stay still while you give head). But since this tentacle is rigged anyway, to the chest among other points, it cannot be adjusted manually.

So if your mouth is not aligned with it, this means either your neck is too long or too short, or your mouth is too high or too low. I'm not saying your avatar is badly proportioned, but that you might need to make a copy of your shape and adjust some sliders (most likely neck length and/or mouth position) in order to match your lips to the tentacle.

Another issue might be the size of the mouth compared to the girth of the tentacle. In particular with Catwa heads, which tend to have very small mouths.

At the time of this writing this is the only solution if your mouth doesn't match the tentacle well, but in the future I will think of a way to make alternate animations that put your head slightly higher or lower too, or an alternate tentacle that is not rigged, worn on the chest, and matching (more or less) the rigged chest part. Stay tuned.

I'm ring-gagged but the monster won't use my mouth.

The monster detected that you are gagged (because your regular chat is most likely suppressed or redirected), but it cannot detect by what. It just thinks "this girl cannot speak so I cannot use her mouth". In the case of a ring-gag, it is best to use the menu of the Supervision HUD to set your "Gagged" setting to "Forced to No" so the monster ignores your gag.

The "stand" blob is deformed and around my hips.

That would be because of the V Bento rigged mesh vagina which seems to use deformers or the like. Detaching it fixes the issue, I'm not sure if there is a way to "undeform" your Bento skeleton while wearing it, not being a user myself. Maybe other mesh vaginas (or other rigged mesh attachment) deforms the skeleton the same way, too.

The monster is done playing and has disappeared, but my attachments are still RLV-locked on me, I can't detach them.

Try to click on the book to get its menu, and select "Reinit", this is what commands the RLV locks. You should be able to detach your attachments afterwards.

Sometimes I get only one choice in the menu, can't it choose automatically for me ?

It could, but it won't ! Xulabarthath wants you to feel how helpless you are and realize you have no choice when your Willpower is too low. He wants you to actively comply instead of doing it for you.

When I pause the game (with the HUD or the book) in the beginning, I don't see a "game paused" message.

This is a known issue. This message comes from the monster AI when it is interrupted by a pause action. However, in the beginning (before the monster appears fully while standing), the AI is not in a state where it can detect a pause yet, it's just "following the script" of asking your preferences and moving to the final standing position. Only then does the AI becomes "pause-aware". It doesn't change anything, though, the AI won't do anything if you pause before you reach the "stand" position because it is simply waiting for the position to be reached, and it won't because the low-level engine (the one in charge of going from state to state) won't move until you resume the game.

One of the scripts has crashed !

Uh-oh ! This should not happen, but you never know. There are many cases that would make a script run out of memory, simply because of the sheer amount of data exchanged. If the script is too busy and long messages pile up, it eats memory and might make it go over the limit and crash. Once again, it should not happen but here we are.

All you can do is get a redelivery, don't forget to save into your Character Save Device so you don't lose any important data. Also please tell me which script crashed (it is written in the error window) and under what circumstances (sim crowded and/or slow, or a special action that you've made and that reproduces the crash every time), the more info the better and this helps me track down the issue and fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The two tentacles around the head (gag and blindfold) are invisible while not playing so you need to press Ctrl-Alt-T to see them in red. Then edit that object, tick "Edit Linked" on the edit window, then select only the mouth tentacle and resize it. It is a single prim and its "tail" should be around the neck, in a high position to avoid clipping, but low enough so that your chin won't clip through when you're actually gagged and your mouth is open. There is an animation in the "Optional" folder, called "OpenMouth" to help you check the fitting with the mouth open.

Then do the blindfold the same way, only you don't need an animation for it.

If it is easier for you, you can make the two tentacles visible while editing them (set their Transparency to 0 in the Texture tab of the edit window), then invisible again once done. You can also do this while playing since they are locked but do not prevent editing, but it's harder and you probably have better things to do at that time.

The tentacles are animated like in a stop-motion fashion. Wouldn't have it been easier to make them Animesh instead ?

This is an interesting question. At first glance it would have made more sense to make them Animesh indeed. However, Animesh works only for non-rigged attachments, and you can wear only one Animesh attachment at a time. They also wouldn't have been able to deform the way they do here, so no comics-like effect. So in order to fully use Animesh, I would have had to make the product completely different, with tentacles coming from a furniture you sit on and that do not coil around your body (and maybe have additional not animated tentacles as attachments just for the look). To put it more simply, they wouldn't be able to hug your body and fuck you at the same time, which would have been a shame.

The credits

Most sounds come from www.freesound.org, some sounds are licensed under Creative Commons. I want to thank all of the people below (and those I didn't mention) for sharing their work with the community.

Have fun !

Marine

 Hi there,

This post contains the release notes of all the post-release updates of Xulabarthath and will be modified every time a new update is available.

If you don't know how to get a redelivery from the Marketplace, please go to the end of this post for the procedure.

Please note that since a redelivery is a new product, you may want to save your stats from your old product and load them into the new one to avoid starting over.

Release notes

Here is the list of updates, from the most recent to the most ancient.

09/23/2020

* Added : When pressing "Invoke", "Babies", "Reinit" or "Beg" on the book menu, a text is now shown by the monster to acknowledge your action.

* Added : Applied the textures of a couple particles such as the spanking star to one of the invisible prims to make sure it is pre-loaded before the situation happens and you don't have to see a particle loading before showing. The only exception I know is the "black waters" particle (showing when a baby peeks out), which I have the UUID of but lost the asset, so I'll have to re-upload it and update all the particle slave scripts, which requires a little more work. This will be for a future update.

* Changed : Now the attachments are locked whenever the monster is active (i.e. there is a blob and not just a puddle or a pentagram), and unlocked when the game ends, not when you start it or reinit manually.

* Changed : Now the "Invoke" and "Babies" buttons won't appear on the book menu while playing anymore to avoid confusion. Likewise, the "Beg" button won't appear outside a game anymore (actually the monster has to be present for this button to appear, no point in begging a pentagram).

* Postponed : The Windlight settings were supposed to be locked (they weren't and that's a bug), but I heard some people having issues seeing anything while using Firestorm, so for now I will not lock them on until I have a solution for this.

