Sunday, September 26, 2010

Closing the maze

Hi,

I am sad to announce that I have to close my RLV maze. This was a fun and quite frustrating place in which many many people struggled to find the way out after falling in a hole... It was also used as a harsh punishment for rebellious subs ("obey or you'll be thrown in Marine's maze !"), or as a challenge for the most adventurous ones.



It has been a fun project. A self-generating, fully RLV enhanced, traps-riddled beast of 3000 prims (exact count varying a little across generations) lost in the middle of nowhere, built only in the purpose of testing the poor adventurer's willpower and patience.



Wandering for two hours (average) before finding the exit, but not before falling into many hidden traps with spikes, smoke or cages, and to be teleported back to the entrance when "dying" after taking a wrong step. Or worse, teleported to a random location into the maze, that's when the victim feels totally lost. Oh the curses I have heard ! For two years ! The screams of frustration were music to my ears. Hehehe. Ahem. Sorry I digress.



So, I have deactivated the entrance of the maze and I'd like to ask everyone who had a "kidnapper" linking to it to do the same. The sim itself will become private so they won't be able to teleport to it anymore anyway. But the maze is going to stay up for a few more days before being derezzed.

Some people might IM me to ask me to rez a maze at their place. It is a fun public playground after all. I'm all for it but I can't transfer it (it is not meant to be sold and some of its sculpts are no-trans anyway) and be warned that it takes a lot of prims as it is set now. It is customizable though, it can be as big or as small as you want.

I've seen people come back over and over again because they liked it so much. And although it takes between one and two hours to finish, I have seen people run it in less than six minutes ! Without cheating !

This closure has only one reason, I just can't support the cost of that place anymore. My sim is going to be rented so I can't afford to maintain a free public place like this anymore. I'm sorry, and I'm very happy to see how popular it has been, even if nobody ever spoke about it publicly. It was like "this secret place you can't talk about" :)


Maybe in the future it will be up again somewhere !
Marine

PS : If you like the design of the walls and ceilings, the textures and sculpts are made by Ariel Erlanger, who sells a dungeon-like skybox called "The Vault" in Vesta that looks exactly like this maze. Go take a look !

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Restrained Love v2.2

Hi !

Here is the latest version of the RLV with several fixes and some improvements :

- added : Keyboard shortcuts to Edit, Open, Sit and Detach, all using right-click.
- added : When receiving inventory from an object, the avatar can be made to automatically say a message on a private channel via the @notify command. That way the object knows whether the offer has been accepted, or accepted AND put in the #RLV folder (which is what it really wants to know), or declined (including muting).
- fixed : The FOV frustum would not be placed correctly on the world map when the UI size is different from 1.0. You can check this bug at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-23105 and no it has nothing to do with the RLV, it was just in the way :)
- fixed : Several bugs spotted by Henri Beauchamp, thank you Henri !
- fixed : When prevented from editing, don't allow to Open with the Open tool on a box
- fixed : @attachallthis on an empty attachpoint or clothing layer attached everything ! (thank you Susan Daviau)
- fixed : Right-click > View Profile on a resident while under @shownames should not do anything (thank you Malidur Galicia)


A word about these new shortcuts :

This version of the RLV makes it easier to execute actions on an object by right-clicking on it. You may have noticed that since SL 2.0, the old pie menu has been replaced with a hierarchical context menu, and while there may be good reasons for this change, it reduces the productivity in everyday use. That's why the RLV adds some features to the right-clicking of the mouse in order to quickly Edit, Sit, Open or Detach an object. Here are the combos :

- Control + Right-click an object in-world : Edit this object.
- Shift + Control + Right-click an object in-world : Edit this object (adding to or removing from the current selection).
- Shift + Right-click an object in-world : Open this object.
- Alt + Right-click an object in-world : Sit on this object. It also works if you are wearing a HUD that takes all your view. Some restraints including mine provide that feature in order to make them feel more real, now this combo will make such a level of restraint be much more user-friendly because it will only prevent touching, and not sitting anymore. Another nice side effect of this is that when you sit that way, it does NOT stop the object if it was moving. In other words, you can now sit on a moving vehicle without stopping it. You can also sit on an object, then sit on another one without having to stand up first.

To delete several objects at the same time, just Control+Shift+Right-click all of them then press the Delete key. This is much faster than right-clicking > Remove > Delete each one of them.

But also :

- Control + Right-click an object you wear : Edit this object.
- Shift + Control + Right-click an object you wear : Edit this object (adding to or removing from the current selection).
- Shift + Right-click an object you wear : Detach this object.
- Alt + Right-click an object you wear : Does nothing.

Of course all these shortcuts are conditioned by the active RLV restrictions. You can't open or edit an object if you can't edit, you can't detach an object that is locked on you, or sit somewhere if you can't unsit from where you are.

Please note that pressing Shift, Control or Alt (or any combination of the those) will still show the default icons (the hand, the magnifier etc) because the viewer has no way to know whether you are going to left-click or right-click on the object.


As always you can grab the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

MD5 hash : 4bf562120afa6fe0d76bbb522bb90117

Have fun !
Marine

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Restrained Love v2.1.2.2

Hi there,

Here is the latest version of the RLV, with several bugfixes and changes that should simplify your life :

- added : A simpler way to activate the real-time shadows. This feature is NOT supported, use at your own risk !
- changed : Outfits are now usable again, unless you are prevented from changing clothes at all.
- fixed : Sometimes when logging on while being prevented from wearing clothes, the bodyparts (hair, skin, eyes and shape) would refuse to load, leaving your avatar desperately ruthed or cloudified until the restriction was lifted. Even a relog would not help. Not fun.
- fixed : The red arrow now appear even when prevented from seeing the location, when you try to map a friend (this is sometimes useful when you are blindfolded).
- fixed : "Wear" an object from the inventory was not replacing an already existing object on the target attachment point, it was behaving exactly the same as "Add".
- fixed : A clever hack around blindfolds.


A word about real-time shadows :

This version of the RLV provides controls to activate and deactivate the real-time shadows. This feature is already present in the original SL viewer, but the controls are hidden because Linden Lab does not officially supports it yet (it is still very much beta and slow). However, if you feel adventurous and know what you are doing, you can activate the shadows by opening your Preferences, then go to Graphics :

- Activate "Framebuffer Objects" and "Lighting and Shadows"
- Select sun & moon with or without projectors in the drop-down list

Please note that NO antialisasing is possible while "Framebuffer Objects" is set, this is a limitation of the viewer.

Attention, real-time shadows are VERY heavy on the graphics card. You must ensure that your computer is able to handle them.


As usual, grab the installer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The hash of the Windows installer is
89f8672966955ee8447e78577499421b

Have fun !
Marine