"Hi. I happen to have a few copies of your fetish hood (you know, the one that the wearer or his/her owner can label). I love it, it's a great product. Any chance to add gag and blindfold functionality to it as well?"
I've been asked this question, or some variation on it, at least two dozen times since 2007 when the first "Isolation Hood" was released.
It's important to remember that when the first version was released, RLV was still a very new and experimental project, and no one knew if it was safe to make products that "relied" on RLV viewers. Who knew if LL would try to ban it or not? Back then, the only real options for gags and blindfolds involved using silly cheats, attaching HUDs to the user's screen, and popping up maps to 'punish' the sub, if the typing animation was detected, or creating massive numbers of "blindfold hud" objects in the user's inventory.
I've always wanted to make a gag and a blindfold, but the technology available to non-RLV users was still very crude.
Over the years since, RLV has become a stable, proven platform to build products upon, and has expanded to offer controls to actually block or alter vision without the use of a HUD, and can automatically re-direct chat to a "gag garble" channel. Earlier this year, Linden Lab released a new technology to allow temporary attachments. This meant that I could make a blindfold that would check for the presence of a HUD, and if missing, it could temp rez a replacement HUD, and temp attach to the owner, without filling up their inventory! LL has made other refinements over the last few years as well, as we can now detect the actual "avatar is typing" status, without relying on whether or not the typing animation is playing.
In short, things have really improved since then, and I still really want to make these sorts of items.
This was a serious consideration in the development of the Black Box.
The Black box is, in essence, a lock. That's really all it does. It handles ownership, whether RLV is "on" or "off", and it keeps track of who owns it, who can access it, and whether it's locked or not. It is the "lowest common denominator among all of my products. It also supports one other thing, plugins.
Plugins are, or I guess I should say "will be", scripts that ship alongside the locking scripts, inside my products. If we take the hood for an example, the hood will come with a locking script, and it will also have a plugin script to handle the text label on the face of the hood. It will also have a script for interacting to the appearance HUD, but that's another issue
Plugins will provide the "specialty" functionality that a product needs, beyond the basic locking and appearance stuff. A pair of shoes might have a plugin for the "walking sound", a butt plug might have a plugin for "inflation", A blindfold would have a plugin that would handle the actual blinding controls, and allow you to specify the severity of blindness when the item was eventually locked on, etc.
Plugins will be modular, and completely automated. Any product that uses the Black Box locking system, will be able to auto-detect plugin scripts, and it will try to use them. So if you bought the theoretical "ER Ballgag" and copied the plugin script out, you could install it into the hood, and the hood would automatically take on that functionality. The same would be true of a blindfold plugin. This would allow you to combine several items into one, if you wanted to, with the maximum number of plugins being 6 per product.
That is a serious mind-trip to me. The idea that someone could take scripts from an ER gag and an ER blindfold, and dump them into the ER hood, and it would all just click together and work. No double menus, no glitches.
That's half of what the Black Box is all about.
So where does the project stand at this point? Click here to find out!
No comments:
Post a Comment