* Fixed : Typos : "toughts" : "enjoy is cum". There are probably others that will arise.

* Fixed (sort of) : With Lelutka Evolution heads, the "closed eyes" animations would make the pupils and iris kind of poke through the eyelids. It doesn't do this with Lelutka Origins heads, or any other head that I know of. This is not the fault of my animations, which simply rotated the eyelids without moving the eyes at all (when you fall asleep in real life your eyes stay more or less straight). To fix it, the "closed eyes" animation has been updated to force the eyes to look down so the iris does not poke through anymore. However, this fix does NOT apply to the "falling sleep" animations (which also close the eyes by themselves). I noticed that the Lelutka Evolution HUD had a "closed eyes" button itself too so if this is a problem for you, you can use that button to fix the clipping. Eventually I will update this "sleeping" animation too, though, and this action won't be necessary anymore.

* Fixed : When a baby is born, the monster should tell you "Your boy or girl's name is XXX, son/daughter of Xulabarthath and -your name-". However, in one instance that I observed, it said "son/daughter of Xulabarthath and Marine". Yikes ! I swear Xulabarthath did not cheat on you with me while fucking you. He's a god but he's not Dr. Manhattan. More seriously, it should work better now :)

* Fixed : Under certain random circumstances (aka bad luck), the product would slow down to a crawl and become unusable. The reason for this was that two scripts would suddenly decide to battle to update the same variable which they both had ownership of, resulting into constant messages sent in a loop and bogging down the whole system.* Fixed : The "Beg" action didn't give any feedback even after pressing a button on the "beg" dialog.

How to get a redelivery / update

To get the updated version of your product, do these simple steps :

 

1. Go to the Marketplace product page.

2. Click on the date of purchase, like this :

3. On the page that appears, click on "Redeliver item".

If all goes well you should get your redelivered, and updated, item.

Hi !

Here is the latest version of the RLV, which is up to date with the latest version of the SL viewer (6.4.9 with the new rendering changes and fixes). Aside from being updated to match the SL viewer, there are a few quality of life changes for those who spend a lot of time blindfolded, as well as a couple fixes.

Here is the list of changes :

Please be aware of the last point, the known issue. There is still a rendering bug in the SL viewer that made its way into the RLV (see the link) and I'm waiting for LL to fix it. Hopefully it will not take too long.

You can download the Windows version from http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows version is :
d67ace1c66a27d3a9a96fe6b3fd33639

The Linux and Mac versions are proposed by Chorazin at this address :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/RLV/

Have fun !

Marine

Hi there,

I have noticed two ways of cheating through the vision spheres in the latest RLV (2.9.28) so here is a version (2.9.28.1) with the hotfixes ! Yes it has been an emergency, imagine all the clever subs being able to see through non opaque blindfolds. We don't want that, do we ? ;)

You can download the Windows version from http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows version is :
5ffa1fa427481e9897d5587b7865c729

The Linux and Mac versions are proposed by Chorazin at this address :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/RLV/

Have fun !

Marine

Hi there,

I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like Xulabarthath is a bit random in his activities... I know it's not, but I have a hunch his way of "thinking" is not immediately obvious to the player, and that's an understatement. It is true that I have been voluntarily vague in the main blog post.

This is why I'd like to give a little bit if insight about how he functions and how he chooses what to do next. I don't want to spoil but I don't want people to think the AI is bogus and he just acts randomly because he really doesn't. I've heard that concern only once though, it's not like everybody feels that way, maybe I'm just getting ideas.

Also, I don't want the game rules to be too opaque. You need tools to start thinking ahead of the game and to get the monster do to you exactly what you want, after all. This sort of "meta-game" is a game in itself.

If you prefer to ignore everything about how the AI functions, I recommend you stop reading here, nobody will blame you.

But if you're curious, read on.

Needs, Responses, Activities, Level

These are the most important data that the AI uses to figure out what to do next, what I call "Activities".

The Needs are the fundamental objectives that Xulabarthath must fulfill during a session. The Responses are updated each time you click on a dialog button. When you do, the response depends on what's going on at the time. For example, if you respond positively to being pleasured, then your "pleasure" response goes up.

Needs, Responses and main Activities have the same names. You even see that in the HUD's "activities" button (the one with a clock), the first eight buttons are those exact activities. The ones below them are sub-activities, simpler bricks the activities are built with. For example, the "gag" sub-activity is used by the "Bind" activity, while the "fuck pussy" sub-activity is part of the "Pleasure" and "Abuse" activities, and so on.

There are 8 Needs/Responses/Activities :

- Pleasure : The monster pleasures you mostly by teasing or fucking your pussy until you cum. He may also fuck your ass at the same time. If he needs to penetrate you, he will take care of pleasuring you first.

- Tease : The monster hugs or pleasures you but will be careful NOT to let you cum ! He will often tease you to the brink of orgasm then leave you wanting. Hehe.

- Breed : That one is pretty straightforward, the monster will fuck your pussy until he cums and impregnates you.

- Drug : The monster will put his tentacle in your mouth and either make you suck it or he will fuck it until he cums in your mouth. He may also fuck you in the ass at the same time. If you're already drugged enough, he will fuck your pussy instead.

- Pain : The monster may spank your ass, slap your pussy (if the tentacle is close enough because he is lazy), or even electrify you (provided you're not too pregnant as the monster does not want to hurt his baby).

- Abuse : This one is all about humiliating you and using you as his fuck toy. He will make you suck him, or fuck your mouth, or fuck your pussy (in which case he won't care if you cum, and if you are being punished, he won't even bother pleasuring you before penetrating you), or even force you to go through multiple orgasms !

- Bind : There are several ways to bind you. Find a more restrictive pose, coil more tentacles around your body, gag you, blindfold you... If the session ends and you are tightly bound, the monster will decide to toy with you a little more before releasing you.

- Strangle : The left leg tentacle coils up around your neck and strangles you until you yield, or if you're gagged by a tentacle over your mouth and nose, it will suffocate you instead. This activity can be chosen by itself without being a punishment for the moment, but this may change in the future.

