Marine's

Restrained Love v2.8.3

2012-01-15T13:02:00.001-08:00

Hi !

Here is the latest version of the RLV, with many bugfixes and improvements over the last one. Check this out !

- added : New keyboard shortcuts for builders (they are also added to the Build > Options submenu) :
- Alt+W to edit linked parts
- Alt+T to set to stretch textures
- Alt+B to set to stretch both sides
- Alt+R to set to set grid mode to World
- Alt+F to set to set grid mode to Local
- Alt+V to set to set grid mode to Reference
- Alt+G to set to set current selected object as Reference and set grid mode to Reference

- added : Debug setting "RenderMeshDeformed" to switch Qarl's parametric alpha mesh deformer on and off (it is off by default).

- added : Include LL's patch for the new inventory features.

- changed : Allow to click in-world while in Mouselook mode, even when your controls are taken, but only while pressing Alt.

- fixed : Inventory offers were unreadable (the Show button used to overwrite the url), same for teleport offers.

- fixed : Shift+Right-click on an object in world failed to open it.

- fixed : In Mouselook mode, we could only click on something or fire with a gun once.

- changed : We couldn't be force TPed when in Busy mode.

- fixed : RLV_50 : The alignment tool in the build floater is broken. Thank you Lance Corrimal and Jonathan Yap for the fix !

- fixed : RLV_52 : another avatar sitting down while I'm in ML resets my camera. Thank you Lance Corrimal for the fix !

Grab the installer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash of the Windows installer is :
93ba2ec5adb1d1e97acc93ad8a9b86c6

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.8.2.1

2012-01-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

Hello again !

There was a bug introduced in RLV 2.8.2 that would prevent you from seeing your own profile. That's due to a faulty merge, I think. So here is a fixed version.

Grab the installer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash of the Windows installer is :
fdde45893cbd77548750f9e9c342ae1d

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.8.2

2012-01-01T04:14:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year !

I wish you health and wealth for 2012, may this new year bring you all that you wished and never dared to ask :)

And along with my best wishes, comes a new release of the RLV ! A big one.

Firstly, it includes all the latest improvements from Linden Lab, especially on the deferred rendering (that's "Lighting and Shadows" in your preferences) : faster rendering (my FPS went up by 150% at least), less artifacts, the ability to drag an item over the tabs of the Edit window and have them open automatically, exactly like in v1.x (for example, when trying to drop a script inside an object and you realize you didn't open the Contents tab first), and so on.

Secondly, it includes my own enhancements and bug fixes :

- added : Press Ctrl+T to hide and show the IM window (only works if there is at least one IM to show, and if IMs are organized in tabs, not separate windows).

- added : Conversations toolbox button to do the aforementioned action of showing and hiding the IM window. It looks like this :
It is a phone icon because to me IMs are a lot like phone calls.

- added : Press and hold the Shift key to make your aim 10x more precise in Mouselook mode. Very useful when your view is zoomed in with Ctrl-0.

- added : You can now sit down while in Mouselook mode, by holding Alt and right-clicking on an object.

- added : When a script tries to attach non-properly named items, the viewer will attach them anyway, by stacking (i.e. no risk of replacing locked items worn on the same attachment point).

- changed : Don't hide the user interface while in Mouselook mode. You can move your cursor by holding the Alt key, and click where you want this way (even on HUDs, and even if your controls are grabbed). If you want to hide the UI, simply press Ctrl+Alt+F1.

- changed : To hide and show the toolbox window, press Ctrl+Shift+T instead of Ctrl+T.

- changed : Added 2 lines to the text on script dialogs, for more readability.

- fixed : Couldn't change the profile options.

- fixed : Couldn't use "Add To Current Outfit" and "Remove From Current Outfit" on folders in the inventory, while something was locked on you.

- fixed : RLV_47 : The Avatar button was permanently disabled. Also the Avatar window is made a little taller.

I'm really glad of the work I did on the Mouselook mode, it was long overdue. We all regretted that it was rendered pretty useless in v2 and v3, while it was enjoyable in v1. Now you can chat, IM, use your inventory, HUDs and map, sit down etc, all this while in Mouselook mode. The only things you cannot do is edit and build stuff, simply because the code is really not made for this, and it would prove to be rather difficult for the user anyway.

Combined to a few improvements made by Linden Lab in the meantime (namely, the head attachments casts shadows and the point of view is a lot less restricted now), it brings back Mouselook to its former glory.

Grab the installer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash of the Windows installer is :
b11d3c38ecc29e759985553c8b2f66e3

Have fun !
Marine

Please note : If this RLV doesn't work for you (things not rezzing for example), v2.8.1 is still available. That would be because I am struggling to build a correct viewer. It seems something is broken in my build machine, probably a library somewhere, but I do know other people could build 2.8.2 from my sources, and got it working. I'll keep you posted of course.

I'm also told it might be because RLV 2.8.2 does not install very well over a RLV 2.8.1 or below. I recommend you do a clean install by renaming or deleting your previous RLV folder before installing this one.

Restrained Love v2.8.1

2011-11-28T12:27:00.000-08:00

Hi !

Ok I know I have just released RLV 2.8, but two things were still bugging me, so here they are, fixed :

- fixed : RLV_38 : @getinvworn can return string literal "n" instead of two numbers for the this/child status indication

- fixed : RLV_13 : @getstatus needs a new, or user-selectable, separator (first character was still always a slash).

Since the second bugfix implied changing the response to @getstatus[all], I have to bump the version of the RLV API to 2.8.1 as well. That's the only change, but the way it was done under 2.8 wasn't intuitive and could lead to more work for the scripter. Now a @getstatusall:;#=2222 will respond #showinv#showworldmap#showminimap (for example) instead of /showinv#showworldmap#showminimap.

Download the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash for the Windows installer is
72c2aeac34492fcec4c739581ec450b9

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Marine

Restrained Love v2.8

2011-11-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

Hey !

So here it is, after many promises, the new RLV with a blacklist to ignore some RLV commands !

I know, I'm a little late. Hehe. Anyway here it is. Along with many other bugfixes, just see for yourself :

- added : RLV_18 : Implement blacklist :
- RestrainedLoveBlacklist debug setting as a comma-separated list of tokens. Adding "%f" after a token indicates that we are blacklisting the "=force" variant instead of the "=n" one.
- @getblacklist[:partial_name]=2222 to retrieve a comma separated list of blacklisted commands
- @getblacklist in IM to act like @version.
- @versionnumbl=2222 to retrieve both the version and the blacklist.

- added : RLV_25 : Canonical names for new attach points need to be defined : "Neck" & "Root".

- changed : Re-establish fully opaque windows, since now we can control their transparencies through the preferences.

- fixed : RLV_35 : Layout of panel_status makes RLV unusable on smaller screens.

- fixed : RLV_28 : simple notifications unreadable (introduced in 2.7.4 by inverting the script dialogs).

- fixed : "@detach=n" on a child prim did not always make the whole object undetachable.

- fixed : RLV_37 : Double names on emotes on the chat history still show under @shownames.

- fixed : @attachallthis doesn't work with folder which name begins with "~", even under another folder (Thank you Sassy Romano for the report).

- fixed : RLV_13 : @getstatus needs a new, or user-selectable, separator.

Some of the changes involve new RLV commands (namely @getblacklist, @versionnumbl and @getstatus[all]), so the API will change version as well, to 2.8.

Go grab the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint/

And the MD5 hash for the Windows installer is :
61eb68da2b3fb85345393e430ddf0c36

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.4.2

2011-11-13T03:29:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

I've been busy fixing bugs lately... and here is the result !

- changed : Radar hides information when the People window is too small, to improve readability.

- changed : Make the chat toasts bigger again.

- changed : Remove the "Block" button on scripts dialog, it was too easy to click on it by mistake.

- fixed : RLV_32 : @showloc wouldn't hide the location when coordinates are hidden.

- fixed : RLV_27 : Whisper/Shout don't show as such on chat history.

- fixed : RLV_31 : Viewer crashes when opening the Picks window.

- fixed : SL bug : Emotes appear twice on the chat history.

- fixed : Empty tokens in RLV commands ("@showloc=n,,showinv=n", "@showloc=n,") would raise a "failed command" alert, yet execute the command anyway (thank you Mo Noel for the report !)

- fixed : Information button on the top menu bar wasn't doing anything anymore, now it shows the Place Profile window again, like on the navigation bar and the mini-location bar.

- known issue : Payment notification text is totally off, as a result of the change to the placement of the buttons in the script dialogs.

You can grab the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash for the Windows installer is :
215a6d23cf52beb9cf4d42117b7eda6b

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.4.1

2011-11-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Hi there,

So I have added a shortcut to restart all the animations (I use this a lot so a shortcut is necessary), but I didn't realize this was used for "select all", AND it would not allow you to select all the text... Sorry about that !

So here is RLV 2.7.4.1, with the shortcut changed to Control+Alt+Shift+A, with my apologies :)

Grab the latest version here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash for the Windows installer is :
241a78959f6f04e9faf7a952a7b5b7c7

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.4

2011-11-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

This is it ! RLV has switched to SL 3.x, this means the sidebar is gone, and we are back to individual windows, like in v1.x ! And naturally this required a lot of adapting and tweaking, that's why I took so long before releasing this version.

You will notice quite a few changes compared to v2.x, but you should quickly find your marks again. The most noticeable changes are the sidebar that is no longer in the viewer, and the notification area that has shifted to the upper right corner of the screen, just like in v1.

Oh wait... This actually creates a big problem, at least for me. You see, I am used to clicking on the same buttons on the same scripts (namely mine), and with time I have grown to predict their position on the screen, even before they appear. This makes me a lot more productive, and it has been so since day one. Let's do a little history here :

In SL v1.x, script dialogs were on the upper right corner of the screen, and were bright blue. There was some text in a fixed size area, possibly with a scrollbar, and then the buttons that you pressed to dialog with the script.

In SL v2.x, these dialogs have moved to a notification area, which is on the lower right corner of the screen. And this time, the text would be a variable size area, but still above the buttons so it wouldn't matter, the buttons would always be at the same spot. Best of both worlds : buttons always at the same position, and no more scrollbar to hide the text.

But now, in SL v.3, the script dialogs are back to the upper right corner, this is all well and good but there is still no scrollbar. Which means the buttons (that follow after the text, which is still a variable size area) would appear... just anywhere on the screen, depending on how much text there is to display ! Eek ! That's unacceptable if you ask me.

That's why for this version and probably onwards, I have inverted the text and the buttons. The buttons appear above the text instead of below. It takes a little time to get used to, but it works since they are now always at the same spot. It creates an issue, though : some notifications are totally off. I will be working on it, but it is less easy than it seems and I really want to release this version now.

And now, on to the other good stuff :

- added : Ctrl+A keyboard shortcut will do a "Me" > "Movement" > "Restart All Animations".

- changed : Now @showloc will also hide the coordinates, not only the parcel and the region. Thank you Chorazin Allen for the suggestion !

- changed : Chat history window is optimized, and the "Google translate" checkbox is removed (for now, but if too many people use it I will put it back).

- changed : in v3.x, the SL viewer shows notifications (IMs, script dialogs etc) on the upper right corner of the screen. This seriously messes up the placement of the buttons on script dialogs, as their positions are not predictable anymore. Therefore I swapped the buttons with the text, and the buttons now appear above the text.

- changed : Chat bar disappears when losing focus, if the chat history is hidden and if "CloseChatOnReturn" is set to TRUE in the debug settings. Chat toasts are also moved slightly higher up so that the chat bar does not hide them.

- changed : Reduced the minimum size of most used windows (inventory, appearance, people, places), as well as the size of the tabs on these windows.

- fixed : "Use region settings" switched back to the latest customized Windlight settings, instead of the default region settings. Thank you Lance Corrimal for the heads-up !

- fixed : Sending a TP offer would behave wrongly if one of the people who were sent the TP offer was an exception to the @sendim restriction. Thank you Lance Corrimal for the fix !

- fixed : Some Windlight settings were wrongly set through RLV commands (namely all the "intensity" values). Thank you Henri Beauchamp for the fix !

- known issue : Payment notification text is totally off, as a result of the change to the placement of the buttons in the script dialogs.

You can grab the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash for the Windows installer is
598d864225c163c50b8560dd7e836422

Please note : In case you hate this viewer (or it does not work for you), I am leaving 2.7.2 and 2.7.3 on the download page. The change might be too much for some.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.3.3

2011-10-22T10:24:00.001-07:00

Hello there !

Finally, here is the version I've been working on loosely, while waiting for LL to deliver sources to a viewer that actually works. It's not perfect, I find it works better than 2.7.3.2, but I still experience occasional crashes, especially when downloading a lot of textures (in crowded areas for example). But at least it's usable.

Here are the bugfixes and improvements I have added in this version :

- added : Make gestures activate/deactivate when wearing/removing items respectively through a script.
- added : New icon for the viewer, thanks to Kittin Ninetails's nice work :)
- added : "Use region settings" menu item in the World > Sun menu, to be able to revert to default without having to open 3 windows.
- fixed : Now each prim handles its own restrictions (instead of all defaulting to the root prim), but if ONE prim is set to be undetachable, then the whole object is undetachable.

Grab the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 for the Windows installer is
374576d5cf34e4ddfbe084662b1e8921

Now I'm going to try out LL's latest viewer, with all their UI changes. It looks good so far !

Have fun !
Marine

RLV Issue Tracker

2011-10-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hi again,

It's been a long time I should have done this, but now it is official : the RLV has its own issue tracker now ! This comes directly from my blog post about opening the specification of the RLV : http://realrestraint.blogspot.com/2011/07/rlv-to-become-really-open.html

If you don't know what an issue tracker is, think of LL's JIRA dashboard, through which bugs and feature requests are filed by the users. The RLV issue tracker works exactly the same way, but is much simpler.

Issues are separated in four main categories (more may be added later) :

- Discussions : This category is meant to serve as an informal forum. Bugs and new features will be discussed here, like a big brainstorm before triaging and turning the good ideas into projects.

- RLVSPEC : This category is meant to contain all the bug reports and new features that impact the specification (the API). It is formal and features in that category are to be considered seriously.

- RLVORIG : This category is about bugs and features in my own RLV (not RLVa).

- RLVUNIF : This category is empty for now, since there is no "merged" RLV yet.

If you encounter a bug and you are sure it is tied to my RLV (the viewer, not the spec), please file it under "RLVORIG". If you are sure it is tied to the specification itself, tag it "RLVSPEC".

If you wish to share your new feature, please drop it on "Discussions" first so that you can discuss it with other people, because "RLVSPEC" and "RLVORIG" are meant to be more formal.

You can find the tracker here :
https://bitbucket.org/marinekelley/rlv/issues

Sorry again for the time it took. I should have done this looong ago !

Have fun !
Marine

RLV news

2011-10-08T23:27:00.001-07:00

Hello there,

Wow it's been two months since my last post... Sorry about that. Let me briefly explain why I've been so silent :

- The V2 SL viewer has been added more nasty bugs than fixes, and that hindered my ability (and motivation) to work on a new RLV, although it has been on "active waiting" mode for more than two months. The bugs are about very frequent crashes due to memory bloat (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-1650), invisiprims being totally useless when using dynamic shadows, breaking prim shoes (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2181 , I think, it is marked as fixed but I had to back it out from my code if I wanted to see invisiprims again), and other countless bugs that, frankly, should have been fixed two years ago when V2 was still beta. This is a shame. Even now, you can't write in a notecard and be sure that what you write will be added where your cursor are. You can't use Mouselook either. Ctrl-W works when it wants. The Discard button is so invasive that you often press it by mistake, losing your purchase and wasting your money. What a joke.

- For more than a month now, the latest version was so bloated that the textures would suddenly start to re-rez repeatedly as soon as the memory limit was reached. It was sickening. First time the viewer made me wanna puke for real.

