Going off script

Whatcha been up to lately, Winter?

The short answer to that question is "retooling.. still." The long answer will take some explaining.

Some months ago, it became obvious that I'd rested on my laurels too long, and while I had hung around and played house in SL, ER had become somewhat dated. As I looked around me, I realized that while many of my products were still popular, I wasn't keeping up with the basic levels of functionality that others seemed to be pulling off easily.

Since I'm not a scripter by nature, revisiting my scripts has never been an enjoyable activity. But as I looked at many of the free and low-cost items that people were using, I began to realize that my reluctance had held me back.

Now, this was, as I say, some months back. I'd just spent 2 disasterous months working on a script, almost to the exclusion of all else. Locking myself away as long as I could stand, to work in isolation on the item. And at the end of two months, I had a working example of SOME of the functions I wanted, spread across three different scripts. The MODEL for the item, and it's textures and sounds had taken less than a day's worth of work, but the script had beaten me, and even with two months of battle, I hadn't defeated it.

The irony is that the project to script the item, far outlasted the relationship that had inspired the item.

And in the end, I hated the project, never wanted to work on it again, and realized I had succumbed to "Creeping Featuritis" in a bad way. It was then that I realized that SOMETHING had to change.

Custom scripting was eating too much of my time and effort, and providing too little reward. One of my proudest achievements was the script in the ER Fetish Doll hood.. and one of my most frustrating realizations was realizing that many people buy my hood, and delete the scripts from it.

That's a hard thing to hear. I'm sure the friends and customers who have told me they've done this are telling me because they love the look of the item.. but the looks were the easier part of that project for me.

Some of my friends are scripters who build, some are builders who script, and some only do one or the other. Either they have a friend who comes in and does the other half for them, or they buy off-the-shelf components to finish the item. Case in point, a shoe maker who designs her own shoes, but uses third-party scripts bought off the marketplace to make her shoes more "feature rich".

 



 

Now I want to make it totally clear, I'm not "giving up scripting". While I'm no girl-genius when it comes to scripting, I am pretty good at making things intuitive. Instead, what I decided to do was to try and outsource the stuff I can, and when I build stuff in-house, try to make it more modular, so when I have several items that all do essentially the same things, I can just re-use the script I made for the first one.

The core idea that started this is kind of funny. I hate some of the colors my latex comes in.

Originally when the first ER latex items came out, they came only in black. As sales picked up, people began asking for versions of those items in the other "PoC" colors. Since PoC was a big brand with relatively cheap catsuits, it seemed like a great idea. People loved the color changer, and so when I finally made my own catsuits, of course, I made them in the same 12 colors.

Since then, people have asked for other colors, and I've longed to make them. A better brown just for starters. But to add just one new color would mean not just adding a new vendor for the catsuit, but going back and adding new textures to every single color change attachment. The hood, the implants, the hairs, the bulges and cameltoes.. it wasn't going to be any small task. A task complicated by the fact that all those items ran on "menus".. and you can only have 12 buttons on a menu page.

Now, before you say it, of course many programmers work around this by doing "pages".. and while there are several free examples of paging menus, the fact is that scripting is very hard for me. Ideally I'd like a solution that didn't require editing the scripts every time I add a color.

My friend's shoes really provided the answer. I'd been toying with the idea of selling shoes, when I realized people would want to wear them with skins and stockings other than just the 12 latex colors I might provide. The old thought about adding MORE colors cam back to me, when I suddenly remembered my friend's shoes and her "off the shelf" HUD system.

The answer to both problems was right there.

If I could just have a hud like hers, like so many makers are using these days, I could add as many buttons as I wanted, adding as many possible textures as I could desire. And with the built in tinting system, I could provide an easier way to color match skins, and possibly even consider embarking on even crazier experiments.

So I looked at the Hood, arguably my most complex item. The Hood has just a few basic functions that can be boiled down to 'locking" and "appearance". If I passed the majority of the appearance stuff over to a HUD, then all I'd really need is a fairly solid locking script, and maybe a little plugin for handling the text label. That got me thinking. Almost all of my fetish items were appearance/lock. In fact, almost any item I could find on my dream-list came down to the same two basic functions, with any additional functions (blindfold for example) being relatively self-contained.

So I started working on that "Locking" script. Continued...