As you may have noticed, half of the needs (hence activities) is positive ones while the other half is more suited for punishment. This is how the monster functions too. When you need to be punished, you can be sure one of the last four activities will be chosen to correct you. "Drug" is also one of the possible punishments. Some punishments are contextual, meaning they depend on what the monster wanted to do to you, or simply on where his tentacles are at the moment. For example, if you refuse to suck his cock, he will most likely strangle you. If you refuse to open your legs, he will most likely slap your pussy.

Between two activities, the monster may withdraw some tentacles to go back to a stable state.

There are plenty of cases where things won't or can't go as expected. For example, he can't drug you if you're gagged, he won't penetrate you if your gestation is too advanced, etc. When such a case arises, he switches to some contingency plan or another. This is where the AI shines, it adapts to the situation.

To calculate the final value of a Need (hence how many times it will be chosen as an activity), the AI adds the Need to your corresponding Response, factored by your Level.

I have hinted in the main blog post that your Level influences the way your own Responses were taken into account. To keep it simple, your Level is positive if it is Lady or above, negative if it is Heathen or below. Since your Responses are multiplied by your Level, this means a negative Level will make Xulabarthath have less need for activities that you responded positively to, and more need for the ones you responded negatively to. If your Level is positive, your Responses affect the monster's Needs the way you would expect and the monster will favor doing to you things that he knows you like. This is why keeping a good standing with the monster is important :)

The exception to this is the Response you give when Xulabarthath asks you what you want to avoid (that's the third question after starting a game). Any other choice than "Nothing" means the corresponding Response is considered to be a hard limit and the monster will not choose it because it inhibits the matching Need. For example, if you chose "Suffocation", you should never be strangled during this session even if the monster has a need for it (and even if strangulation was supposed to be chosen as a punishment). This inhibition does not depend on your Level either because a hard limit is a hard limit.

 

Begging

I have been very vague in the main blog post about this feature, which may lead to it being incorrectly used or not used at all (and in software development, a feature that is not used does not exist). But to explain it, you must know about Needs and Responses so here we are.

When you click on "Beg" on the book's menu during a game (you can't beg the monster if he's not here, right ?), you are presented with a menu with 8 buttons plus "nothing". Each of these 8 buttons corresponds to a Need/Response/Activity.

If you choose one which the monster has a high Need for, then the monster will appreciate you more, otherwise he will appreciate you less. And his appreciation is actually your Level. Please note that I wrote "has", not "had". This means that if you're begging to be made love to and the "Pleasure" Need is now low because it has been soothed, the monster will be irritated that you're so needy. It doesn't matter what the "Pleasure" Need was set to initially, what matters is its value at the time you beg.

Attention, each time you beg, the corresponding Need decreases a little so you will find out that begging for the same thing repeatedly is counter-productive since eventually your Level will take a hit. Better beg once for an activity you think the monster has a Need for. To guess that needs practice but if you read the descriptions of the activities above carefully, you will learn to recognize what the monster is doing at the time. Knowing that a Need is soothed (partially or completely) only when the activity ends, this helps you know when to beg and what to beg for.

In all cases, your chosen Response is increased by begging, as if you had responded positively to a dialog. In other words, begging is your way of making the monster ask you how you respond to the activity of your choice.

 

Choosing the next activity

When Xulabarthath must choose the next activity after the previous one has ended (or he must choose the first one), he looks at all his Needs, compounded by your Responses and Level and picks one of them randomly, weighted by the values of each Need (so a higher value has more chance to be chosen than a lower one).

Then he starts the corresponding activity, plays with you and then his Need is soothed, more or less depending on what happened and how you responded. When a Need is completely soothed, no matter your Response to it, it will no longer be chosen during this session.

When all the Needs are soothed, the session ends and Xulabarthath releases you. With the notable exception of being tightly bound, which will make the monster play with you a little more, because the "bind" need gets soothed progressively during the game (meaning the monster restrains you a little more, then does other things to you, then binds you further, etc). It would make no sense to end the game right after reaching the most restrictive bondage, right ? You want to enjoy it a little, I'm sure, so he takes advantage of you for a moment while you squirm in bondage.

Templates

When you start a game with the monster (not with the babies), a template is chosen. This template simply attributes values to the needs and this is what decides what will happen during the game. Some Needs are set higher than others to ensure they have a good chance of being chosen first. Likewise, other Needs are set lower than others to ensure they have a good chance of being chosen last. For example, the "breeder" template has a low (but not null) value in Breed, meaning the monster will do all kinds of things to you before going for the jackpot.

At the time of this writing, there are only a handful of templates and the choice is completely random, it does not depend on your Level. That's weak because one of the templates will make the monster be sadistic with you, which makes no sense if you're high Level.

So I'm currently working on it and will update this section once it's done. I want to add more templates and to make the monster choose one of them depending on your Level. It will still be random, but it will be a controlled random this time. Stay tuned.

I hope with all these explanations, you will no longer believe that Xulabarthath acts randomly anymore :)

Have fun !

Marine

PS : I repeat, I use the term "AI" loosely here. Technically the monster follows complex scripts (not in the LSL sense). There are a lot of "if we're in this situation then do this, and if it fails then do that instead, and if everything fails then here is the backup solution" instructions in the behavior trees. This is really like a video game AI, it is programmed exactly the same way. It is absolutely not a "I know the girl's pleasure is low and I want to make her cum, so let's examine my options" kind of AI. Let alone a "last time I punished her for being a brat, it went well so since she is a brat right now, let's punish her again" kind of AI.

In other words, this is a procedural AI instead of a declarative AI or a learning AI (except for the Responses which are taken into account, so there is a little bit of learning here). It is however still way beyond what we can do with a functional language like LSL (or even C#, C++, Python etc), because to write this sort of AI we need a language with a structure that is adapted for it, this is the structure we call "behavior trees".

Hi !

Here is an update that was long overdue !