- I've been working at testing mesh on my RLV, so far so good, except... well, meshes are not resizable when rigged (i.e., when used as a piece of clothing). Apparently, it is too hard technically to allow for resizing a rigged mesh, but this limitation is a fatal blow to the mesh clothing and restraint market. This is so disappointing, I was working on some new mesh restraints, well this project has been shelved now. The official ETA for the fix is "Someday/Maybe". Just take a look at the JIRA entry to see for yourself : https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2374

- Third party viewers like the RLV are still unable to upload mesh, because the library is proprietary. I've been trying the open-source version, but had less success than others.

- I am currently working on overhauling the animation system in my products, to give more choices to the user without breaking the existing RR plugins. I'll blog more about this later, when it's ready.

So right now the RLV is on standby, but almost ready for a release should something new happen. It is just that for now, I have nothing new to offer compared to 2.7.3.2, which is more stable and usable than 2.7.3.3.

Ok, this post sounded like a rant... And not at all what I was supposed to talk about in the first place. No worries, I'll blog about the next thing shortly :)

Have fun,
Marine

A new brand and a new item !

2011-08-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

Over the years I have been working on many projects in SL. Some very much on the kinky side, like restraints, others totally different. Among the restraints, some were (in my opinion) good enough to share with others, and that's the reason why I have created the RealRestraint brand. However I never got to share some of my other projects with the community, because they were so far away from my main business that I was afraid of confusing my customers.

But I have a lot to share... Some of my private projects are, I think, good enough to be enjoyed by others and although I know they won't be as mainstream as my restraints, it would be a shame to keep them for myself :)

So here is me creating a new brand that I have called "Marine's Goodies". It's a little like visiting an attic, without the spiders. In this brand you will find several items that have nothing to do with each other, and very little to do with BDSM.

For now there is only one item to sell in this brand, a HUD that is meant to be used by ponygirls/ponyboys and their trainers. It is very versatile, a trainer can command as many ponies as they want, even with other teams around, it is very resistant to lag, and a pony can even use this HUD while blind ! Have you ever tried to pull a cart while blind, without hitting a wall ? I know a few ponies who are good at that now, thanks to this HUD :)

Several friends of mine have been nagging me for over a year to release it, so here it is !

For now there are only two vendors in this new brand. One is at my shop in Pak, the other one is at the Little Shop of Kink, in Lineside. If it works well, I will add vendors across the grid.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.3.2

2011-08-13T23:43:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

Here is the latest version of the RLV, no new features this time but an updated codebase and a few bug fixes. The change I like the most in the new codebase is being able to focus on any object without having this "zoom effect" we've had for years. You can now focus on a hollow prim at will.

This new codebase also added a "feature" that I personally disliked very much, and therefore changed back to how it was before : the Build window used to have a drop-down list that would allow you to change the way objects were moved and rotated : World/Local/Reference/Screen/Attachment. It was VERY useful for a builder and I used it like all the time. I don't know why, but Linden Lab moved this list box to an annex window (the "Build Options" one). However this window is meant to be used only once in a while, now the SL viewer requires a builder to have it open at all times. It eats more screen real estate and makes you click more, for no gain. Worse, this list box was replaced by the "Link" and "Unlink" buttons... Imagine clicking on "Unlink" by mistake, it would destroy your object with no undo available.

So I removed those two buttons and re-added the list box and I'm a happy builder again.

Aside from that, here are the bug fixes :

- fixed : The Windlight shared region settings added by LL to the viewer recently introduced a way around the prevention against changing environment settings.

- fixed : @getinvworn would sometimes give weird results when a single no-mod item was under a folder which name did not begin with "."

- fixed : When prevented from seeing the location, right-clicking on the ground (Linden land not a prim ground) would make the viewer slow down to a crawl, eventually crashing. Same thing when trying to open the "About Land" window.

Download the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash of the Windows installer is :
320c1045a227f23dd4d8e5d11e20c42b

Have fun !
Marine

New RR product : The Jammer

2011-08-04T03:14:00.001-07:00

Hello there !

I am proud to announce the release of a new product in the RealRestraint brand : the Jammer !

Unlike the other products of my brand, this one is not really a restraint. It is... far worse. Those who heard about the Banishment Program know that I am very interested in all kinds of behavioral control devices in SL, and the Jammer is the result of my research.

Out of the box, it looks like a mundane bluetooth headset, that everyone owns nowadays.

But make no mistake ! This is not at all what it is meant for. Under this disguise lie a few high-tech, low power control devices :

- Headphones : Filling the wearer's ears and employing active noise cancellation, they completely suppress the hearing while acting like actual earphones.

- Vocal chords suppressor : Pressed against the wearer's trachea, this small device issues active noise cancellation as well to suppress any sound coming from the wearer's throat, effectively muting her. It also contains a mic, in order to record what was going to be said and send it to the central unit.

- Contact lenses : Applied directly on the eyes, they react to the radio signals sent by the central unit, and polarize themselves accordingly, effectively blinding the wearer when needed.

- Speaker : Disguised into the microphone part of the headset, it is used to speak on behalf of the wearer, using advanced voice morphing technology to perfectly imitate the wearer's voice. It also contains an actual microphone that hears what is said within chat range.

- Central unit : This is the nexus of the system, it is embedded inside the plastic part of the device. It comprises several sub-units :
- A radar to detect who is around
- An antenna to communicate with the Dominant's remote
- A very high frequency, very low power radio emitter to control the opacity of the contact lenses
- A central micro-processor to execute the program uploaded by the Dominant

With this device and the remote control that goes with it, you, as the Dominant, are able to control what your sub says, what she hears, what she sees, you can even speak through her device and hear the chat around her. Or limit the amount of chat she says, suppress it, censor it, or even censor what she hears, making her hear totally different things...

And last but not least, you can actually program her like a computer ! The Jammer has its own programming language that is flexible enough to give you plenty of leverage over your sub, and have her behave at all times, even when you are not around. With this programming language, you can automatically replace words that she says or hears, force her to say the things you want, report to you according to your wishes, and even trigger animations and sounds (that you upload from the remote control).

In the remote you find several predefined programmings, like one for a slave (not being able to speak unless spoken to first, being forced to say "Master" or "Mistress" when talking after you, etc), one for a ponygirl (not being able to understand human language, only common gestures), one for a puppygirl (being made to bark and overall act like an animal), one for a doll (obsessed with sex, eager to serve her owner) and one for a drone (acting like a robot, having her brain washed, being unable to even speak, only obey). Of course these are just examples, you can modifiy them and write your own programmings at will, without limit. You can even share them with fellow Dominants, since they are just contained in notecards.

You also find a few full-perms sounds and aninms (the famous "nadu" for example, but also some custom anims like a "girl in pain" one) that you can upload into the Jammer, and force your sub to play.

Now... Before you get all excited, know that this device is VERY complex stuff. The manual is big and divided in three parts :

- If you are just a casual user, you will have fun with its basic features such as acting like a renamer, limiting and suppressing the speech and hearing, and speaking and hearing through the sub.

- If you are more serious about it, you will learn through an extensive tutorial how to write a program for the Jammer and how to upload it. Mostly for its speech control features.

- And if you are an actual programmer in RL (or even just a scripter in SL), i.e. you have the mindset of a developer, you will enjoy reading the expert part of the manual, that details all the intricacies and features of the language itself, telling you how you need to know to come up with full-fledged programs.

In other words, into the right hands this device can prove to be very powerful. Mwahaha !

Have fun with this new weapon !
Marine

RLV to become really open

2011-07-21T08:18:00.000-07:00

Hi,

A big change is occurring on the RLV side of life. From the beginning I have been holding a tight control over it (how many times did I hear "too tight" !), it was painful and frustrating for some but necessary for the project to succeed.

Firstly because when it started by the end of 2007, third party viewers were still a new thing in SL and users needed to be reassured about the liability of the makers and maintainers of these viewers. We couldn't allow a password-stealing function hidden under some nice feature. I wanted to enhance the experience for the fetish community so I needed to make my own viewer, and I needed it accepted by said community. I committed my name to it, since I was already famous at that time. It was a successful move and the "Restrained Love Viewer", or "RLV", was quickly born and adopted. Note that at the time, it was still named "Restrained Life Viewer". It changed name only much later.

Over the years, suggestions came and were discussed (in private, mostly), features were added, but always with me staying in control of the project. Both because I was developing it and because I needed to make sure it stayed consistent, secure and backward compatible.

This is why the RLV is some kind of UFO in the world of third party viewers. While other third party viewers strive to give more power to the user, the RLV strives to give more power to scripts. Generally, commercial scripts. In other words, the RLV is a platform, a middleware between the user and the scripts included into the objects they would use daily. It was a challenge to build such a platform and the trust with both the users and the content creators. You don't risk your business lightly on some kind of new technology without being sure that it is there to stay. But it is a challenge that I took and won. The RLV is a success.

Nowadays, the RLV is mature. It is widely adopted by users and content creators, even outside the fetish community. Its wide exposure brings a lot of feedback, suggestions and bug reports, that I have to handle myself in my free time. And the more feedback the more features, the more features the more work for me.

Moreover, I had considered approaching Linden Lab with the idea of integrating a subset of the RLV inside their original viewer, in the past. For example the shared Windlight settings, the shared folders and so on. Things that are outside kink but yet very useful to a broad panel of users. Bots are made that use the RLV to let customers see demonstrations of the outfits they consider buying, for example. Combat sims use a number of RLV commands to ensure fairness during fights. Disabled people are helped by others when it comes to moving, teleporting, wearing outfits etc, all this thanks to their RLV. There are dozens of examples like that. But integrating the RLV into the SL viewer was never considered by LL (they have enough on their plate as it is), so my implementation of the RLV stayed a little like an outsider. The specification, however, was more and more adopted thanks to another viewer that was steadily seducing more and more users : Firestorm. It is to the point that half SL uses it now (and counting), so instead of maintaining the RLV for LL, why not do it for Firestorm ?

Now that the RLV specification is mature (as in "stable and usable", not "complete"), there is less momentum to add new features. There is more code, more testing, overall more work involved when I add something now than when I did back in 2007. And there are more and more pressing demands from other people to open the specification, in other words to give more power to discussion instead of letting me be a "bottleneck" in the process. I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Some of you might be aware of an effort that was undertaken months ago to make a group in order, a "think tank", to discuss of the directions where the RLV should be headed to. The RLV belongs to the community and not to me. It is my gift to the community after all, I am the guardian of it, but not its owner. My role is to ensure that any new feature will not break older ones, nor existing content in SL. The RLV is a platform for business, it is capital that the content creators know that their platform of choice won't bite them in the butt later and jeopardize their business.

However, this group is mainly Firestorm-centered. The maths are simple : the user base of Firestorm is multiple times bigger than that of any other third party viewer, so whatever feature they come up with becomes de facto standard when it's released. And that group is really pressing to adding new features to the RLV part of Firestorm.

So after giving it much thought, I have decided that it would be beneficial to everyone, especially content creators, to bring the specification to a new level of audience and reactivity.

This is why I am joining their team as one of the two RLV developers, the other being Kitty Barnett (whose own implementation is called RLVa, for "alternate", and was meant to be a testing grounds for new features before discussing with me to add them to the spec, precisely). And be part of that group as well, of course, for I am the most qualified to determine whether such and such change is beneficial to the spec, the most knowledgeable about the many pitfalls to avoid, and am the original author of the specification and first implementation.

So what does it mean in practice ?

I will keep developing and maintaining my own RLV on the side, as I always have. It has many features that are unique to it and I don't want to lose them. Moreso, other third party viewers use my code directly and I don't want to let them down. I also want to keep my testing grounds for new features (which is what my RLV has always been), so nothing changes there. However both my implementation of the RLV spec and Kitty's need to be merged into one, and that's not going to be an easy task. There is a chance that I drop my code completely and only use hers, since it is already in Firestorm, we'll see. My code is older and grew along with the specification, while hers is younger and was done when the specification was already mature. Both our codes are very different, mine is rather simple and to-the-point, while hers is completely object-oriented hence modular. But also much more convoluted.

On a side note, Kitty hasn't had the most enjoyable role until now. A different implementation implies different bugs, with users screaming at her because it "works in my viewer and not in hers". And she was always bound to wait for me to add new features to the spec. This was not a sane situation for her. Now we are going to work together instead of doing the same thing in two different ways each one on our side.

I am also coming into that group (again) with my own guidelines. There are three golden rules for the RLV spec, that I've been following to the letter so far :

1. Separation : A RLV shall not do what scripts can do. Otherwise it would stop being a platform and would become a competitor to the very projects it is supposed to support.

2. Compatibility : A RLV shall not break content. That means we must assume that each existing command is already widely used across SL, and that changing it will upset a lot of people. Likewise, a new command shall not contradict an existing one.

3. Security : A RLV shall never jeopardize the user's assets (be it inventory items, objects in-world, money or personal information).

These rules are the reason for its success. I will keep following them when discussing new features, and will systematically vote against a change that violates one of those rules. They are the reason why I have kept doing this alone until now, I trust the people in the group are adult and responsible enough to understand their value and subscribe to them. If they don't, I have nothing to do with that group.

The way I see it, the group is like a buffer between the community's suggestions and the inclusion of some of them in future versions of the spec. We (that means me included) will debate over interesting new features to add to the specification and decide whether to really include them or not, by voting. I am not going to be their coding slave though, nor is Kitty. There is no hierarchy involved. All equal, no leader (although the workload of actually coding the thing rests on our shoulders). Besides not all the members of the group are involved into Firestorm, it is a group of content creators, and of course not all Firestorm is involved into that group either. Lastly, the group should be open for joining, lest be regarded as some kind of "RLV elite group", which would be very much anti-community. The last thing I want is to see the RLV spec be used as a weapon by a select few content creators against the rest of the crowd, and I am here to ensure it won't happen.

But I want to make it clear that I will not tolerate a battle of egos. I come there to get things done. Petty politics are for petty people. The last (and only) meeting I had with this group months ago was less than pleasant. I got myself crowded and pressed with demands from all sides. If it happens again, I won't stay long.

Likewise, I am not being "assimilated" (eww). I am not committing myself to Firestorm, nor dropping anything else that I was doing. The way I am joining may not be the most ideal for me (those who know the story behind it understand why), but it is the most logical. It is capital that the RLV stays under the control of responsible people, including the original author of it (me), but one person cannot take the load of all the suggestions coming from all the Firestorm users. It's just too much.

I'll keep you posted about the developments.
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.3.1

2011-07-15T09:33:00.001-07:00

Hi !

Here is the latest version of the RLV, hopefully less crashy than the last one. There are a few bugfixes too, some of them to long-standing bugs :

- fixed : Could not Replace Outfits when under an @addoutfit or a @remoutfit restriction.
- fixed : When trying to teleport someone, we were not getting the automatic response if they were prevented from teleporting.
- fixed : Temporary uploads were broken in 2.7.3.

Grab the installer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash for the Windows installer is
a71225d8893e9cb77bffece0eed13c63

Note : If invisiprims render black on your screen (no matter whether you have Lighting and Shadows on or off), simply turn the "OctreeAttachmentSizeFactor" down to 1 (it is 4 by default). You can do this in the Advanced > Debug Settings menu.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.3

2011-07-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Here is a new version of the RLV, with once again a few enhancements that you'll like, I'm sure :

- added : Now you can see "Typing" above the name of an avatar who is typing, regardless of whether their typing animation is hidden or not.
- changed : Now you can customize the automatic message people get when they IM you and you can't receive IMs. Requires a restart of your viewer.
- changed : Now you can customize the automatic message people get when you IM them but you can't send IMs. Requires a restart of your viewer.
- changed : You are given the choice whether you can send and receive OOC chat (chat between double parens : "((...))"). Default is TRUE, and it requires a restart of the viewer.
- fixed : Restrictions were removed silently (i.e. without a notification to scripts) when garbage-collected from an object that had disappeared.
- fixed : Allow to Replace an Outfit even when something is locked. This was a long-standing bug, glad it is fixed now.