As you may know, the Maison De La Marquise Latex Catsuits, Bodysuits and Socks+Gloves were initially made for Maitreya only. Only later were they extended to work with any Omega-capable mesh body. However, at the time, Maitreya wasn't able to change the tint of a layer nor its Environment and Intensity values, only its Glossiness value. Nevertheless, the Catsuits and Bodysuits contained an interesting accessory in the form of a neck piece, to make the outfit cover the neck as well, giving them a kinkier and classier look.

At the same time, I also added boots to the Catsuits and Socks, which means another accessory.

Those accessories (neck piece and boots) were supposed to work seamlessly with the outfits, so they imitated their capabilities, which were... limited because of Maitreya.

But in the beginning of 2020, Maitreya released Version 5 which added a whole lot of new features, including the ability to change the Environment and Intensity values of the shine on a layer, as well as tinting said layer, either the base texture or the shine, making your latex much more versatile now. So the MdlM latex accessories were lagging behind in terms of features, since they did not support those.

So after all this time, here is (finally) a standalone HUD to control the tint and shine on the accessories, to make them completely assorted with your outfits, no matter how you like your latex. Here is what it looks like :

The layout of the sliders is not random : it is designed to imitate that of the Advanced Panel of the Layers tab of the Maitreya V5 HUD. The accessories HUD is the same width, and the sliders are the same dimensions :

It is made this way so that you can easily reproduce what you see on your Maitreya V5 HUD to your MdlM Accessories HUD because the sliders are aligned. It even behaves exactly the same way (click on a slider or the color swatch, drag and release to validate). The tints are HSL instead of RGB to make it easy to reproduce Maitreya's tint as well.

Here is how to use it.

Wear either accessory or both (neck and boots, but don't wear both boots items at the same time, you would look silly) and wear your Accessory HUD. Click on the Neck button to activate or deactivate commands to the neck, same things for the shoes with the Shoes button. Here is a picture with an explanation of (almost) each button :

Everything you click on, except for the Neck, Shoes, Tex and Gloss buttons, applies the current parameters you see on your HUD, to the currently selected accessory (or accessories). If you need to repeat the parameters to an accessory you've worn after having tweaked them, just click on the "Re-apply" button. If you need to go back to default (that's Gloss 150, Intensity 100% and Environment 0, as well as Visible On and Mask Off), click on the "Default" button.

If you need to change the tint, drag and release on the color swatch and on the luminosity swatch, and tweak more finely with the six arrows.

That's pretty much it, the rest is rather self-explanatory. If you don't know what a button does, click on it to find out. You can always go back to the default parameters anyway.

Please note that the communication only goes from the HUD to the accessories, not the other way around. An accessory will not update your HUD when you wear it because it does not "talk" to the HUD, it only listens to it.

Also note that non-updated accessories will not work with this new HUD, obviously. You can still hide and show the old accessories, as well as change their mask mode, via the applier HUD that you already know. Those buttons on the applier HUD also work on the updated accessories.

How to update

Simple. Either rez the updater contained in your folder (the one that was delivered to you by the Marketplace the day you bought it) and you will get your update automatically, or request a redelivery on the Marketplace website.

Have fun !

Marine

Hi there,

Yep, this is yet another update to the Police Collar ! After nearly two years of not touching it. This one is about adding two features to satisfy some popular requests I've gotten during this year while working on other stuff : the ability to mix the two position monitors (relative to captor and absolute) with an AND or with an OR, and the ability for the captor to zap the sub without having to click on the collar first.

These sound easy but they were tricky to implement because the former required a substantial rewrite of the monitoring code, while the latter involves a new Police Collar Remote HUD.

 

Before you read further, if don't know how to update your collar please follow these instructions :

First you need to go to one of these locations :

My Little Shop
Chorazin's store
Roper's Dark Playground
Dark Wishes


Once there, click on the updater and follow the instructions. You need to choose "REPLACE" for this one as the Zapper plugin has been cut in two and has a second slave script now, and the HUD has been added to the collar so the updater cannot provide you those changes without a replacement. Don't forget to save your times. If you do not get a "REPLACE" option, contact me (Marine Kelley) to get a manual replacement.

Position monitors mixing

Until now, if the Relative position monitor (i.e. force the sub to stay close to their captor) and the Absolute position monitor (i.e. force the sub to stay close to a fixed point in a region) were both active, the sub was punished whenever she was outside the bounds of either of these monitors. This meant that if the captor was too far from the absolute area, the sub could not be in both areas at the same time and was constantly punished, so the captor had to turn the Absolute position monitor off before taking the sub for a walk. Not really practical.

This update provides you with a new "OR" switch (or "union" switch if you're into math) that is ON by default. When ON, the monitors will motivate the sub to stay either within the Absolute area or within the Relative area (if both are active). When OFF, the monitors will make the sub stay within both areas, like before, with the risk of constantly punishing her if the areas do not intersect.

Please note that although I write "area" I mean "volume" because the distances are 3D, but you get the point. "Area" works too because most of the time we move horizontally anyway.

Here is how you turn this switch on and off. Go to the Relative Position menu and click on "OR Abs.", or go to the Absolute Position menu and click on "OR Rel.", both buttons set that same "OR" switch. You can also go from one menu to the other by clicking on "Abs. Pos..." or "Rel. Pos..." respectively, as a shortcut.

Yes, I know, this "OR" switch is technically an "AND" switch since when it is ON, the monitors punish the sub when she is outside BOTH areas at the same time. But I find it easier to call it an "OR" switch as the sub is expected to stay inside the Absolute area OR the Relative area, not necessarily both at the same time. From the captor's and the sub's points of view, the sub has to stay either in one area OR in the other in order to avoid being punished.

This is pretty much it for this new switch, but it required to rewrite a good part of the monitoring code, which led to adding a new slave script named "CheckTargetPos" which is fully in charge of the monitoring now. This was needed because the original Zapper plugin was close to memory exhaustion, and the two features contained in this update required a lot of additional code which would have made the original script explode. Hence the need for a replacement.

Police Collar Remote

This is a new object provided along with the Police collar and you will find it by clicking on the new "Get Remote" button in the Zapper plugin menu (lower left corner) :

Once you get the Police Collar Remote object, wear it and you see this HUD :

Please note : If you do not see the blue text right away, right-click on the HUD to refresh it. I don't know what causes it but it seems to be a viewer issue.