The "Typing" feature was something I have been meaning to do for a long time now, but never found how to do it. 90% of the people in SL deactivate their typing animation because they think it makes them look like newbies, but they don't realize that it removes a crucial piece of information from the people around them. When they don't know whether you are typing a very long message or you're just afk for a bit (or crashing), they tend to become frustrated that the conversation is dragging.

I've had long conversations with friends that could have been much shorter if our typing animations were enabled, simply because we spent most of the time wondering if the other was typing or not. Because of that, I had deactivated mine as a sign of protest, after years of trying to convince them to activate theirs.

I believe that enabling the typing animation is a mark of respect to others, but being very vocal about it over the years didn't bring any result. Now with this new feature, the point is moot. People can keep their typing anim off, you can still see whether they are typing or not. Best of both worlds.

Following the release of 2.7.2 and much testing, it appears to be very crashy for a few people (like me) but not for others, and only when enabling Dynamic Shadows. If you don't enable it, it does not crash more than any other SL viewer. Therefore I have removed the link to 2.7.1, and this one becomes the normal RLV.

The Windows dowload is there :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash is :
e77197ec6fe620d184068385eb83879e

Have fun !
Marine

Addendum :
Forgot to mention it in the readme file, the debug settings to control the OOC and send/receive IMs features are the following :
- OOC : RestrainedLoveCanOoc
- Send IMs : RestrainedLoveSendimMessage
- Receive IMs : RestrainedLoveRecvimMessage

RLV 2.7.2 as an optional download

2011-06-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

A couple days ago I have released RLV 2.7.1, with a few new features... No need to repeat them here, you can read all about them there.

I must admit, this release was a little rushed. Linden Lab had been working in their Mesh Viewer branch for more than a year (the first line of code of this branch is more than 2 years old), and had merged it with the "viewer-development" branch a few weeks ago.

Think of "branches" as full-fledged projects, usually requiring a full team of developers. On the LL side, Mesh, Windlight, Search etc are branches to the main SL viewer codebase. On the TPV side, Phoenix/Firestorm, Dolphin, Kirsten, Imprudence, RLV etc are "branches" to the main SL viewer codebase. Each branch drifting further and further off the official SL viewer as new features are added to them. Eventually, LL-side branches are bound to be merged to the main SL branch and be rendered available for download. This is how you benefit from the work of dozens of teams working on separate but complimentary projects. All these branches forming, in the end, the SL viewer.

There are two main branches : "viewer-release" and "viewer-development". The former is the one the official SL viewer is built from it is supposed to be stable because it went through all the QA testing, while the latter is more advanced (read : it has more features and more fixes, but also more bugs sometimes) and is the one I built my RLV from. It serves as a buffer and testing grounds for new features before they hit "viewer-release" and the general public.

In other words, the RLV was about to get the latest merge from the Mesh team right in the face. It was daunting. The Mesh team had been working not only on adding Mesh support to SL (the Beta grid had it live for a year now), but also on improving the visual effects dramatically. Dynamic shadows, that's them. Depth of Field, them too. Shadow smoothing, yup. Ambient Occlusion, ditto. And Mesh support, of course. They've been working hard and some of their work had been integrated into several TPVs over time (including RLV), but it was still beta.

Now that their work was about to go mainstream, I had to get the latest features into the RLV, test them and release them before taking the big leap. Because grabbing their own work to add it to the RLV was like adding Windlight and Sculpties in one move. It was bound to take some time and vacations are approaching. Hence the release of RLV 2.7.1 with those not-so-RLV enhancements.

Once the release was done, I thought I was out of the woods for a while, but I took a head-start and tried the Mesh code anyway. Just to see the damage it would do to my code. And it went... surprisingly well (thanks to Mercurial). Many things that had been annoying me for months have been fixed (small prims not rezzing, horizontal scrollbar messing the text selection, alpha-sorting not done properly, and dozens others), and more importantly it's SMOOTH ! I had received a powerful graphics card for xmas, just so I could run the dynamic shadows on my machine and had been less than impressed at the improvement... But now it's smooth even with everything on (SSAO, sun & moon with projectors, depth of field). It looks GOOOOOD ! And the Depth of Field feature, although a marginal addition, has the nice side effect of making sub-standard looking structures look, well, less sub-standards. When a building has ugly seams but stays in the background, they won't ruin your snapshots anymore. For someone as snap-happy as I am, this is a nice perk.

All this to say... I actually love this new viewer. This is what I've been awaiting for so long, and I've heard here and there that LL has been listening to their users as to what needed to be improved first. Kudos to the team for their work !

The only downside is that it crashes a lot. I don't know if it comes from the "viewer-development" codebase or my computer, but taking snapshots or sometimes even playing with the sidebar would do funny things like crash to desktop.

However LL has just released their "Dynamic Shadows Viewer" as the official SL 2.7.2 yesterday. The corresponding RLV is ready, but does crash. That's why I am releasing it at the same time, but as an optional download, leaving 2.7.1 available for now. I don't know how it will behave on your computer. I do know that it crashes more than the last on mine. But it's too good to pass on so here it is.

The Windows dowload is at the same place :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash is :
199edbb5d3651e9be796b12c14177184

Attention, aside from the crashes there is a known bug : hearing an emote on the chat will display as "/me ..." if the chat history is not shown. This is not a RLV bug.

Have fun with it and don't forget, if it crashes too much you can still go back to RLV 2.7.1.
Marine

PS : I'm hearing Henri yell at me from here "Stop mapping your RLV version to the SLV version, it confuses the hell out of my users !" I didn't do it on purpose ! This is a coincidence again !

Restrained Love v2.7.1

2011-06-11T23:02:00.001-07:00

Hi !

Here is a new version of the RLV with a few bugfixes and enhancements (no new command this time), these are things I have been wanting to do for a long time.

During roleplay, a few times now I could still recognize a friend even when being unable to see names and despite her efforts to sound like a different person, simply because I knew nobody else bearing her "dummy name" ("An agent" in her case). I have stated years ago, when introducing the @shownames command, that every avatar had a dummy name that was calculated from their user name, and that this dummy name never changed. This is not true anymore because making it static like this would eventually ruin the very purpose of hiding names. One would go "Oh her name is 'this individual' ? That must be Jane again !" and blow the surprise that Jane was making.

Now the viewer will make a new deal of dummy names every few hours (but not during a session). This means that every few hours, Jane's dummy name will change to something else on the next relog. It doesn't change at every relog because sometimes the environment can get crashy, and you need to relog several times during your roleplay. Dealing new dummy names every time you log on would confuse you unnecessarily.

Second big enhancement, I have added a menu item called "Restart All Animations", in the "Me > Movement" menu. This item allows you to restart all the animations you are playing, as well as all the animations every avatar around is playing too, resulting in all the animations starting at the same time again. This is very handy when you're involved in couple animations with your partner, but both are out of sync because one needed more time to start than the other. With this menu item, animations will be perfectly in sync again.

Third big enhancement, this was kind of a popular request... I have long wanted to add a "@say" command to force the avatar to say something. While interesting at first glance, this command would open a big can of worms because of the amount of griefing it allows. Imagine for instance your RLV relay forcing you to insult someone on the chat in a public place that you visit often, resulting in you getting banned. This is why no such command has been added, despite many requests.

So I flipped the problem around, and made it so that when an object speaks, it would look like avatar chat to the RLV users around. Even if the wearer herself is not a RLV user. This is purely a cosmetic change, no new command to handle this, and can be controlled with a debug setting anyway. This makes it much safer while still allowing "fake avatar chat". The conditions for being able to make an object sound like an avatar are these :

- It must be attached (it won't work if it is on the ground).
- Its name must be equal to its wearer's user name, or dummy name, or first name or last name.
- People hearing it must have their "RestrainedLoveImitateAvatarSpeech" debug setting set to TRUE (this debug setting is introduced in this version), which is the default value.

Notice that this behavior occurs in the RLV of the users AROUND the object, not the RLV of the object's wearer themselves (if any). In other words, if the captor wants to make her gagged victim sound like she is talking gagspeak herself and not through green chat, they must use this RLV.

There is an important bugfix as well. When some folders are locked or specifically allowed, moving folders and items in or out of them would be problematic (if your top doesn't want you to wear this particular dress, there was a way to move the dress elsewhere and wear it anyway).

Now the behavior is simpler :

- You cannot rename a folder if it is locked and under #RLV.
- You cannot move a folder or an item if it is locked or the destination folder is locked.
- You can always move or rename a folder or an item if the source and destination folders are not under #RLV.

By "locked" I mean "allowed" or "denied", not exactly "locked on you". This refers to the recent feature of locking folders on, off, or adding exceptions to these locks.

There are a couple other bugfixes, such as a slowdown on the Nearby tab when prevented from seeing names, and refreshing the status bar on startup so that the sliders won't appear twice if your navigation bar is open.

So there, here it is :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash for the windows installer is
aa392c0f8d92e6f691f8ae7653579131

And the full change list :

- added : "Me" > "Movement" > "Restart All" Animations menu item, to restart every animation you and other avatars are currently playing around you. This is local to the viewer only and has no consequence on the sim or other people. This is handy for synchronizing couple animations, especially when one takes a lot more time to download than the other.

- changed : When someone else's attachment speaks and its name matches its wearer's (user name, dummy name, first name or last name), the viewer will show it as if it were avatar chat instead of object chat. This makes gagspeak look more natural. This behavior can be turned on or off by the "RestrainedLoveImitateAvatarSpeech" debug setting.

- changed : "Dummy names" ("a person", "this individual"...) are now scrambled every few hours when unable to see names. This allows even a close friend whose dummy name is well known to still be able to surprise you during roleplay. They are not scrambled at every relog though, to avoid confusing the user under crashy conditions.

- fixed : Copy/pasting items from/to a locked folder (a folder to which a lock or an exception to a lock has been issued). Renaming folders and moving objects from an unshared folder to another one is ok though.

- fixed : A slowdown of the viewer when having the Nearby tab open and restricted from seeing names.

- fixed : Refresh the draw distance and avatar height offset sliders in the top status bar when starting.

Have fun !
Marine

PS : If you experienced weird errors about a notification called "HintView" in the RLV, spamming you with so many dialogs that it was unusable, please download again. This was a strange issue with non-English languages.

RealRestraint update to 1.21.2

2011-06-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

I have updated all my brand of products to 1.21.2, it is mostly to catch up with the latest additions in the RLV. Although benign at first glance, this update will really add to the features of the RR products !

See for yourself :

* Touch plugin
- Added the latest RLV commands restricting touch (self, other people and in-world objects).

* Outfit plugin
- Added the ability to restrict some folders and their children, as well as to allow some folders and their children. Very useful if you want to precisely control your sub's ability to dress.

* Wear plugin (new plugin)
- Handles the ability to wear specific clothes and attachments (like the old Outfit plugin did in a coarser way).

* Unwear plugin (new plugin)
- Handles the ability to unwear specific clothes and attachments (like the old Outfit plugin did in a coarser way).

* LockShoes plugin (Vixen ankle cuffs only)
- Changed its access scheme, to allow the wearer to be able to resize the heel strap if needed.

Plus, two new tutorials to teach you how to use the Touch, Control, Wear, Unwear and Outfit plugins :

Touch/Control/Wear/Unwear plugins tutorial
Outfit plugin tutorial

You can update your restraints by going at any of these locations :

Marine's little shop
Little Shop of Kink
S&M Castle (*)

Once there, just touch the updater (it looks like an orb mounted on a pedestal), and follow the instructions.

(*) You may have to walk to the castle, find my vendor (you can't miss it), the updater is in a corner.

Have fun !
Marine

Outfit plugin

2011-06-04T06:13:00.001-07:00

Hello there,

Today I am going to tell you about a plugin I use all the time : the Outfit plugin. This one relies on RLV to work, it won't do anything if the captive is not using the RLV.

This is complex stuff, so please bear with me. There are a lot of things to explain, but fortunately they could be split into two posts. This one will talk about how to handle shared folders (restricting them, forcing them on or off etc), while the other post is about its child plugins Wear and Unwear, which work exactly the same way as Touch and Control, that's why they are melded into one post only (you can read that one here).

For this tutorial I will wear these pieces of clothing : a jacket, a shirt, a bra, a skirt, panties and boots.

Yeah, I know, it looks like I am just missing my umbrella for a walk under the rain. Har har.

First off, I am going to talk about the two buttons named "Detach at" and "Remove at". These buttons are on the main page of the Outfit plugin, and are meant to detach things that the captive is wearing, quickly. Let's see... Right now I am wearing shoes, boots to be exact. Let's say my top wants to force me to remove them but does not want to browse my folders. All he has to do is to tell the plugin to make me remove "whatever outfit containing the shoes layer". So he clicks on "Remove at" and chooses "shoes". And immediately my shoes layer, as well as my left lower leg, right lower leg, left foot and right foot attachments are detached. Simple, easy. It would have done the same thing if he had pressed "Detach at" and chose, say, the left foot.

Now, let's head to the really interesting part : handling the shared folders through the Outfit plugin. You already know the RLV handles what is called "shared folders". In a nutshell, a shared folder is a folder in the inventory that is "exposed" to the scripts, so they can manipulate it. I won't detail how shared folders work here, there are tutorials on this blog, but let's see how to use the Outfit plugin to exploit them to the best of its abilities.

Browsing through the shared folders is easy. Shared folders are just that, folders, and as such they are organized in a hierarchical way, exactly like your files on your computer. And like in every hierarchical structure, there is a root that is the entry point to the whole data. So I click I click on my cuffs, I go to Plugins, select "Outfit", then "Root"...

I'd like to find one particular outfit I am wearing, without knowing much about its name. It happens when your shared folders are beginning to become a bit populated, like mine... And I'd like to find my jacket.

Did you notice that little "(w)" sign before "> Glamour" ? This sign means "something is being worn somewhere in that general direction". So I press on this button, and get shown all the folders contained in it. Once again one of them shows "(w)". I press on "> Casual", I see that the "Jackets" button has the "(w)" sign, so I press it and...

Found it ! The "Black bomber" is the outfit I am wearing. I know it because it shows a "(W)" sign now, not a "(w)" anymore. The capital "W" means "this outfit is worn". So I click on it and will decide what to do with it.

Before I go any further, let's say I am distracted by RL for more than 10 minutes. Since the Outfit menu has a 10 minutes timeout, when I come back it will have expired so it won't do anything when I press a button. So I press "Ignore" to close this now useless menu, but I do not want to walk all the way down to the jacket again ! That's what the "Selected" button is for : I click on my cuff, press "Last Plug" to go to the Outfit plugin again, and then choose "Selected". And I am lead right to where I left ! "Selected" means "the last folder I was on", as opposed to "Root" which means "the topmost folder" (in our case, "#RLV" itself).

Now, what options do I have ? Not many. There is no outfit contained in the "Black bomber" one so I cannot keep browsing that way (the shared folders are a hierarchy after all, it is a tree with a root, branches and leaves, and this particular outfit is a leaf, a dead-end). All I can do is detach it or walk back, or change its mode (more on that later).

I press "DETACH" and right away my jacket and its prims vanish.

Naturally, if I pressed "ATTACH" now, it would come back, but this is not what I want.

This was pretty straightforward. Now on to the sexy stuff. No I'm not talking about lingerie ! I will show you how to allow and deny folders, and what it really means to do that.

Some of you might remember that in the past, the RLV was only able to restrict attaching and detaching clothes and attachments per name. For example, you could only prevent from attaching a jacket, a shirt, or something on spine, things like that. But you couldn't prevent from wearing one particular folder, or prevent everything except one particular folder. It can do that now, and this plugin is up to date to handle this new feature.

Before I begin, let me remind you exactly what this new feature is. You already know that your #RLV folder is a hierarchy of folders and items. By default you are able to wear and unwear what you want, except what is locked. The RLV is able to completely lock a folder and all its children out from you, making you incapable of wearing it (or removing it, depends on the option), renaming it, moving items in or out of it... It is secure. It is also able to prevent you from wearing or unwearing things that are NOT in your #RLV folder. In other words, it allows the top to control the captive's ability to wear things totally.

This is the theory. Let's see it in practice. Let's say my Mistress wants me to be able to wear only heels. Only N-Core heels, for that matter, and nothing else. No boots, no flatties, no sandals, nothing but high heels.

You may have noticed the "Mode" button on the menu. When clicking on it, it switches between "Normal", "Allow" and "Deny". And on the top of the menu, you see the current mode as well. Redundant you say ? Not really, let me explain why.

I click on my cuffs again, Plugins, Outfit, then I go to the Root folder, and Shoes.

This folder contains all my shoes, and I have lots. Ankle-high boots, knee-high boots, thigh-high boots etc... and all these must be restricted except on particular brand of one particular kind of boots.

Here is the folder in my inventory, entirely expanded :

What I want is the top "Shoes" folder to be locked out, but NOT the "N-Core" folder. I am in the "Shoes" folder now, let's press "Mode" twice to set it to "Deny".

There, what I have just done is this :

The red overlay indicates what I am prevented from wearing or unwearing.

But this means I cannot wear my n-core heels, right ? Yes, for now. I go to the "n-core" folder, it is contained in "prim heels" :

Oh, interesting here. The "Mode" button pretends it is "Normal", but I can try as I might, I won't be able to wear any of these shoes, or any other shoes whatsoever. But what is the top part of the menu saying ? "OUTFIT DENIED BY INHERITANCE"... What the hell does that mean... Remember that the "Shoes" folder and all its children was red, in the picture above ? Including "N-core" and the rest ? I denied only "Shoes" though, I did not deny the other folders one by one (imagine the task it would be). This means that since one of its parents is denied, this folder "n-core" is denied too. By, uh, inheritance.

Now I want to specifically lift the lock for this folder. So I click on "Mode" once, to switch to "Allow". And in the process, the top part of the menu indicates "ALLOWED". How convenient. Here is what the menu looks like now :

And my inventory is now treated like this :

The red still indicates what I am prevented from wearing, but there is an isle of green folders, that I am allowed to wear.

And I can now wear my n-core Pinup shoes ! These are the pumps I am wearing on my Vixen Leather vendor pic, btw. Lost of people asked.

Lastly, managing all the allowed and denied folders can become tedious, when there are a lot. Fortunately the Outfit plugin gives you a way to check the lists, and to actually use them as shortcuts if you like.

I click on my cuff, and go to the main page of the Outfit plugin, then I click on "Allowed" :

It shows the list of allowed folders, for now there is only one but this is really a list. And it also gives me a wall of numbers, plus a "Clear" button. If I pressed "Clear", it would clear the list instantly, and my Pinup shoes would be locked away from me again (to be exact, they would be locked ON me right now, since I am wearing them).

But instead of pressing "Clear", I press "1", which is the number of the N-core folder... and it brings me straight to that particular folder :

From there, I can change its mode or navigate at will, it saves a lot of time.

Now, if you are interested in the internals, here is what the RLV actually does when you ask it to wear or unwear an outfit :

- It checks if the folder is locked, if so, bail.
- It looks at all the parents, from that folder up to the root folder, and stops as soon as it finds one that is not "normal" (i.e. one that is either "allowed" or "denied", well, the RLV equivalent anyway). If it stops on a non-normal folder and that folder is "denied", then you can't wear the outfit. If it is "allowed", you can (even if one of its parents is "denied").
- If it went up to the root without finding a non-normal folder, all is well, the requested outfit can be worn or unworn.

There, it's pretty simple to understand but not so simple to explain. I find the red and green overlays on the pictures to be a lot more self-explanatory.

Have fun !
Marine

Touch plugin... and its siblings Control, Wear and Unwear

2011-06-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Today I am going to talk about not one but four plugins at the same time ! These plugins, although having apparently nothing in common, share the exact same architecture and it is easy to understand what they all do (and how to use them efficiently) when you understand this very architecture.

Let's go. For this tutorial I will use the Touch plugin as an example, but keep in mind that the others work the same way. I will highlight the differences at the end of this post.

If your own Touch and Control plugins do not look like this one, please update your RR products. These versions are still fairly new at the time of this writing.

The Touch plugin is meant to prevent the captive from touching objects, and is normally found in arms restraints (when your hands are restrained, you can't use devices). In the past, it was used only to restrict touching far, since the arms restraints could "block" the captive (i.e. raise a HUD that would take the entire screen, blocking clicks, edit and rez). But recently the RLV has been added a few commands to control what could be touched and what could not, in a much finer grain than before. Hence the new Touch plugin.

Moreso, depending on the way her cuffs are locked, the captive may or may not be able to touch this or that. For example, with her cuffs locked in front, she may still be able to touch someone else's attachments, whereas she couldn't if her hands were cuffed in the back.

So for every lock type (hands in front, hands in back...), the top might wants to be able to decide what can be touched and what cannot, and to not have to set these restrictions everytime the lock changes.

In other words, the restrictions are organized like a matrix. For each lock, indicate which restrictions are to be in effect. And to represent this matrix, locks would be on the X axis, while restrictions would be on the Y axis. Does that make any sense to you ? Don't worry, it will soon.

I click on my Vixen leather handcuffs, and I go to the Touch plugin.

Oh, see ? A matrix ! Surprise ! A full square means "the captive is able to..." while an empty square means "the captive is restricted from...". For now all the squares are full because the restraint is new.

By default all the restrictions are lifted. This means that if you've just bought your restraints, your touch won't be restricted in any way even when you lock them on you. How to set a restriction then ?

Before we do anything, let me explain what is displayed a little. There is a small "x", followed by a row of numbers from 1 to 6, then a "L", and then a "A". And an arrow pointing to the "A".

This row represents the locks. "x" means "unlocked" (but all the restrictions are lifted when the restraint is unlocked, so you don't need to bother with that one, it is displayed for a reason I will explain later), the numbers "1" to "6" correspond to the 6 locks, "L" means simply "locked" (without a pose), and finally "A" means "All locks".

Aha. The arrow points to "A", and the "ALL LOCKS" button is "on". This is because by default the restrictions you set are applied whatever lock you choose.

Wait, doesn't it defeat the very idea of "one different set of restrictions per lock" ? Yes it does, but not everyone wants the fine-grain control that this matrix offers. Although you might want the realism of not being able to touch someone else's attachments only when your hands are cuffed behind your back, you're no here to punch holes into a matrix. You're here to have fun ! Therefore, by default, you simply decide what restrictions to apply, and that's it. If you want finer control, it is as simple as pressing the "ALL LOCKS" button. You'll see in a minute.

But enough talk ! Let's try it. I am wearing my Vixen cuffs now, and I click on them and lock them behind my back. As I didn't change anything on the Touch plugin, I am still able to touch objects in-world, whether they are near or far, and I can touch my own attachments and those worn by other people. As if I wasn't restrained at all.

I click on them an go to the Touch plugin, then press "Touch far". What happens ? Let's see the matrix now :

The matrix has a hole in it now, the square at the intersection of "A" and "Far" is now empty. This means "For ALL the locks, the captive cannot touch objects that are FAR". Farther than arms reach, that is. That's farther than 1.5 meter away, folks. Let's check this... I touch the door over there, nothing happens (it normally opens when touched). I walk closer and try again, ok that works now, I must just be near it. When I touch my collar it gives me its own menu. I can touch everything around me EXCEPT objects that too far away. It makes it feel more realistic, goodbye telekinesis !

Since my hands are cuffed behind my back, it would make sense that I'd be unable to overpower someone nearby, therefore I should be unable to click on their attachments as well. However I should still be able to touch my own attachments (for example a gag, you can still raise your hands at mouth level when cuffed like this, it does not require much flexibility), and objects that are not worn by anyone, like doors. I should be able to open a door in this kind of bondage, I just have to be very close that's all.

So I press the "Touch other" button to set this restriction, and another hole is punched into the matrix, still under "A". This now means "For ALL the locks, the captive cannot touch objects that are FAR, or objects that are worn by OTHER people". Hmm, this bondage is starting to feel real, now...

Ok, this is all good and well, but what if my hands were cuffed in front of me instead of behind my back ? I still wouldn't be able to reach objects that are far, but should I be able to, say, lock someone else's cuffs ? I think so. But how ? If I pressed "Touch far" again now, I would be able to touch far regardless of how my hands are cuffed, that's not very realistic...

This is where I must disengage "ALL LOCKS". This button acts like an override to simplify the handling of restrictions for people who don't want to bother about realism. But I do, so I press it to remove the override. And now the plugin goes from 1D to 2D (no there is no 3D yet :p ).

Notice that the arrow has shifted from the "A" column to the "2" column. Why "2" ? Because my hands are cuffed behind my back, and that is the second lock on the main menu. The first one being "hands in front".

And guess what ? I am totally unrestricted again. I can touch far, and I can touch other people's attachments. Great, did I do all this for nothing ? Not really. Let's see what happened here.

The "A" column has two holes, the ones we've set earlier, "touch other" and "touch far". This has not changed, but the arrow is not on "A" anymore, it is on "2", and "2" has no holes in it. In other words, the restrictions are all lifted again. Now suppose I am lazy and... no wait, scratch the "suppose" part, I AM lazy. I don't want to set the restrictions for every lock, that would be a waste of time that could be better used, for example on having fun. Let's do a little magic that is called copy/pasting. Remember the restrictions are more or less ok when the "ALL LOCKS" override is engaged. I will copy them and paste them to all the locks, individually.

I press "ALL LOCKS" again, engaging the override. Then I press "PASTE TO ALL", and...

What just happened ? The "A" column has been copied and pasted over all the other columns. Now I can tweak each individual lock if I want to. I press "ALL LOCKS" one more time to disengage the override again, and the arrow goes back to "2", the current lock.

On a side note, I can do this the other way around too, by copying the settings of the current lock (when "ALL LOCKS" is disengaged, "PASTE TO ALL" becomes "COPY", which actually pastes the current column to the "A" one, and then I can paste the latter to every column with the method I have shown above), but no need to do this now.

Now, I lock my hands in front. I am still unable to touch far (this is normal), but I would like to be able to touch other people's attachments. Nothing's easier, I press the "Touch other" button to lift that restriction. And now the matrix looks like this :

A square has been filled, I can now touch other people's attachments again... but only when my hands are cuffed in front. If I cuff them behind my back again, that ability is removed. This is fine-grain control !

Now you know the most part of how the Touch plugin works, and by extension, how the Control plugin works (with its Edit, Rez, Map, Inventory and other restrictions), as well as how Wear and Unwear work (they restrict from wearing or unwearing clothing layers and attachments). Also, since the Touch plugin may be in the same restraint than the Control plugin, there is a shortcut to switch from one to the other. Same for Wear and Unwear (and their common parent "Outfit", for which I will write a full tutorial too).

There are a few things to note though, I know this has been a long read, but you might be interested in this...

I have said that the "x" column was unused. This is not entirely true. The top is actually able to set the restrictions on the captive even when the restraint is unlocked. Although this doesn't make sense at first glance, this is actually very handy when used in conjunction with, say, an autolock. When the restraint is unlocked, every button pressed on the Touch plugin will modify the "x" column. When the restraint is finally locked, the contents of the "x" column are pasted onto the current lock, or on the "A" column, depending on the override. But this happens only if the "x" column has been changed since the last unlock. Long story short, if you modify the restrictions while the restraint is unlocked, no problem. They will be applied next time it is locked, as intended. You won't even have to bother about it.

Lastly, it is possible to save the matrix and to load it again. After all, this matrix is just a series of 0s and 1s, right ? It is just text. And as such it can be copied to a text file and said on the chat.

I press the "Save/Load" button, and immediately I hear this from the cuffs :

Leather right wrist cuff (r forearm) whispers: Current configuration (save it in a text file for later) :
111111111110010000000011111111111000000000001111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,0
If you want to load another configuration, please type it on the public chat channel.

This is the contents of the memory at this time, after I have set the restrictions how I like them. So I copy them to a text file somewhere on my computer.

Now let's assume some time passed and the plugin was reset for some reason (for example after an update), the restrictions would be clear again, and I don't want to set them one by one again. The menu would look like this, leaving me a whole lot of work to do again :

This is where the "Save/Load" button helps me again, I press it, and I hear this :

Leather right wrist cuff (r forearm) whispers: Current configuration (save it in a text file for later) :
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,1
If you want to load another configuration, please type it on the public chat channel.

Now it's telling me the contents of its memory again, but it's clear. However it also tells me that it is listening to my chat, in case I'd have some data to give it. It just so happens, I do ! I copy the contents of my text file directly on the chat :

Me: 111111111110010000000011111111111000000000001111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,0

Yeah, I speak binary fluently. Hehe. At least binary that this plugin can understand. And it does understand it, because now the matrix shown on the menu is exactly the same as it was before it got reset. I just loaded the old configuration :

If you're interested, here are my favorite configurations for different arms restraints of mine. Just press "Save/Load" on the plugin menu and say one of these on the chat, and you'll get the same configuration :

Elegance cuffs : 111100011110000000000011010001111110000011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,0

Armbinder : 010000000000000000000000000000000000000000001111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,0

Police cuffs : 111101011110000000000011010001111110000011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,0

Vixen cuffs : 111101011110000000001011010001111010000011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,0

You're still here ? Oh, yes, forgive me I forgot. This post is about 4 plugins, not just Touch... Well there is not much else to say, what I have explained for Touch also applies to Control, Wear and Unwear. Here are the main differences though :

- Control also allows the top to add exceptions to the channels restriction (which prevents the captive from sending messages on non-public channels).
- Wear prevents not only from wearing clothing layers and attachments, but also all the folders that contain anything that is meant to be worn on said layers and attachment points. For example, if you restrict "top", the captive will not only be unable to wear a shirt, undershirt or jacket, or anything on spine or chest, but even folders that contain shirts, undershirts etc. You don't want her to wear anything to cover the upper part of her body, that's what this option means.
- Likewise, Unwear prevents not only from removing clothing layers and attachments, but also any folder that contains clothes or attachments worn on the specified points. If you restrict "top", she will be unable to detach her spine and chest attachments, as well as remove her shirt, undershirt or jacket, as well as any accessory contained in a folder that also contains one of these parts.

There, I think that's it. Whew ! Thank you for reading this far !

Have fun,
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7.0.2

2011-05-14T12:52:00.000-07:00

Hi again !

Well, as usual when trying to do things fast, I botched the release of the latest version and forgot to include the sound libraries. So if you are not getting any sound with RLV 2.7.0.1 and would like some, I strongly suggest you download this new one !

http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash is
1784528c1e151766aad02345b90330f5

Have fun and sorry for the inconvenience !
Marine

PS : I had to upload this RLV twice, the first attempt did not give the right version when going to Help - About. If your RLV 2.7.0.2 pretends it is a 2.7.0.1, please download again and it will be fixed.

Restrained Love v2.7.0.1

2011-05-14T03:21:00.000-07:00

Hi !

This week LL has notified us TPV developers that one of the libraries used by the standard SL viewer had a vulnerability. This was allowing malicious users to make your viewer crash at will (no data were lost nor stolen, but it still was annoying), and LL has released a fix to plug that hole.

Incidentally, since the RLV uses the same library, it needs the same fix so here it is :

http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash is
21b2e1d763a23bec4d8362bd7c597971

Please note that there is no new feature other than this urgent fix so this RLV will behave exactly like RLV 2.7, minus the possible crash.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.7

2011-05-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

Here is the latest version of the RLV, with a few bugfixes and a couple enhancements and new commands... See for yourself !

- added : @temprun command to prevent from running by double-tapping on an arrow key, this does not prevent from running with Ctrl-R though, one must use @alwaysrun at the same time to prevent from running at all.
- added : @alwaysrun command to prevent from running by pressing Ctrl-R, this does not prevent from running by double-tapping on an arrow key though, one must use @temprun at the same time to prevent from running at all.
- changed : Sliders and parcel information on the top menubar will now hide also when showing the mini location bar.
- changed : Double-clicking on a piece of clothing in the inventory will now either stack or replace according to the "Double-click to replace item" option in the RLV menu, as it did with attachments.
- changed : Moved "Share" out of the way in the context menu, "Properties" used to be the first (and most useful) item in the menu in v1.
- fixed : Could bypass the @showminimap restriction.
- fixed : Range slider was not showing on the Nearby tab.
- fixed : Align tool was missing on the Edit window.
- fixed : @standtp did not work when sitting on the ground.