Click on "TARGET" to set the target, either "NONE", "ME" (that's you), or any of the names that appear in the target menu if you are not alone. Those are not necessarily wearers of a Police Collar, they're just the 10 people closest to you within a 30 m radius around yourself. Choose one of them who is wearing a Police Collar preferably, ideally your own sub.

Please note : The communication only goes from the remote to the collar, there is no feedback the other way around.

Once a target is set, you see their display name (or at least the printable characters in it, I know some of you guys like to include bizarre Unicode characters in your display names ; well those certainly won't show on the remote) followed by their user name. If the text is too long to fit on the 24 characters of the display, it scrolls.

The remote itself is pretty easy to understand and to use. Here is what every button does.

- TARGET : Set a new target among the people around you, or yourself, or clear the target.

- MENU : Opens the menu of the Zapper plugin of the person set as the target. If their Zapper is not active, you see either "ACTIVATE" (if the target is yourself or if the Zapper is simply switched off) or "ASK" (if the Zapper was not activated by the sub manually first).

- SWITCH : Switches the monitoring on and off. This is different from the initial activation that the sub has to do manually in order to use the Zapper, even if it looks very similar. Internally, this is treated like a temporary deactivation that allows anyone, not just the sub, to reactivate the Zapper. Of course, if the sub clicks on "DEACTIVATE" in their own Options menu, then the Zapper is totally deactivated as if it were brand new, and will have to be reactivated again. This switch is useful when you want to take your sub on a walk and don't want her monitored and punished automatically, but you still want to be able to use the Zap buttons (which are out of reach in the menu since you have to click on "ACTIVATE" first to get access) to punish them manually.

- ZAP 1 to 3 : Immediately delivers an electric shock to the sub. This is exactly like clicking on "Zap low", "medium" or "high" respectively in the Zapper menu. These buttons work whether the Zapper is switched on or off, but not if it is completely deactivated by the sub.

- Title bar : This hides and shows the HUD to make room when needed.

The HUD is Copy/No-mod/Transfer so you can pass it along if you want, but only the person holding the key to the collar can control it through the remote. Unless the key is available, in which case anyone can control it.

You do not have to set the target every time you wear the Remote, and you do not need to get a new Remote every time you log on or whatnot. Once you have gotten this Remote, you can just keep using it.

Also, please note that this remote functions only if you are in the same sim as your target, it does not do cross-sim messages.

Have fun !

Marine

Hi !

Here is a new version of the RLV with a few bug fixes, including a couple more "loopholes" that people told me about.

 

- fixed : A way to move the camera even while @camunlock is active (thank you Chloel3n for the heads-up).

- fixed : A way to teleport during login (thank you Svart Kjeller for the report). 

- fixed : When under @editobj=UUID (prevented from editing a particular object), we could not open the Build window either with Ctrl-B or with the Build button on the UI. It still worked with Ctrl-3. Thank you Sylkis Jenipe for the report.

- fixed : We still couldn't add an item to an attachment while sitting and restricted from sit-tping, despite the fact that the cursor was no longer blocked. It was half fixed, now it should be fully fixed.

- known issue : Clicking on a landmark in the Places window the first time after having opened it, scrolls the window down and loses the focus. This is problematic because it could lead you to TP where you didn't mean to (happens to me all the time). This bug is not an RLV one as it is present in the SL viewer too. See https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-229428).

- known issue : Moving the camera beyond the radius of a light makes that light shine brighter on surfaces which specular color is not white. This is an SL bug, not an RLV one. See https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-229436.

You can download the Windows version from http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows version is :
62ef8984d5b0770f6d804eb6f981d6b9

The Linux and Mac versions are proposed by Chorazin at this address :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/RLV/

Have fun !

Marine

Hi !

Here is a big update to the MdlM Latex Catsuits, Bodysuits and Socks & Gloves to add support for BoM ("Bakes On Mesh") !

In a nutshell

To use the BoM version of the Catsuits, Bodysuits or Socks and Gloves, you need to wear one of the provided Tattoo wearables, and to apply one of the skin shine appliers from the provided HUD, preferably the one that corresponds to the Tattoo you wore.

 

Bakes On Mesh

Before I explain what's in the update, let me try to explain a few things about Bakes On Mesh first, so you understand what you'll get and how to use it, because it is not obvious at first glance. If you already know what Bakes On Mesh is and how to use it, you can skip the part in italics.

Bakes On Mesh ("BoM"), in principle, is a set of special textures that the viewer renders differently from the usual ones. A BoM texture, when applied to a surface of an attachment, renders a part of your system body including its skin and all its wearables at the time. For example, if you apply the "upper body" BoM texture to your Maitreya upper body skin layer, then you will see your system skin top body part, plus all the wearable items you are wearing on the upper body at the time (I mean actual wearable items, not mesh objects, so for example a tattoo, an undershirt item etc). If you add or remove a wearable or change skin, the texture on the mesh body updates accordingly without you having to do anything. Think of it as a dynamic texture that the sim recalculates every time your appearance changes and that projects your system avatar onto your mesh body (and/or head) as if your mesh body was your actual avatar. A little like "media-on-a-prim" in fact.

Bakes On Mesh works well for wearables, unfortunately it does not support materials (that's the normal texture, the specular texture and the shine values). In plain English, there is no slot in an Undershirt wearable for the material textures, for example, there's only one texture (that we call "diffuse" in 3D design) and that's the one BoM manages and lets the viewer render. Normal and specular textures, however, can still be applied onto your mesh body skin layer while still keeping it BoM-active and that's the point of this update.

As the MdlM latex outfits use materials and BoM does not support materials, the solution here is to provide you with additional appliers that will replace your skin shine (but not your skin textures, which are supposed to be the Upper and Lower body BoM textures), and many Tattoo wearables that contain the diffuse textures of each latex outfit (that's 129 tattoos for the Catsuits, 129 for the Bodysuits and 252 for the Socks & Gloves, yes that's a bit much but that's what it takes).