It also fixes the black profile toasts bug of 2.6.1, but that was a bug in the standard viewer, that LL fixed after I released it, so there.

You can grab the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash for the Windows installer is
8d0e0717f6d4d57d521795ea9ae18784

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.6.1

2011-05-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Here is a new version of the RLV, a bit in an emergency since LL has just released their "bouncy bits" viewer, and many people wanted the same here... So here it is, with a couple enhancements on top of it :

- added : Support for the new body physics in the regular outfit commands : @getoutfit, @remoutfit, @addoutfit, @attachthis, @detachthis...
- changed : When the navigation bar is visible, the parcel info and the offset and draw sliders are hidden on the menu bar and shown on the navigation bar instead. This was a request from people with low resolution screens, as these infos would step on the menus themselves as well as the L$ balance and sometimes the clock.
- changed : Made it easier to switch between the Teal and the Orange themes (see the paragraph about the Starlight skin).
- fixed : Couldn't teleport with the world map when under a @sittp restriction.

You can download the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash of the windows installer is :
37b72c9002da25ca76c34684d144848f

Please note : I am no longer releasing patches, it is too tedious a task, and I now have my own Mercurial repository here :
https://bitbucket.org/marinekelley/rlv/

If you want to include the sources of the RLV into your own viewer, I suppose you already know how to use Mercurial... With this tool, you can pick the changes you want and leave the ones you don't, it is infinitely more flexible than flat patches. This makes it easier for everyone, me included !

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.6

2011-04-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Here is the latest version of the RLV, with a few new commands and a LOT of enhancements, to make your SL easier... See for yourself !

- added : @touchme=add exception to the @touch*=n restrictions, this works only for the oject that issues this restriction, to avoid cheating.
- added : @startim=n command, to prevent the user from opening an IM session with anybody (the little "trill" sound will still play, though).
- added : @startim:UUID=add exception to the above restriction.
- added : @startimto:UUID=n command, same as @startim, but regarding one particular person only.
- added : Debug setting RestrainedLoveShowEllipsis (default to TRUE) to show or hide the "..." when you are under @recvchat or @recvchatfrom.
- added : A new RLV menu with the following items :
- List RLV restrictions => displays a list of the current restrictions and exceptions in effect, in the chat history.
- Show Debug Info => Activate or deactivate debugging info for RLV commands.
- Forbid offers to #RLV => allow or forbid objects to send inventory directly in your #RLV folder.
- Double-click to Wear => To choose the default behaviour (Replace or Add) of the viewer when double-clicking on an inventory item to wear it.
- added : Some features from Firestorm :
- Login screen to default to secondlife.com instead of a dumb blank page.
- Temporary textures and snapshots uploads.
- No MOTD on the login progress screen (who wants advertisement anyway ?).
- Top status bar now contains an info button, the name of the parcel and the properties icons (no fly, no rez etc).
- MU*-style emotes (in other words, being able to begin your sentences with ":" as well as "/me").
- Names over "Show Look At" crosshairs.
- Distance on the minimap inspector.
- Radar on the People panel and chat history notifications (but no ability to teleport directly to someone, this is too intrusive).
- added : Some enhancements of my own :
- In-world profiles. Although inspired by Firestorm, these are closer to the v2 codebase.
- Friends offline/online notifications on the chat history (this is managed by the "OnlineOfflinetoNearbyChat" debug setting).
- Group count on the group panel, to show to how many groups you belong.
- Profile, Teleport, Share and Pay buttons directly on the IM window, to act as shortcuts.
- Keeping the permission icons in the friends list always visible.
- fixed : Replacing an outfit while the RLV was deactivated would not work (thank you Lance Corrimal).
- fixed : Avatar tooltip would not be correct when using Display Names, and under @shownames.

I hope all these improvements will make the viewer more enjoyable to use... They sure did for me :)

As usual, you can grab it there :

http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash for the Windows installer is
37659d3e5d77613103257fd4e71a1d97

Have fun !
Marine

The next RLV will have a little Firestorm in it !

2011-04-04T09:08:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

I long wanted to port a few features from Phoenix/Firestorm to the RLV but never had the time for it. These features are meant to improve the user-friendliness of the viewer, and I am glad they are now part of the original RLV. See for yourself :

- Temporary texture upload : This one is almost a copy/paste from Firestorm, and is very handy, it allows you to upload a texture without having to pay the upload fee, this texture being temporary and not surviving across sessions. It's a life-saver for the builder who wants to test textures without going broke, or for the snap-happy who wants to quickly show their pictures off.

- No advertisement on the startup page.

- Show the name of the parcel and region (with coordinates and properties as icons, plus a quick info button) on the top status bar, making the navigation bar less necessary, hence freeing a lot of real estate on the screen.

- In-world profiles, in lieu of the new web profiles (except for your own personal profile, which requires more controls to edit it). They are much faster and smaller, you can open several of them at the same time, you can drag/drop items on them, etc, etc. They are not a copy from Firestorm though, they are looking much more v2-like.

- Names over the "look at" crosshairs. I don't know how useful it is except for saying "stop staring at me !", but many people like them, so here they are.

- Added the current number of groups and the maximum number of groups to the groups panel (I don't know why it isn't there out of the box).

- Added the distance to the avatar on the minimap inspector.

- Added a menu item (under "Me") to list the current RLV restrictions in the chat history (this one was looong overdue).

- Added an automatic replacement of leading ":" by "/me", to please the MU* people (works in IMs too).

- Added some of the radar functions of Firestorm into the People tab : Payment info, Age in days, Number of seconds spent since detected, and more importantly, the Range ! I did not add the context menu and especially NOT the "Teleport to avatar" action, because I believe it breaks the privacy of said avatar. Nobody likes to see someone appear right in front of their nose without a warning. I banned some for that in the past.

- Added 4 buttons directly on the IM window : Profile, Teleport, Share and Pay, as shortcuts to the same buttons on the left sliding panel (the one that slides open when you click on ">>").

All these are small enhancements, but added to the enhancements the RLV already offers (right click shortcuts, sliders on the status bar etc), it makes the viewer much more user-friendly.

Please don't message me to ask me to add this and that feature though, my goal is not to copycat Firestorm (or any other viewer for that matter), but to add a few improvements that I feel LL should have added long ago.

There is no ETA yet, there is still a little work to do but everything I have listed here works already.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.5.0.1

2011-03-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

So it seems I have made a little oops with the RLV 2.5, by adding the Starlight skin I forgot to re-include two patches that would have been interesting. Plus the little fix I added to avoid making the avatar bounce when wearing clothes, actually introduced another annoying bug, that is fixed in this version (you could not remove a stacked piece of clothing easily, e.g. you couldn't remove the second shirt if you had a first one, without removing them all at the same time, how silly).

So here it is, go grab it at the usual spot :

http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the hash for the Windows version is
c3aea95f88a347a8a21fa1ebbbb2d125

Have fun and sorry for the oversights !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.5

2011-03-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

And as promised, here it is, the latest version of the RLV.

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that this version is a bit big, with more than a few new commands. If you're interested in knowing what is new, read on. If you prefer downloading it right away, just go grab it at the usual location :

http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

And the MD5 hash for the Windows executable is
b59d5b3e49c50ad3c0178d4b034cdf6c

Still here ? Let me paste the readme file for you then :

- added : Notification to scripts on clothes and attachment changes. This allows a script to be notified when the user wears or unwears an outfit, without having to constantly poll for the list of worn items. The notifications are "(worn/unworn/attached/detached) (legally/illegally) (path_to_outfit)"
- added : "@adjustheight" command, as implemented by Henri Beauchamp (see http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&p=1847#p1847 for details).
- added : "@attachoverorreplace", "@attachthisoverorreplace", "@attachalloverorreplace" and "@attachallthisoverorreplace" commands, which now do what respectively "@attach", "@attachthis", "@attachall" and "@attachallthis" used to do until now, in preparation for a possible change in the future.
- added : "@setgroup:(name)=force" command to force the user to activate the specified group (they must be a member of course). "none" will deactivate the group tag.
- added : "@setgroup=n" to prevent the user from switching groups.
- added : "@getgroup=2222" to obtain the name of the current activated group of the user. Please note that the UUID of the group is not disclosed, only the name, to stay consistent with the LSL API.
- added : "@touchworld:(uuid)=add" exception to allow to touch an specific object in world even when "@touchworld=n" is active.
- added : "@touchthis:uuid=n" restriction to prevent from touching one object in particular.
- added : "@unsharedwear=n" command to prevent the user from wearing anything that is not under #RLV. (*)
- added : "@unsharedunwear=n" command to prevent the user from unwearing anything that is not under #RLV. (*)
- added : "@detachthis_except:(folder_child)=add" to add an exception to a "@detachallthis:(folder_parent)=n" restriction, provided that (folder_child) is contained somewhere under (folder_parent) and that "@detachthis_except" has been issued by the same object (this kind of exception does not work between different objects, on purpose). (*)
- added : "@detachallthis_except:(folder_child)=add", same thing as above but will include all the sub-folders in the exception as well. (*)
- added : "@attachthis_except:(folder_child)=add" to add an exception to a "@attachallthis:(folder_parent)=n" restriction, provided that (folder_child) is contained somewhere under (folder_parent) and that "@attachthis_except" has been issued by the same object (this kind of exception does not work between different objects, on purpose). (*)
- added : "@attachallthis_except:(folder_child)=add", same thing as above but will include all the sub-folders in the exception as well. (*)
- changed : Now "@attachall:=force" (notice the lack of option after the colon) is ignored, to avoid a common mistake that would make the user attach their whole #RLV folder (and given the time it takes, probably disconnect their viewer in the process).
- changed : The minimap is not hidden anymore when "@showloc=n" is issued.
- changed : The user can now wear up to 10 pieces of clothing per layer (for example, 10 jackets at the same time). Please note that the maximum number of objects per attachment point has NOT been increased, in order to avoid hogging the sim.
- changed : The avatar will not bounce up and down when wearing and removing clothes, having the nice side-effect of increasing the speed of changing outfits.
- fixed : Could remove the jacket layer even when contained into a shared folder and "@detachthis:jacket=n" was issued.
- fixed : Could change shape even under "@remoutfit:shape=n".

(*) : These new commands are extremely helpful when you want to lock everything except a particular folder (and its subfolders if you need). You can for example issue a "@attachallthis=n" command to lock the whole #RLV off, followed by a "@unsharedwear=n" command to make sure that no other folder can be worn instead (locking the inventory out would work well too but would be a bit overkill), then issue a "@attachallthis_except:boots=add" to allow the avatar to wear only what is contained inside the "#RLV/Boots" folder (if any) or any of its children.

Of course, while a folder is locked that way, the user is unable to rename it, move it, or move its contents. Moreso, since such an exception is valid only with restrictions issued by the same object, if another object issues a "@attachallthis=n" command, this will completely void the exceptions issued by the former object and lock the whole #RLV folder anyway.

Finally, the RLV checks the closest parent's restriction when it comes to determining whether an outfit can be worn or unworn. In other words, you can decide that a folder and all its children are locked off, except one sub-folder that can be worn, and a couple of its own children cannot.

You may have noticed that the commands "@attach" and "@attachoverorreplace" are synonyms now, as well as their derivatives. Although I wanted to revert "@attach" back to how it used to behave on RLV 1.x (i.e. always replacing existing attachments when attaching new ones), this had the nasty effect of upsetting a lot more people than I thought at first. I am not here to upset people, so this change is going to be postponed until further notice. I'll try to communicate early enough when it really needs to take place, but for now it is not a necessity yet.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.5 coming soon, addendum

2011-03-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

Hi again,

It seems the change I had planned on the @attach command actually put a lot of people in trouble. Or at least would if it were adopted, so I will postpone it until further notice.

So finally :

- The @attach command on RLV 1.x, will REPLACE the attachment that was present, by the one the command is attaching

- The @attach command on RLV 2.x (including 2.5) will REPLACE the present attachment, UNLESS the name of the folder to attach begins with a "+" (or whatever the user choses), in which case it would ADD it without detaching what was already there.

- The @attachover command stays in RLV 2.x and is not meant to go away.

- The @attachoverorreplace command will STILL be added (in case some of you already started to update your products), and will act EXACTLY like the current @attach command.

I'll be honest, this keeps an inconsistency that I hoped to get rid of. But not at the expense of the users and the scripters.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Marine

PS : this blog post is likely to be followed closely by another one announcing the release of RLV 2.5, since I am finalizing it at the time of this writing.

Restrained Love v2.5 coming soon

2011-03-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

So after about a month of working non-stop on the Vixen Leather Training Set, here I am back on the RLV, which needed some attention.

First of all, it needed to be upgraded to the latest SL viewer codebase, just so you could benefit from the 40-groups-limit that was introduced in the SL viewer v2.5, and the RLV was lagging behind until now.

Secondly... well there are a lot of commands that I always wanted to add, and that are now going to be live soon. See for yourself :

- added : Notification to scripts on clothes and attachment changes. This allows a script to be notified when the user wears or unwears an outfit, without having to constantly poll for the list of worn items. The notifications are "(worn/unworn/attached/detached) (legally/illegally) (path_to_outfit)"
- added : "@adjustheight" command, as implemented by Henri Beauchamp (see http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&p=1847#p1847 for details).
- added : "@attachoverorreplace", "@attachthisoverorreplace", "@attachalloverorreplace" and "@attachallthisoverorreplace" commands, which now do what respectively "@attach", "@attachthis", "@attachall" and "@attachallthis" used to do from v2.0 to v2.4.
- added : "@setgroup:(name)=force" command to force the user to activate the specified group (they must be a member of course). "none" will deactivate the group tag.
- added : "@setgroup=n" to prevent the user from switching groups.
- added : "@getgroup=2222" to obtain the name of the current activated group of the user. Please note that the UUID of the group is not disclosed, only the name, to stay consistent with the LSL API.
- added : "@touchworld:(uuid)=add" exception to allow to touch an specific object in world even when "@touchworld=n" is active.
- added : "@touchthis:uuid=n" restriction to prevent from touching one object in particular.
- added : "@unsharedwear=n" command to prevent the user from wearing anything that is not under #RLV. (*)
- added : "@unsharedunwear=n" command to prevent the user from unwearing anything that is not under #RLV. (*)
- added : "@detachthis_except:(folder_child)=add" to add an exception to a "@detachallthis:(folder_parent)=n" restriction, provided that (folder_child) is contained somewhere under (folder_parent) and that "@detachthis_except" has been issued by the same object (this kind of exception does not work between different objects, on purpose). (*)
- added : "@detachallthis_except:(folder_child)=add", same thing as above but will include all the sub-folders in the exception as well. (*)
- added : "@attachthis_except:(folder_child)=add" to add an exception to a "@attachallthis:(folder_parent)=n" restriction, provided that (folder_child) is contained somewhere under (folder_parent) and that "@attachthis_except" has been issued by the same object (this kind of exception does not work between different objects, on purpose). (*)
- added : "@attachallthis_except:(folder_child)=add", same thing as above but will include all the sub-folders in the exception as well. (*)
- changed : "@attach" now does not care about the "+" character in the beginning of a folder when attaching it anymore, this command will now always replace what was previously worn, exactly like it used to do in v1.x. The "@attachoverorreplace" command and its derivatives will do what "@attach" used to do from v2.0 to v2.4 included. This spares the script from having to "guess" whether an outfit would stack or replace when wearing it with "@attach".
- changed : Now "@attachall:=force" (notice the lack of option after the colon) is ignored, to avoid a common mistake that would make the user attach their whole #RLV folder (and given the time it takes, probably disconnect their viewer in the process).
- changed : The minimap is not hidden anymore when "@showloc=n" is issued.
- fixed : Could remove the jacket layer even when contained into a shared folder and "@detachthis:jacket=n" was issued.