 

What's in the update

The update contains, for each product, a new HUD called "something something skin shine appliers for BoM something something" (for example "MdlM Latex Catsuits skin shine appliers for BoM OPAQUE" for the opaque catsuits) and a bunch of Tattoo wearables, one per color. All those new wearables are contained in boxes because the Latex Outfits can be updated either with a Marketplace redelivery or with the provided updater which gives you the new product from a server in-world, and you can't include sub-folders in a box unlike in pure Marketplace products. In some cases, like the Latex Socks & Gloves Fatpack, that makes quite a lot of new boxes.

How to use

Wear one of the wearables provided in this update and the corresponding Skin Shine HUD. Click on the button of your choice to apply the corresponding shine, and if you chose the correct button the shine will match your tattoo and you will look like you are wearing the latex outfit you wanted. Easy, right ?

Wait I'll give you an example. Firstly, and most importantly, make sure your mesh body is set to "Bakes On Mesh" (on Maitreya Lara V5 that's the big "Bakes On Mesh" button in the "Skin" tab of your HUD). Notice that I'm wearing the Proud Girls, in BoM mode too (that's a switch in its Options menu) to show that they work seamlessly with the rest.

Then wear the "Catsuit Opaque - Black" Tattoo (provided you own the Opaque Catsuits, if not, replace with whatever variant and color you prefer).

This is what you see :

It's not really a catsuit yet, but we'll get there. Now wear the "MdlM Latex Catsuits skin shine appliers for BoM OPAQUE" HUD, it looks like this :

(there's a reason why there is so much empty space, as you'll see below)

Click on the rightmost button and you get this :

Aha, you can now distinguish the seams and creases, the catsuit shine is still dull though. All you have to do is manipulate the shine of your skin, and most likely the shine of your Proud Girls too. I'll do both here, setting the Glossiness and Intensity to max on my Maitreya Lara mesh body, as well as its Environment to 30 (that's three clicks on the right of the "+" button next to the "Environment" slider on the Advanced Skin Panel of the Maitreya HUD). Same for my Proud Girls, that I set to "255 30" to match (open the Proud Girls menu, go to "Layers", then "Skin shine", then write "255 30" in the text box and click "Submit") :

And now we have it, and no layer is necessary since it is all directly on the skin. Notice though that the catsuit is very sticky, it is like painted on your skin. Depending on your mesh body, you may or may not have some "BoM parts" to loosen the fit. Maitreya provides such parts, no need to demonstrate them here though, I have written a full blog post that explains a lot of things about Maitreya, including BoM and BoM parts at the end.

So, what really happened ? You have noticed that wearing the BoM version of the catsuit is done in two steps. Wear the Tattoo wearable and apply the skin shine, not necessarily in that order. And you don't have to do both if you don't want to. For example, if you only apply the skin shine without wearing the Tattoo (or you unwear the Tattoo), you will look like you are wearing a clear latex catsuit, like this :

This is, actually, almost exactly the same thing as wearing the Clear Latex Catsuit with the regular appliers, on the Tattoo layer. With the notable difference that unlike the applier version, the BoM version lets you see reflections (there's an Env Box in the room I'm in) for a more realistic look, while the applier version cannot do that because it is alpha-blended (i.e. transparent).

The skin shine

So, now that you see what it does and how to use it, let's get into the nitty-gritty stuff. It is important because you will see that this update does not merely port existing appliers to BoM, but also offers you a few new features that you can use to your advantage.

In a nutshell, every applier you see on the HUD is a stripped down version of the corresponding latex outfit applier, meaning it only applies the bump and shineto your Skin layer, but not the texture itself -- you have to do it manually by wearing the Tattoo layer of your choice. The part in bold has notable consequences.

Since it applies the latex shine to your skin layer, it replaces whatever shine was applied to it before. Usually, the factory shine (for Maitreya, that's one of the three "Material Presets Skin" buttons on the Advanced Skin Panel).

Attention : If your skin shine is custom, make sure you know how to re-apply it after you're done wearing your latex suit, because the HUD cannot do it for you.

This is not really an issue when you wear Latex Catsuits because they cover the whole body, but what about Latex Bodysuits which don't cover the legs ? Or Latex Socks or Gloves ? What happens to the exposed skin when you apply these ?

The answer is : instead of making the exposed skin dull and without shine, it replaces its existing shine with a subtle sheen. The key part is that although the shine values (glossiness, environment and shine color) are the same as the latex since it is on the same layer, the exposed skin shine is toned down a lot. In other words, when you put some environment on your latex to reflect your surroundings (if you have a reflection box or an env box around), your skin won't reflect it at all unless you crank the value to the max. Likewise, your skin will shine in a subtle way, a lot less than your latex.

Here is an example :

Hi,

 

Here is a new version of the RLV that fixes two very annoying bugs contained in the recent versions. See for yourself :

- fixed : Sometimes all the attachments (except the locked ones) would be kicked off upon login for no apparent reason.

- fixed : Included the fix for https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-229428 (clicking on something in the Places window would scroll it down and make you click on another landmark by mistake).

Please note that the second fix is not my own, LL had it fixed months ago but the fix hasn't reached the official code yet, so I'm including it in advance. I don't really like to do that but this bug was sooo annoying.

You can download the Windows version from http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows version is :
fa3da8e75af216dd4f23564ecc60c06b

The Linux and Mac versions are proposed by Chorazin at this address :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/RLV/

Have fun !

Marine

Hi there,

Here is a new version of the RLV, this one is a big one because it includes many new RLV commands on top of a few bug fixes and changes.

Normally it should have been 2.10 but none of the new RLV commands is a real game changer like the vision restriction spheres in 2.9 so it stays a 2.9. It's not really important anyway.

Here is my personal take on the matter of most of the new commands included in 2.9.29. The technical stuff and the actual release notes follow after the part in italics.

Most of the new commands were actually already present in Catznip and I've added them to the RLV for consistency concerns. They're mostly about EEP and how to keep controlling the environment settings with EEP the same way we used to with Windlight, without having to rewrite any script. Problem is, RLVa 2.3 brought in commands with a different syntax than those in the RLV API 2.9.27.

As a result, RLVa was forking even further from RLV and for the sake of the scripters (and their sanity), it is not good to have two nearly but not entirely identical APIs. On top of it, RLVa goes straight into Firestorm (without filter as far as I know, but I'd love to be corrected on that) which is by far the most popular viewer so when a command is added to RLVa, some people assume they are in the RLV as well. This is why most of the new RLV commands in 2.9.29 are taken from RLVa.

There is one simple rule though : if a command is not in the RLV API, it is not an RLV command and scripts should not assume they are.

This is the last time I do this. In order to keep RLV a single API which scripters can rely on for its consistency, all the people working on different implementations of the RLV API must understand that forking is not the most sensible thing to do. Having different implementations that interpret the API differently, or even having commands that are part only of some implementations only confuses users (scripters and end users alike) and increases everybody's workload.

I do understand that when someone wants to add a new command to the RLV API, they have to ask me and I'm the one to do the work on the specification and first implementation (because it has to be tested, right ?), which is not always possible. I consider every suggestion carefully and I say no more times than I say yes, provided I have time at all. So I do understand that other viewers implement their own "test" commands on their side as proofs of concept. I have no problem with that as long as they stay test commands and proofs of concept, but injecting them into popular viewers without getting back to me first is bound to cause issues because suddenly the proofs of concept become mainstream commands without being in the API. That's when things become ugly for scripters and end users.

This applies to Catznip because that's the one that I know about, but there are perhaps others. Of course, if the test commands in Catznip are not transferred into Firestorm when the latter publishes a release, then this whole rant personal take is moot and to be ignored.

Alright, on to the interesting stuff.

A word about the EEP shine fix. The initial bug arose after some LL fixes about the shine on any surface, namely the shine was now way too bright when you moved your camera outside the light radius (see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-229436 for details).

Sovereign Engineer brought a fix for this new bug that fixed it beautifully... except that the shine was now way too low specifically on alpha-blended surfaces, on parts of the surface where the specular map was not completely white. It does not sound like much but it breaks a lot of content that relies on precise materials such as sweat appliers. Suddenly the background shine of the skin became invisible.

To fix this was easy, I could just ignore the materialF.glsl file in Sovereign's commit and all was well. Problem is, Sovereign's commit was also taken by LL, materialF.glsl included, which means soon the SL viewer will show a very weak shine on alpha-blended surfaces, breaking content. After discussing with Sovereign about it, I know that the calculation of the shine after the fix is correct and it was incorrect before, but it has been incorrect since 2015, when materials were introduced in SL, and a lot of content was developed using this flawed specular curve. In my opinion it is too late to go back now. Keeping the fix the way it is now in the SL viewer is bound to make a lot of people, creators and customers alike (who paid for those products) very angry.

For now the RLV keeps the shine the way it always was, even though it is not consistent with how the SL viewer will render it in one of its next iterations. I have yet to decide what I'll do if LL keeps it like this. I'm certainly not going to rework nearly all my products to match the new calculation.

You can download the Windows version from http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows version is :
aaf07aca0eca908025005f3b9818b293

The Linux and Mac versions are proposed by Chorazin at this address :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/RLV/

Have fun !

Marine

Hi !

Here is a new version of the RLV which is dedicated to taking a couple features from RLVa, namely "@setsphere" and the ability to create sub-folders when giving a folder to #RLV directly.

I said in my last post that this was the last time I integrated proofs of concept RLVa commands that make their way into Firestorm without filter. But that was without taking into account Kitty Barnett's new "@setsphere" commands which she worked on for a long time and that are now going to go into Firestorm, once again without any filter.

But I know that users have been eagerly waiting for years for an equivalent of the @cam commands to simulate blindfolds and other vision restrictions that are present in the RLV and Kokua viewers but not in Firestorm which is by far the most popular viewer. It was frustrating for them so I expect scripters will jump on the opportunity to use these commands as soon as they are released. That's why I can't just ignore this new set of commands since they will become popular in no time. Problem is, they are not in the RLV API so if they start using them and I don't do anything, there might be a significant difference once they actually make it to the API and it will be too late then.

So this version (2.9.30) includes Kitty's "@setsphere" commands, working the same way as in RLVa with two key differences that I will explain below.

The second feature is being able to create sub-folders when a script gives a folder to the user's #RLV folder. For example, before this version, giving a folder named "#RLV/~A/B/C" would create a folder "~A/B/C" and put it under #RLV, just like that. Not very handy especially since RLVa would actually create folders "~A", "B" and "C", and organize them the way you'd expect. Since this version here, RLV does the same now which is :

- Create a folder C (in all cases, the last folder in the path is created so we don't pollute an existing folder with new items).

- Create the other folders in turn and organize them, but only if they don't already exist. For example, if your inventory already contains "~A" and "B" inside "~A", it won't create them but it will reuse them, placing the new folder "C" under the existing folder "B" (regardless of the fact that there might already be a folder "C" there since, like I said, the last folder in the path is always created, never reused).

That way, RLV functions exactly like RLVa on these features from version 2.9.30.

Here is the change list :

- Added : Support for @setsphere like in RLVa (with a significant difference : "=force" commands become "=n" commands).

- Changed : Giving a folder to #RLV will now create nested sub-folders if the name of the folder contains slashes ("/").

- Fixed : Defensive fix against a potential crash when using @camtextures (thanks Henri Beauchamp for the heads-up).

You can download the Windows version from http://www.erestraints.com/realrestraint/

The MD5 hash for the Windows version is :
9dc39253a79954e3b926c8d8cc2127d3

The Linux and Mac versions are proposed by Chorazin at this address :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/kokua.team-purple.p/files/RLV/

 

Now, you might have noticed the "significant difference" part in the change list about @setsphere. Read on if you want to know more.

All the "=force" commands designed by Kitty are turned into "=n" commands (*). The reason for this is the way the parameters must be mixed when two or more objects issue identical "@setsphere_mode" commands but with different parameters. In RLVa the result is random, whoever comes last wins or something like that. In RLV they are properly mixed to retain the most restrictive parameters.