(*) : These new commands are extremely helpful when you want to lock everything except a particular folder (and its subfolders if you need). You can for example issue a "@attachallthis=n" command to lock the whole #RLV off, followed by a "@unsharedwear=n" command to make sure that no other folder can be worn instead (locking the inventory out would work well too but would be a bit overkill), then issue a "@attachallthis_except:boots=add" to allow the avatar to wear only what is contained inside the "#RLV/Boots" folder (if any) or any of its children.

Of course, while a folder is locked that way, the user is unable to rename it, move it, or move its contents. Moreso, since such an exception is valid only with restrictions issued by the same object, if another object issues a "@attachallthis=n" command, this will completely void the exceptions issued by the former object and lock the whole #RLV folder anyway.

Finally, the RLV checks the closest parent's restriction when it comes to determining whether an outfit can be worn or unworn. In other words, you can decide that a folder and all its children are locked off, except one sub-folder that can be worn, and a couple of its own children cannot.

All these features are coded and tested, so unless something happens in the meantime (a huge bug when testing or yet-another-super-interesting-command coming up and me feeling the urge to add it to this version), the new RLV 2.5 should be released during the week. The only thing I am still missing is a Starlight skin to go with it.

I must add that I am also working on the Outfit plugin for my products, in order to include the new "@attach[all]this_except" and "@detach[all]this_except" commands. This should make the management of outfit restrictions much more interesting. These commands are also what I was waiting for before I could actually write this Outfit tutorial that I have been promising for nearly two years now. Heh.

Have fun !
Marine

Vixen Leather Training Set

2011-03-09T10:46:00.000-08:00

Hi there, long time no see !

I've been busy lately, and this blog post is going to show you what I've been busy on : a new product called the "Vixen Leather Training set".

Because it is leather, it is tight, it is sturdy, and it is definitely meant for training your favorite vixen, as you can see by looking at the pictures :

This set is very much like the Serious Shackles and the Restrained Elegance Shackles, and is to be used the same way. One collar, four arms cuffs, two legs cuffs. Oh and also a few bonuses...

For one, the collar is actually 4 collars in 1. The same object has 4 different appearances, a simple leather collar (looking very much like the cuffs), a classy version for everyday use, a medium posture collar and a high posture collar. See for yourself :

Simple

Classy

Medium posture

High posture

The cuffs also have a few surprises. Beyond the usual bondage (chaining the hands in front, behind the back or along the body), they come with two interesting pieces of equipment : a leather binder and a yoke. The leather binder binds the arms behind the back in a U, very useful for workout and ponyplay, while the yoke locks itself directly on the collar (the "Reshape" plugin allows you to resize the yoke to your shape). Told you this set was meant for training !

The chains

The yoke

The U-Binder

As for the legs... it gets even better. You have the usual loose chaining of the ankles to slow the sub down, a hogtie (the same one as in the Restrained Elegance Shackles), and not one but four spreader bars. Standing, sitting, laying down and hogtie, all with the legs spread widely apart. Like the yoke, the "Reshape" plugin allows you to resize the spreader bar without having to edit it by hand. Did I tell you this set was meant for training ? Hehe.

Spreader bar, a classic

Sitting on a spreader, try to get out of this one

Moving around in this bondage is fun

Of course black might not be your color of choice... Fret not, you can customize the cuffs entirely. Main leather, straps, trim and metal parts can be colored independently through the "VixenTex" plugin. Most textures are color variations of the leather texture, but you also get a black latex texture and a brown cow hide texture.

And last but not least, the legs cuffs come with a little plus : the ability to lock high heels on with a small strap that goes under the sole. For long sessions of, uh, training, y'know. Of course since the set uses the RLV, the shoes are really locked on when the strap is applied. Moreso, since every heel is different, the "LockShoes" plugin embedded in the legs cuffs allows you to actually rotate and stretch the straps as you see fit.

It does add some special look to the heels on top of it !

So if you combine everything, you get a quite devious set of sober but elegant leather restraints that is guaranteed to keep your little vixen squirming. Or perfectly still, if so is your choice.

Have fun !
Marine

RLV on Mac !

2011-01-23T12:39:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

Thanks to Kittin Ninetails' relentless efforts, the latest RLV is now available for Mac as well !

See her blog for details :

http://kittin-ninetails.blogspot.com/

The link is also now added to the side bar of this blog.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.4

2011-01-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

Hi !

At last, here is the latest version of the RLV, with all the features I have been blogging about lately. Let me recap them here :

- added : @recvemotefrom, it was forgotten in 2.3.
- added : @touchfar which is a synonym for @fartouch.
- added : @touchall to prevent the avatar from touching anything (including attachments but not HUDs).
- added : @touchworld to prevent the avatar from touching any object in world (does not apply to attachments and HUDs).
- added : @touchattach to prevent the avatar from touching any attachment, including theirs (does not apply to HUDs).
- added : @touchattachself to prevent the avatar from touching their own attachments (does not apply to HUDs).
- added : @touchattachother to prevent the avatar from touching any attachment, except theirs.
- removed : no-scripts areas won't prevent you from detaching any object anymore now. I had added this feature because I thought that logging on in such areas would keep scripts frozen, but that is true only for some scripts, not all.
- changed : double-click teleport is now prevented only when the forward control is grabbed and something is locked.
- fixed : Edit and Build on land were deactivated on right click menu.
- fixed : a clever cheat to detach something locked (but it would come back after 5 seconds anyway).
- fixed : a way to log in from home.

Please note :
Among the promised "@touch*" commands, @touchhud and @touchallnonhud have not been included. This is because since the last blog post, several people raised concerns about it being too intrusive, and frankly I was of the same opinion from the start. So until the situation changes, these commands must stay out of the viewer.

As usual, download it there :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

MD5 hash for the Windows installer :
fca1419395c20c5b08f2ee8d8b94d56a

Have fun !
Marine

More on RLV 2.4 (still coming soon)

2011-01-16T04:51:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

Sorry I am a little behind, a new RLV 2.4 was promised last week and I didn't deliver anything. Testing took a lot more time than planned, and real life got in the way.

And now... a few things have been added since the previous post.

For one, RLV 2.3 used to keep you from detaching objects when in a no-script area, that was a safety against some kind of sneaky cheat, but it was a bit heavy so I changed that to "prevent only if we actually logged on there, not if we come from another place where scripts were allowed", simply because I thought that all scripts were frozen when logging on in a no-script area. That's how I remembered it at least, but my memory was a bit old on that matter.

After talking with Henri and after doing some complimentary testing, I was just wrong, logging on and entering a no-script area give the same result : only scripts tailored to take some of your controls will keep working (that way your AOs and your vehicles keep working in these areas), while others will be frozen. Most restraints implement that trick too, so there is no real reason to impose further security since the scripts are able to take care of themselves.

Long story short, this safety was a hindrance to user-friendliness, and will be removed altogether in 2.4.

Secondly, I finally took the leap of faith and implemented a bunch of "touch*" commands :

- touchfar/fartouch : these are synonyms and act exactly like "fartouch" always did
- touchall : to prevent you from touching anything
- touchhud : to prevent you from touching your own HUDs
- touchallnonhud : to prevent you from touching anything, except your own HUDs
- touchworld : to prevent you from touching anything in world
- touchattach : to prevent you from touching any attachment at all
- touchattachself : to prevent you from touching your own attachments
- touchattachother : to prevent you from touching other people's attachments

That should be it, if I think of something else, I will add the corresponding commands but with this, the scripts will have much more control over who touches what.

You might have noticed that there is no "touchworldself" and "touchallother" commands to prevent you from touching your objects in world and other people's objects in world respectively. This is because SL does not provide a way to know the other of an object that you touch, this information is contained only in the message that comes from the sim when you select an object. Unless I'm mistaken, of course. It does work for attachments though, because attachments that you own are also contained in your inventory, while those you don't own are not, and this is how to distinguish the two.

So there, sorry for the additional delay, the new RLV should be ready soon.

Have fun,
Marine

Restrained Love v2.4 coming soon

2011-01-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

Hi there,

First of all, Happy New Year 2011 to you !

I have been working on the RLV a little, fixing here and enhancing there, here is what you can expect for the next version 2.4 :

- Edit and Build on land were deactivated on the context menu (when right-clicking on the ground), this was introduced with the new @editobj command.

- Double click teleport is now available at all times, except when something is locked AND your forward controls are grabbed (i.e. when your forward arrow does something else than just make you walk forward).

- Now, no-script areas will prevent detaching stuff only when you actually log on there, not when you have already been into a script-enabled area during the session, allowing the attachments to issue their RLV commands. The old behavior (not being able to detach anything at all in no-script areas) was too heavy on the user.

- Fixed a clever way to detach something that was locked (but it would come back afterwards anyway).

- Fixed a way to log in from home.

- Added the @recvemotefrom command, which was forgotten in 2.3.

Please note : At the time of this writing, the RLV is still based on SL 2.4 rev 13360, which is the one RLV 2.3 has been built on. I know there are newer versions of the SL viewer, but they contain a nasty bug that you can read about here :
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-24361

If I released a RLV based on a recent SL viewer (say rev 14120 or 14357 for example, I have tried them both), you'd be forced to relog every 30 minutes because past that delay the viewer slows down to a crawl everytime you walk, fly or speak on the chat. This bug renders it unusable. I invite you to vote on it if you can.

So I am NOT going to release a RLV based on a more recent version of the SL viewer until this bug has been addressed, in order to avoid inflicting it on you.

Besides, releasing a RLV 2.4 based on SL 2.5.13360 is also nice because the Starlight skin is compatible with it (I love this skin, it makes the viewer much more user-friendly).

It should be a matter of days before I release this new version of the RLV, I'm just running some final tests with it.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.3

2010-11-28T08:36:00.001-08:00

Hello there,

As promised last week, here is the latest version of the RLV with many new commands ! These commands were all popular requests, some being more than two years old... Here they are at last !

- added : @detachthis and @detachallthis restrictions to prevent the avatar from removing certain outfits.
- added : @attachthis and @attachallthis restrictions to prevent the avatar from wearing certain outfits.
- added : @editobj command to prevent editing and opening one object in particular.
- added : exception mechanism to the @edit restriction (not to be mistaken with @editobj mentioned above), to allow the avatar to edit or open one object in particular.
- added : @sendimto, @recvimfrom and @recvchatfrom restrictions to prevent an avatar from sending IMs to, receiving IMs from and hearing chat from an avatar in particular.
- fixed : when attaching a folder, the objects would detach themselves once the clothing layers were being worn, and the outfit would have to be worn twice. This was not a RLV-specific bug.

As usual, download the installer there :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash is
aad7f3792733b95af16f27e0a3e00019

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.3 coming soon

2010-11-21T03:36:00.000-08:00

Hi !

Just a quick post to tell you about the upcoming RLV 2.3 and its new commands. At the time of this writing it is almost done, but not complete yet so it will be a few days before it is released. There are also a few other commands I am working on, but since the syntax and the actual effect is not clear yet, I'd rather not list them here. What is listed here is what will be included because it is already coded and tested.

This post is mostly aimed at the other RLV developers who want to keep their own RLV up-to-date, and at scripters who want to start working on new scripts to integrate the new commands in advance.

* "@detachthis=n" and "@detachallthis=n" : When this command is issued from a worn attachment, it locks all the objects and clothes belonging to the same folder (and to the sub-folders as well for the second option) on the avatar. It is the equivalent to calling a serie of "@detach" and "@remoutfit" commands for all the objects and clothes belonging to those folders.

* "@detachthis:attachpt=n" and "@detachallthis:attachpt=n" : No matter what object issues this command, the folders containing objects worn on attachpt will be locked on. In the case of the second option, the sub-folders will be locked on as well.

* "@detachthis:layer=n" and "@detachallthis:layer=n" : Same thing, but with clothing layers (shirt, pants, tattoo...).

* "@detachthis:folder=n" and "@detachallthis:folder=n" : These commands lock a folder by name, which implies that while it is locked, the user cannot move it, rename it, or move items or folders in or out of it.

* "@attachthis=n", "@attachallthis=n", "@attachthis:attachpt=n", "@attachallthis:attachpt=n", "@attachthis:layer=n", "@attachallthis:layer=n", "@attachthis:folder=n", "@attachallthis:folder=n" : Same thing, but this time it locks the folder(s) off, preventing from actually wearing them.

Please note : For the moment, even the object that issues these restrictions cannot ignore them. In other words, if your collar issues an "@attachthis:cuffs=n" kind of command, you won't be able to even make yourself wear the cuffs by using an "@attach:cuffs=force" command, even from it. This is something I am going to work on seriously in the future because it can be annoying at times.

* "@editobj:uuid=n" : Issuing this command prevents the avatar from editing and opening the object which root has the indicated uuid.

Have fun with these new commands !
Marine

Vendors online again

2010-11-10T16:53:00.001-08:00

Hi there,

Just a quick post to say that although the Apez issue is not entirely resolved yet, they have done their best to at least let me withdraw, and will do so again should I need to again (and I will), until the actual owner of Apez comes back and fixes the issue for good (only he can do that).

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Marine

Vendors going offline for a few days

2010-11-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

Hi,

I must put all my vendors offline urgently. Apez, the sales system I have been using for 4 years now, has decided not to let me withdraw the money I got from my recent sales anymore. People were still getting their products, but the money would not go to me, and would be stuck in the pipe. This is not the first time it happens and I usually got a good service from the Apez guys, but this time it is too much (that's more than L$68000 stuck somewhere and not guaranteed to be transferred to me ever).

Let me explain what Apez is, in a few words. It is a networked sales system that provides a merchant with a server and vendors to rez in-world, and that is all manageable through a web interface. It's cool... when it works. Apez Mann, the official bot used by that system, channels all the monetary transactions as sales are made.

Typically, when you buy something from me, I am paid the money you pay the vendor, then immediately the vendor makes me pay the same amount of money to Apez Mann, which adds this amount to a "virtual" account (yes, even more virtual than a SL account !) which is managed on that webpage. Every few days, I'd do what they call a "withdraw" from that account back to my SL account, and all is well. Only... this time the withdraw procedure does not work, it says that 100% of the money is "unavailable". It happens when the transactions cannot be verified, and apparently requires the owner of Apez, Cenji Neutra, to control all the transactions by hand. It takes days.

Problem is, Cenji has not logged on in 4 months. Their support ticket system is barely responding, nothing is happening, their forums are riddled with complaints and people are leaving for Hippo or other sales systems. This is too bad for the second biggest sales network in SL to end like that. What if I left too ? I am their biggest client after all, generating more than 10% of their daily sales. Should I expect better customer service from them ? Perhaps. But what am I getting ? Zilch. Zero. Nada. Total radio silence. This is unacceptable.

So I am currently working on a solution to put my vendors back up, be they Apez or anything else, but I do not intend to stay offline for too long.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Marine

Restrained Love v2.2.1.0

2010-10-31T13:52:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Here is the latest version of the RLV, with a few bugfixes and some nice improvements to make it a bit user-friendlier :

- added : Support for Display Names. Please note that this is still in beta stage so there might be a bug here and there, but the tests were pretty conclusive so far.
- added : Qarl Fizz (formerly Qarl Linden) align tool, which is a big plus for builders. You will find it on the Edit window, as a new tool. Thank you Qarl !
- added : Starlight skin by Hitomi Tiponi.
- changed : Now the navigation bar won't hide itself when the avatar is prevented from seeing the location. This will allow them to use the sliders on the right at any time now.
- fixed : Remove From Current Outfit would not work well when the RLV features were disabled (thank you Lance Corrimal for the heads-up).
- fixed : The avatar could not be force-teleported by an object which restricted them from sit-tping (it used to work in 1.x).

You can download the installer for Windows here :
http://erestraint.com/realrestraint

MD5 hash :
b83dafe87311ad4b64b524f089c11724

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.2.0.1

2010-10-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

Hello there !