For example, if two objects issue "@setsphere_mode:0=n" (that's "restrict the vision with a plain color gradually becoming more opaque over the distance) then one issues "@setsphere_distmax:3=n" and the other @setsphere_distmax:10=n" afterwards, the second command will be retained like the first one but the actual distmax parameter that will be applied will be "3" because it is more restrictive.

(*) Actually the RLV accepts both because there might be scripts already using @setsphere the way Kitty designed it, but the RLV API will only specify "=n", not "=force" because the latter is bound to cause issues and is not consistent with the way the RLV works.

The "force" commands are not retained in the main RLV map, they are forgotten as soon as they are executed, so they cannot be consulted afterwards by scripts. Those "force" commands are "one-shot" commands that are meant to force the avatar to do something, like sit somewhere or teleport, but not configure a command that itself sticks around.

Another difference is the separators in the "@setsphere_param" command. The API will specify that ";" is needed but RLVa takes "/" for the time being. However, "/" is more reserved for folders than actual separators than for multiple parameters (I know, "@tpto" seems to be an exception, it was done this way to facilitate turning an slurl into an actual RLV command, it sounded like a good idea at the time) so ";" it is.

 

Also, it is too soon to add anything to the RLV API about @setsphere. I don't know yet if it is a good idea, for example there are issues with alpha-blending which I am not sure Kitty will be able to solve. I would also like @camdraw commands to be replicated in RLVa, at least becoming synonyms for @setsphere commands. In short, "@setsphere" is still more or less a command in testing.

However Kitty raised an issue with @camdraw commands in RLV : the view seems darkened far before the actual outer limit. There is a reason for this, the spheres are alpha-blended and stack one after the other in a linear way (that's 40 concentric spheres between @camdistmin and @camdistmax).

Problem is, when two alpha-blended surfaces overlap each other, the resulting transparency is a multiplication of both transparencies. As a result, the concentric spheres blend in an exponential way, resulting in an apparent darkness occurring a lot closer than it should. The spheres are placed correctly though and the initial requirement was to make it so @camdrawalpha commands were exact. If you specify that the outer alpha should be 75% (hence 25% transparent), then any white fullbright surface beyond that distance should appear 75% grey, and it works. The reason for this apparent bug is that the spheres are placed linearly. I could place them differently (logarithmically for example) but then this would break existing products using those commands. Adding new @camdraw commands would require to think long and hard on how to mix them.

Anyway, this is the reason why @setsphere is a different set of commands from @camdraw but it would be great to find a way to set a bridge between them, after all they both do the same thing.

 

Have fun !

Marine

Hi there,

Following the recent addition of @setsphere to the RLV (in v2.9.30), I have updated all the RR blindfolds to add the ability to choose between three methods of blinding, in their "Blindfold" plugin :

- HUD : This is the old-school pre-RLV method, a big prim takes all your view and has only a tiny hole in the middle to let you click through it. It obscures all your view, including your avatar.

- CamDraw : This is the RLV 2.9 vision restriction spheres that you already know.

- SetSphere : This is the RLV 2.9.30 and RLVa 3.4.3 vision restriction sphere that was recently introduced.

The way it works is simple. You choose your preferred method (even while blindfolded, you can change on-the-fly) and the plugin decides which method to use according to the version of your RLV. If the version or your RLV actually supports the method you chose, no problem, the plugin will use it. Otherwise, it chooses another method like this :

- If you chose CamDraw and are not using a RLV 2.9 but are on a RLVa version 3.4.3 or above (in Firestorm or otherwise), then it will choose Setsphere.

- If you chose SetSphere and you are using a RLV 2.9 but not 2.9.30 or above (in which case what are you waiting for, grab the latest version !), then it will choose CamDraw.

- Otherwise it will choose HUD.

 

If you wonder, the blindfolds in the RR line are :

- Scarf Blindfold

- Deluxe Blindfold

- Tape Blindfold

- Iso Blindfold

- Mummy Blindfold

- Remvision

Note : If you are reading this and are a creator of RLV blindfolds yourself, let me help by recapitulating all the versions and what they mean for you when you get a response to your @versionnum request : 

< 2090000 : No camdraw, no setsphere available (that's before RLV 2.9).

< 2093000 : Camdraw only, no setsphere (that's RLV 2.9 but before 2.9.30).

< 3000000 : Camdraw and setsphere are available (that's RLV 2.9.30 and above).

< 3040300 : No camdraw, no setsphere available (that's RLVa prior to 3.4.3).

Other numbers : Setsphere only, no camdraw available (that's RLVa 3.4.3 and above).

I hear often that this update makes your vision spheres white. This is not a bug but a feature actually, the vision spheres take the same color as the root prim of your blindfold. To change that, simply edit your blindfold, check "edit linked" on the edit window, select only the root prim (that's the one highlighted yellow) and set its color to whatever you prefer, the vision spheres will follow. It's a nice hidden little feature if you're tired of the black.

As an extra, there is also an update to the Vixen legs cuffs : their D-rings would not hide when selecting the Invisible style while unlocked. You need a replacement to benefit from this update though.

If you don't want to replace your Vixen cuffs (which I understand, they're a pain to resize), you can fix the bug yourself by following this procedure :

1. Edit the right ankle cuff and check "edit linked" on the edit window.

2. Click on the main part of the cuff only (the one with the strap and rings) so it selects only this part.

3. It should have a weird name. Replace the weird name with another weird name such as this :

$2%Lw:1/0 $3%Lw:1/0 $4%!Lw:1/0 $1567%w:1/0 $0%Lkw:1/0

4. Do the same with the left ankle cuff.

No need to reset or anything, this fixes the bug once and for all.

To update, simply go to any of the following locations :

My Little Shop
Chorazin's store
Roper's Dark Playground
Dark Wishes


Once there, click on the updater and follow the instructions. You do not need to choose "REPLACE" for this one as the Blindfold plugin is the only thing that changes and is a single script, so a simple "UPDATE" is fine. You do need to replace your Vixen legs cuffs though.

 

 

Have fun !

Marine