Here is the latest version of the RLV, this time more about user-friendliness than about bug-fixin'. See for yourself :

- added : A slider on the navigation bar to offset the altitude of the avatar. This is useful when the current animation is not properly offset according to the size of the avatar. This feature was inspired from the Phoenix viewer. If the navigation bar is unavailable, the setting can be changed by modifying the "RestrainedLoveOffsetAvatarZ" debug setting. Attention it works only between -0.5 and 0.5, default is 0.0.

- added : No script will be able to remove an item, a piece of clothing or a complete folder if its name contains "nostrip". This feature is inspired from RLVa's "nostrip" security. Yes, it was about time !

- changed : Do not automatically decline inventory offers and do not ignore object IMs when in Busy mode.

- changed : When in no-script areas, every attachment becomes automatically undetachable. Thanks JiaDragon Allen for the idea.

- fixed : Script editor freezes when pasting large pieces of code. Fix was possible thanks to Satomi Ahn's patch for https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-229

- fixed : Removing all clothes with a @detachthis command would not remove stacked clothes.

- fixed : Crash when receiving inventory if no #RLV folder was created. My bad, and thanks Henri Beauchamp for the heads-up.

- fixed : In the Outfit panel, "Wear & Replace" should remove the current attachments and clothes instead of stacking.

- fixed : "Remove From Current Outfit" was missing from the context menu.

- fixed : "Remove From Current Outfit" was not available when RLV was deactivated.

Download the installer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

MD5 hash :
6014752f9b99560bcc1af4e298bd5bc0

Have fun !
Marine

Closing the maze... NOT !

2010-10-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

Hello again !

I am happy to announce that the maze did not close after all, it just... moved.

You will find out it is now in Deitide, high up in the sky. However the main entrance is still in Zhora (look for the pile of rocks in the park and walk through the badger hole with a RLV relay on) and the maze is identical to what it was before. It's just elsewhere. The main entrance will move soon too I guess, I will put it in Deitide, or copy it, or whatever. In any case, it's working.

A BIG thanks to Chorazin Allen for hosting it there. I'm happy to see my old buddy back into shape !

Have fun !
Marine

Closing the maze

2010-09-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

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 !

Restrained Love v2.2

2010-09-21T05:37:00.000-07:00

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

Restrained Love v2.1.2.2

2010-09-05T07:14:00.001-07:00

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

Restrained Love v2.1.2.1

2010-08-30T06:42:00.000-07:00

Hi !

This is a last-minute release for the RLV with a quick fix. It seems that 2.1.2 crashed when receiving a @getoutfit command. If you have downloaded 2.1.2, please download this new version ASAP because using a furniture or an attachment that issues this command will make your viewer crash to desktop. Big thanks to Chorazin Allen for helping me track that bug down.

For those who build their own viewer and include the RLV patch in it :
I have also added the revision of the latest changeset integrated in the SL viewer at the time when I cloned the repository to build this RLV, which is 11980. Same revision as RLV 2.1.2 so the patch will need to be applied on the same source code. I'll try to keep the revision number visible so we know exactly what changes are included into the viewer when I decide to build a new RLV.

For those who didn't understand a word in what I just wrote, this simply means that the version of the SL viewer I have used to build the RLV on, will appear on the Help > About window, and I will try to do so from now on :)

Grab it here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint/

Hash for the Windows installer :
6f4ca405511ef7225d8a6571574dd196 (initial version with debug setting set to FALSE, unavailable now)
92e4ad7d2f02552ffb5d043ee4012885 (fixed version with debug setting set to TRUE)

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Marine

PS : The initial version 2.1.2.1 had its "RestrainedLove" debug setting set to FALSE in the package, resulting in the RLV features being deactivated by default instead of activated. If you have downloaded it between 6:40am and 7:15am SLT on 8/30/2010, please download it again or turn this debug setting to TRUE yourself in Advanced > Debug Settings. That's the only difference between these two versions. Sorry about that.

Restrained Love v2.1.2

2010-08-28T06:52:00.000-07:00

Hello !

Here is the latest version of the RLV, really taking multi-attachments and multi-wearables now, like the soon-to-come SL viewer. Oh and also, as promised, a new command to make sure a prisoner won't escape from a cell by teleporting through HUDs and the like. Here is a breakdown of the new features :

- added : New commands to force attach outfits without replacing clothes and attachments : @attachover, @attachthisover, @attachallover, @attachallthisover. Note that if the folder begins with a "+" (can be changed through the "RestrainedLoveStackWhenFolderBeginsWith" debug setting), @attach:folder=force will add the outfit instead of replacing it.

- added : New @standtp command to force an avatar to teleport back to the previous location where they were standing last, to prevent them from cheating through cages by rezzing poseballs or teleporters.

- changed : Added Henri Beauchamp's tweak to make sure that an exact match for a folder takes priority over approximate matches, regardless of the position of the folder in the inventory.

- changed : When you receive a folder which name begins with "#RLV/~" from another resident, this folder goes directly into your #RLV folder, exactly as if it were given by an object.

- changed : The previous "fix" that would spare the viewer from removing all clothes before rebaking again when changing outfits is now removed. This fix could not handle multiple clothing well, due to how the regular SL viewer handles changes of clothing now (i.e. it removes everything and immediately rebakes the textures, which shows your avatar losing its shoes for a short moment, it is annoying but it works).

This version is also standalone (and I don't think I will release non-standalone viewers anymore now), you can grab it here :

http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint/

The hash for the Windows is
a2784267b1867adfa12a9be3ce9ed684

Have fun !
Marine

Upcoming new RLV command : @standtp

2010-08-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Just a short blog post to give you a heads-up as to what the next RLV command will be and what it will be used for : @standtp.

Cages in SL are pretty much secure, with one flaw : the prisoner could use a rezzer HUD to rez prims and get out. One way to prevent this so far is to issue a @sit command, which has the downside of not allowing the prisoner to sit anywhere (it is ok for most cages, but some do include furniture on which the prisoner is expected to sit). Another way to prevent it is to lock their inventory away with @showinv and to ensure the prisoner cannot use a script to grab the rezzer from their #RLV folder... but it is also a bit overkill because the inventory could be useful for other things.

That's why @standtp is being added : When the avatar sits down the RLV retains its last standing position, and when it stands up and this command is active it is teleported back to this last standing position, exactly as if you double-clicked on the floor with the "DoubleClickTeleport" debug setting set to TRUE.

In other words, if you are kept inside a cage that uses this command and you think you can escape by using a HUD that rezzes a prim you can sit on... think again. lol. You'd snap right back inside the cage when you stand up.

Now... Why isn't it part of other commands like @sittp, for example ? Well it wouldn't work for leashes, where the sub can be told to sit in a vehicle for a stroll. She would snap back to the original place upon standing, which would be confusing. So this feature does need a new command I'm afraid.

Oh one last thing ! When the command is issued, the last stored location is also updated to where you are at the moment so that grabbers that force-sit you can still be used to bring someone inside a cage, issue all the restrictions (including @standtp) and THEN unsit the victim. That way no content will break.

I do not have an ETA yet. The command works, but I have no plan to release a new RLV in the next few days so you have time. But since the RLV does accept even non-existing commands (for this reason), you can already update your cages if you want, to be prepared for the time when it will be part of the RLV API.

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.1.0.1

2010-08-18T02:02:00.001-07:00

Hello there,

Here is the latest version of the RLV, with only bugfixes but a lot of them. I hope this will make it more user-friendly for everyone.

- changed : When debug settings are forced, atmospheric shaders are forced on too because RenderResolutionDivisor (*) needs them to work.
- changed : DoubleClickTeleport (*) is ignored if your controls are being handled (like when wearing legirons), or when unable to sit-TP, or when unable to teleport.
- fixed : The Build button was not refreshed correctly when the @rez restriction was active and the avatar was walking from parcel to parcel.
- fixed : Don't hide the LMs in the Places panel when the inventory is hidden.
- fixed : When changing outfits, don't reset all the clothes (making the shoes disappear and reappear), but only update what needs to be updated, like in 1.x.
- fixed : When wearing 2 pieces of clothing at the same time after clearing the cache, one of them cannot be removed easily. Please note, this is a SL viewer bug, see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-20608
- fixed : You could delete (not return) an object you were sitting on while prevented from unsitting.
- fixed : You could send a TP offer even when the location was hidden.

(*) This is a Debug Setting, that you can change by going to Advanced > Debug Settings on your top menubar (if you don't see the "Advanced", press Ctrl Alt D).

Here is the link to the RLV, remember it is standalone now :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint/

The hash of the windows installer is
b2ff5e97cd70c57360e76774189308d7

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.1.0

2010-08-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

As promised, here is the latest version of the RLV... with a few significant changes ! First of all, it is a standalone version, and not an executable that you have to drop into the SL folder anymore. What you get is an installer that will decompress wherever you want, and you won't have to go through the hassle of copying the settings.xml file anymore.

But more so, this version handles multiple attachments... If you don't know what it is about, let me explain it to you real quick :

Until now, you could only wear ONE object per attachment point (like "spine", "r forearm" etc). Which means that attaching another object on a point that was taken would either kick the present object off, or do nothing if the object was locked.

Some other third-party viewers like Emerald added several copies of the existing attachment points to trump the system and make you able to wear several objects on the same point. It worked well, but scripts would have difficulties with them, especially since it was not a supported feature.

Now, the grid is able to handle this and has support from the regular SL viewer 2.1, which has become official last week. And with it, RLV 2.1. What happens now, is that an attachment point does not hold only one object anymore, but a list of objects.

It impacts some of the features of the RLV directly though :

- A new @getpathnew command is added because @getpath would return only one folder, the folder containing "the" object attached to an attachment point. Only... "the" does not mean anything anymore, since there can be several objects worn on the same point.
- When your avatar is forced to wear something, the objects won't kick the existing ones anymore. So you have to manually remove them before or after wearing the new outfit.

The "MultipleAttachment" debug setting is going to be your friend, too. It is set to FALSE by default (so the viewer follows the old behavior), you have to set it to TRUE yourself in order to enjoy this new feature. This is because older viewers like 1.23 are unable to render those additional objects when they're attached on top of existing ones.

Here is a recap of the changes and new features :

- added : Support for multiple attachments. The debug setting "MultipleAttachments" is used to decide whether to allow multiple attachments or not. Defaults to FALSE. (*)
- added : New command @getpathnew to respond with a list of folders when testing what outfits contain all the objects attached to one attach point in particular.
- added : Some tweaks to make the viewer generally more user-friendly. You can find them here : http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_2_Tweaks/Full_2.0.0.203055
- changed : The Build, Map, Minimap and Inventory buttons in the bottom bar are greyed out when the appropriate restrictions are issued.
- changed : Made the chat toasts bigger for better readability.
- fixed : Update the context menu of the top menubar when @showloc is issued.
- fixed : Ironed out some oversights that needed to be addressed after porting the RLV source code to 2.0, then to 2.1.

(*) The release notes may seem to say exactly the opposite. What is said here in this blog is the actual behavior, the debug setting is NOT ignored.

Here is the link to the RLV, remember 2.1 is standalone now :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint/

The hash of the windows installer is
434c1a68b8fe65d1c8712d6901505aa6

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.0.1

2010-06-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Here is a new version of the RLV, including a few bugfixes that were annoying the hell out of the users. And as nobody reads the release notes, I will paste what has been done here. Here goes :

- fixed : Holding Shift while typing would send the chat as is, in a Whisper. It could be very annoying.
- fixed : Prevent a clever cheat over @shownames.
- fixed : When the user is prevented from removing clothes but wears something that replaces an existing one, in theory it should not do anything (since the existing clothes cannot be removed). But after a relog the new clothes were being worn, despite the restriction.
- fixed : When setting the IMs to tabs, the tabs would only display the avatar icon and no name, and clicking on a tab would do nothing (alt-left and alt-right would work, though). For now the avatar icons are removed, but the names show and the mouse clicks work again. The solution is less than ideal but the bug hunt took me over two weeks...

Download the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The hash for the Windows zip file is
02bbc6a4e3e68dbcf6a276d3d70f51be

Have fun !
Marine

Restrained Love v2.0

2010-05-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

After much time spent porting the code (or should I say, rewriting the code) from SL 1.23 to SL 2.0, and after even more time spent testing it, here is the first acceptable version of the RLV 2.0 !

I say "acceptable" because this is still in beta, there are bugs from the standard SL viewer and other bugs that I certainly didn't notice or didn't cover well enough. We'll see in the long run. But at least this is something.

As always you can download it from
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The hash code for the Windows version is
28080de8606c2d5d0de17388463116fa

You may expect this version to be updated a few times, as users will report bugs or missing features, just bear with me :)

Have fun !
Marine

RLV 2.0... working on it !

2010-04-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

Hello and sorry for having been so silent lately, I deliberately stayed away from all the fuss around the TPV policy and the new ToS. I have voiced my point of view once, and that was enough. But I've been very attentive to all the concerns raised on the os-dev mailing list and various forums ever since.

But the main thing I've been doing lately has been keeping me far busier than this : I am working at porting the code of the RLV from SL 1.23 to SL 2.0. It has taken me weeks of non-stop coding and testing (weekends included) because the two source codes are so radically different that a total rewrite was actually not out of question. And it's not over yet.

First of all, let me say that I do not dislike 2.0 too much, it actually looks slicker than 1.23, even if it was hard to change my habits because it clearly does not behave the same way. I hated it at first but I'm slowly growing to getting used to it. Some parts make more sense than in the older versions, when you think about it LL wants to tend towards a "metaverse", which is no less than a 3D web. Hence the browser look-and-feel for the new viewer. It makes sense because conceptually regions are like websites, landmarks are like bookmarks, etc. Some correlations can be done. And I like it because some features were clearly broken in 1.23 and LL had the guts to start them over from scratch, sending the message that they are going to improve them and finally fix some old-time bugs. I still prefer 1.23, though, because it generally offers more power to the user (and requires less clicks for the same actions).

Porting the RLV from 1.23 to 2.0... is a nightmare. We are talking about a source base that has been worked on behind closed doors for a year at LL, before being released to the users with all the changes that it implies. Most of the code that the RLV specification impacts has changed, or is actually not there anymore, which means recoding manually and retesting it all. Some controls have vanished (the upper status bar, some floaters), some have dramatically changed (the lower control bar, the chat bar), some are new (the side tray for instance). Most of the restrictions issued by the RLV were broken, even "detach" had to be fixed. Not to mention the new concept of links (which is a good concept, but the RLV was not able to handle them natively), outfits and worn items. Worse, some intrinsic paradigms in the source code have changed, and this made the port even harder. I can say that practically every single feature of the RLV has been recoded one way or another.

To give you a glimpse of the task, here are the features that were still working (the rest was broken badly or very badly) :
- automatically reattaching locked items after being kicked off
- @recvim, @recvchat
- focusing in-world while Blocked
- @redirchat
- @tplm, @tploc, @tplure
- @fartouch
... and that's about it. Every other feature of the RLV was broken and had to be either fixed or recoded. Granted, everything is not even tested yet, namely @setenv and its suite of commands, I don't know whether they still work or not. The damage assessment is not even complete yet.

But I'm getting there. Most of the features work again, there are still a few things to fix, and a lot of testing to do. The only thing that worries me is that I am actually working on the source code of Snowglobe 2.0 (since Viewer 2.0 is closed source), its first version to be exact, and it does not run with the Beta version of the SL viewer 2.0. Well, it does run, but some XML files must be missing which prevent me from logging on using Beta 2.0. So I can't say that RLV 2.0 works with Viewer 2.0 yet. It works with Snowglobe 2.0 and that's already it.

All this to say that I am not quitting, nor stopping developing on the RLV, but I wanted to avoid conjectures until I had something solid to present. Of course I can't provide any ETA yet, it could be weeks before I can publish an acceptable RLV 2.0. And even then, it would certainly still contain bugs and oversights that would have to be fixed over time.

Please bear in mind, though, that the two projects (1.23 and 2.0) are so radically different that adding a feature to one does not mean it can be added to the other easily. 90% of the time it can't be ported without being entirely recoded. So unless it is small and easy enough, I am not going to add any feature to RLV 1.23 anymore. It is not the time to add features anyway, it is the time to make the damn thing cross the gap and keep living on. Because eventually SL 2.0 will become mandatory and 1.23 will stop working. Better safe than sorry.

Marine

The new name of the RLV (yes, really !)

2010-02-26T08:58:00.001-08:00

Hi there,

Ok so it is done, settled, taped, fastened, tightened, locked, double-locked, welded, and I even added a drop of glue just to be sure it wouldn't budge anymore.

The new name for the fomer Restrained Life Viewer is... Tadaa !

Restrained Love Viewer !

I actually like this name better than any other one, and many people have suggested it yesterday. It delivers a very positive message, even, and despite still having a fetish flavor, it can be used in mainstream without much afterthought. And it's cute ! And more importantly, I know first-hand that the Legal department of Linden Lab is 100% okay with it. Finally !

Now we can start working at updating everything that needs updating, but before let me just explain a few things.

Firstly, "Living" was too "confusingly similar" to "Life", according to LL's words, so keeping it was bound to raise issues. This was not a legal one though. I would not have been sued for making a viewer that used a forbidden word or a similar one. It was barely a trademark issue actually. No, it was much simpler than this : LL does not want to give the possibility to any viewer to pretend to be official in any way, direct or implied, and that requires to forbid all the names that could lead the new users into believing a viewer has been made by LL. I can understand that. I don't approve, nobody in their right mind would have confused "Restrained Living" or even "Restrained Life" with "Second Life", but I understand. The policy is heavy handed and poorly worded, but it is their platform, and they reserve themselves the right to accept who they want on their grid according to their own terms.

Secondly, mark my words here, Linden Lab does not dislike me or the RLV at all, nor the BDSM crowd in general. They know we are responsible people, and that we share their interest in making this virtual world a better place. The RLV is one example of this interest, there are many others, and they know it. Their Legal department is not populated with top executives who have life-or-death power upon us Residents, but with people who try to edict rules to protect themselves when it comes to providing us powerful tools to work along with them. This is very much like handing a gun to someone hoping you will have your back covered. The last thing you want is to have the weapon pointed at you ! Granted, this was not done in the best way, nor at the right time (it should have been done the day the viewer went open-source, rather), and it seems the policy will be reworded in the next few days anyway. This double name change only made me waste a few hours and bounce up and down a little, but that's as far as the damage went. No weasel has been hurt during the take.

Thirdly, I would like to publicly thank Soft Linden for his patience and help through this. Without his help, I would have released a "Restrained Living Viewer" and it would have been banned from the grid. Thanks to him, I am sure it is not going to happen. Better yet, Soft offers to rename the groups that have "Restrained Life" in their name to "Restrained Love", rather than letting the group owners create new groups and do all the work that implies themselves ! For the trouble, y'know. That's Soft. Thank you Soft.

Fourthly, the amount of support I got from everyone was simply amazing. I cannot count the number of kind messages I received during the last few days, and this is very humbling... Thank you all !

It's ironic, when you think about it. This is "just" a name change, and in this case "just" two letters. That's all. On a project that everybody refers to by its acronym anyway. That's a lot of noise for not much, and I apologize for that.

Have fun and thank you again !

Marine

New name ? Not so fast.

2010-02-25T13:22:00.001-08:00

Argh. Now I'm going to really blow a gasket. I've been told that "Restrained Living Viewer" INFRINGES Linden Lab's policy about third party viewers. No more info for now. Just that it is not going to be named that way for the moment. I know I have been blogging that it was settled a few hours ago, and now I am forced back to square one. Just please hold on before changing your scripts or whatever, the new name of the RLV is NOT chosen yet. Again.

Sorry about that.

RestrainedLife changes name (final)

2010-02-25T03:22:00.001-08:00

Hello again,

After much discussion with many people, I have found out that most of the suggestions for the new name of the RLV tended to converge independently towards "Restrained Living Viewer". I kinda like this name, even though I originally wanted to take make it less fetishy... But one killer argument is that the viewer should be as easy to find (on Google or elsewhere) with its new name than with its original one. "Red Light" would not lead you anywhere near the RLV unfortunately. Another killer argument is that "Red Light" is actually the name of an adult-oriented 3D platform that is somewhat a competitor to Second Life. No less ! Proves that the name was not so bad, but someone had the same idea first.

So it is settled now, after much thought, decision and indecision... to Restrained Living Viewer. Not "Red Light Viewer" as I initially planned, but that name did not have much meaning, it was like a placeholder. "Restrained Living Viewer" has much more substance to it, is very close to the original name, and keeps the two most important words of the three : "Restrained" and "Viewer". Apologies to those who hoped the new name would be less fetishy, I really tried as hard as I could, but hey, after all it is not that adult-oriented, is it ?

In a nutshell, here is a recap of the most important reasons why I'm choosing this name among the others :
- It abbreviates to "RLV"
- It is very close to the original name, so it won't be a huge change in the mind of the users
- Losing "Restrained" would lose many search results in Google or other search engines (including within SL), and that is one of the best argument to keeping it
- It is more positive than "Restrained Life", which has a sense of coercion that "Restrained Living" does not have (the latter sounds more like a choice of life rather than an imposition). Yes I know this is subtle, but it counts

Ok so now that this is settled, I can start working at changing the name everywhere I can. Code, manuals, API, scripts... it will take a while before everything is clean again, but you won't notice most of the changes anyway. And I will not rush, Linden Lab is giving us 3 months to make the move. So scripters do not need to rush either. Let's all do this smoothly and nobody will get hurt.

What you will notice is a new command called @versionnew that will return "RestrainedLiving viewer v1.23.0 (SL 1.23.5)", exactly like @version which will remain unchanged. Note that "RestrainedLiving" will be one word, without a space. @versionnum will remain unchanged as well, of course.

I want to thank all of you who have helped me with the choice of the new name, and for your support through your kind messages, notecards, blog posts... I really, really appreciate your concern.

Love you all,
Marine

RestrainedLife changes name

2010-02-24T03:06:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

Today Linden Lab has decided to publish their new Third Party Viewer policy that you can read here

To begin with, this policy is unacceptable. A Third Party Viewer Developer (with a big "D" !) must NOT be held responsible for whatever use their users do with their work. It makes no sense, is not viable in court, and nobody in their right mind would even think of imposing this. As soon as you download an application, as a user you are entirely responsible for what you do with it. You are responsible for what transits through your wifi router, too. And you are responsible for your driving style when you buy a car. I could go on and on. I am NOT responsible for what you do with the RLV, guys, and never will.

Let me emphasize the one point that makes this change necessary :

# Your Third-Party Viewer name must not be confusingly similar to or use any part of a Linden Lab trademark, including “Second,” “Life,” “SL,” or “Linden.” For example:

1. You must not have a Third-Party Viewer name that is “________ Life” where “________” is a term or series of terms.

That's right, Linden Lab forbids us from using "Life" in the name of any Third Party Viewer from now on. Therefore "RestrainedLife" must be renamed or die. And it won't die.

First of all, let me just say that I am personally offended. No, disgusted. No, mortified. Well I feel anything you can think about except satisfied with it. I'm appalled that they dare stabbing their most faithful supporters (the Developers) in the back like this, to protect themselves from a handful of griefers. They are openly admitting that they have no weapon to counteract them, or worse, that we (their supporters) are in their way in this stupid arms race and must get ridden of. This viewer has been around for 2 years and a half now, and this policy is only one day old, but who am I to believe they'd have respect for what is already in place when making a change to their platform. This new policy is hurting every legit third party viewer, while not doing harm to any of the custom and privately modified griefer ones.

On SLU and other forums, some developers are even saying they are going to quit, being so disgusted by that new policy. Let me just rephrase what Desmond Shang said to one of them : "Give it a night's sleep, don't give up now, don't take any rash decision before waiting a day or two, since this policy is likely to change again soon anyway". Best advice that could be given to someone whose 2 years and a half work has been thrown down the toilet in a day. Because I am not the only one in this case, and I am not quitting. But it sure will be a hell of a task to rename the RLV, considering how broadly that name has spread now. The damage would have been nil had this policy been released the day the SL viewer became open-source, in January 2007 ! We are February 2010 now ! Think of how implanted the older viewers are now !

Let me just remind one thing to Linden Lab (and I know some of their employees are reading this blog) : We, as the Third Party Viewer Developers, with all the capitals at the right places, are adding value to your platform. We are working our asses off to make your own project better ! Most of us are not paid for this, and do this as a hobby, albeit in a very dedicated and consistent way. In my own case, yes I do know that the RLV does increase sales in-world, and not only mine. Simply because it makes your platform more attractive ! I have been told countless times that the RLV was the reason why some users signed up in the first place ! And other viewers are having the same effect ! And this is how you thank us ?

Having said this, yes RestrainedLife was bound to change its name eventually, this was in the plans. Having grown from a marginal enhancement to scripts in-world to a full-fledged LSL<->Viewer API, and having moved from being used by a handful of hardcore BDSM practitioners to a significant amount of the SL population, many of which having nothing to do with us fetish players, "Restrained" is a word that was bound to be replaced with something more vanilla. Yes, I wanted to keep "Life" in the name, now I can't anymore, but that doesn't matter.

Which brings me to the real relevant part of this post, after venting a little. The new name. The consequences of changing the name are tremendous, considering the number of scripts in-world that use the name "RestrainedLife" to refer to this viewer. Fortunately, "RestrainedLife" is a bit long to write, so many people prefer using the acronym "RLV", since it is a buzzword everybody knows. Which is why, in an attempt to control some of the damage at least, the new name must still abbreviate to "RLV". Ok I've kept you hanging on long enough, here is the new name...

"Restrained Life Viewer" hereby becomes "Red Light Viewer"

Why this name ? This is not a knee-jerk reaction, I have given it a lot of thought, and actually "Red Light" makes sense for many reasons.

It is usually associated with shady life, where prostitutes put on the red light at their windows to indicate their are available to new clients. There is even a song, sang by Police, which is a group I used to listen to a lot when I was a child. "Rox-ane... You don't have to put on the red light...". But I digress.

A red light is also something you can visualize easily, as opposed to a "restrained life" which is an abstract concept. And red is somewhat associated with forbidden, temptation, and punishment. And this is also my favorite color, so there.

It also has its downsides, unfortunately.

For starters it still sticks to the area of adult play. But how to get rid of that adult aftertaste when most of the features of the RLV are about restricting the user from doing this or that ? It is quite singular in that respect, as it is meant to be used by a quite singular kind of people. And if any viewer connecting to SecondLife must be associated with adult activities, this is this one.

Secondly it is, well, red. And one of its implementations is now part of the Emerald Viewer, which is, well, green. Uh-huh. Right. They will forgive me this I think.

Thirdly this new name has less ties to what the viewer actually does than the original one. This is a direct consequence of me wanting to dissociate it from BDSM play (while still staying adult), rather than because of the new policy.

So let's keep calling it "the RLV". No matter what "RLV" actually stands for, be it "RestrainedLife Viewer", or "Red Light Viewer", or "Really Lame Viewer"... all that matter is what it does, and this does not change one bit.

I'm only asking the scripters who use it to look into their scripts and documentation, and to either replace "RestrainedLife" with "Red Light", or just to mention that the viewer has changed name and that all reference to "RestrainedLife" now means "Red Light", or whatever you want to do as long as it is clear what viewer you are talking about. This may be a lot of work for some. It certainly will be a lot of work for me, and will take place in the weeks to come.

Oh of course, this is still subject to change. I have not started anything yet, but as of today, "Red Light Viewer" really grows in me, it is a name that sticks, and I cannot think of anything better yet.

Marine

RR update to 1.20 is now live

2010-01-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

Hello again,

Well as promised, the latest version for the RealRestraint products is available ! I won't repeat what the changes are here, the previous post explains it all. But it is a major update, with lots of changes !

Have fun,
Marine

RR version 1.20 coming soon !

2010-01-21T14:07:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

This is just a small post to keep you updated with what I am doing at the moment. I have been working on my restraints, refactoring code, merging scripts and adding features, all in the name of improving user-friendliness and script load, which results in the soon-to-come version 1.20 of the Lockable system !

So what's in there ? Here is a glance, but remember that I am still working on it so there is no ETA yet, and I cannot guarantee that this list will not change (but it's pretty much stable now).

1. Lockable goes Mono. Not a big deal ? Well it was a necessary step in order to do all the rest, and the 1.17 and earlier versions are in LSL. This means less memory available so I squeezed the existing code as much as I could, hence more scripts to do complex tasks, hence more memory footprint for the sim. And guess what ? Linden Lab is going to set script limits on objects and attachments (memory and/or sim usage) at some point in 2010. So although I have delayed switching to Mono as much as I could, because of that infamous "freeze the whole sim when rezzing a Mono scripted object" bug, it is now time for me to take the step as well. You'll see, the features that this switch allows are worth it by far.

2a. The "Long time", "Gender" and "Alarm" plugins are now merged back into the main script (Lockable), allowing for 3 less plugins on the Plugins Browser. Their menus can be found on the new "Tools", "Special" and "Timer" pages of Lockable.

2b. The Lockable_Check_RL, NoDetach and Lockable_Shortcut scripts are now merged into Lockable too, allowing for 3 less scripts in the restraint again (so 6 less scripts in total, making it much easier on the sim).

3. More information on the Lockable menus : which page we are on, which pose the captive is locked in, whether the timers are hidden or shown, whether the captive is Blocked/Mouselooked.

4. More options for timers, coming from the former "Long time" plugin, including a "+10 mn"option for more precise control.

5. The ability to save the current state of the restraint (only when unlocked), specifically best time, best escape time, gender, visibility of timers etc. What's best is that even the older versions of Lockable will have their data saved for later, during the update ! So you won't lose your records by updating anymore.

6. Add support for 2 more locks, if a future restraint requires it. I have no plan to add more poses to existing restraints as of yet, but at least 1.20 will allow it if needed.

7. Favorites on the Plugins Browser. Now when you select the same plugin twice in a row from the Plugins Browser (not through "Last Plug"), it will be added to the list of favorites that shows on every page. Since there are at most 3 favorites, there are now only 6 plugins shown on each page, but it is an acceptable tradeoff since 3 plugins have disappeared now anyway. Oh and favorites are separated for the wearer who has no key to their restraint, from everyone else. Exactly like the "Last Plug" button on the Lockable main menu.

8. Ability to set Lockable to "silent" or "verbose". When "silent", everything Lockable says will be said in IM instead of chat, including keys, locks etc. This does not apply to plugins directly, but they are notified of the change.

9. When recovering tries, the message is said to the wearer only. This was seen as "green spam" by people, and didn't really make sense since the struggling was private anyway.

10. RealRestraint_Base will not Block the captive by default in any pose now. This was too confusing for the user, and didn't make it easy to resize the restraint, especially on the Shibari Ropes.

11. When clicking on Autoref and sitting, now the pose will be stopped. That way the captive won't have to unsit and sit again to keep the original pose of the furniture running.

12. Keep running in No-Script areas (main item, secondary items, HUD). It was not done before for simple memory usage reasons, but since Lockable has switched to Mono, this is not a problem anymore.

13. The delay for the main menu goes from 1 minute to 5 minutes.

14. Various bugfixes and oversights :
- "Cmd:L0" to "Cmd:L9" link messages are now supported (again) when received from scripts. They were removed for memory reasons, years ago, and never put back.
- No "Take Keys" link message was sent from Lockable when the wearer locks themselves and the keyholder is someone else.
- The Give Keys plugin does not try to reopen the menu anymore after giving the keys to someone else (it resulted in an "unauthorized access" message anyway).
- The Spy plugin was showing "your keyholder is online/offline" repeatedly when using a third party plugin that triggered dataserver events.
- The Spy plugin crashed. Badly. Repeatedly. And for no reason. And I still don't know why, but switching it to Mono should do the trick. I'll keep an eye on this bug though.
- The Leash plugin's "Anchor" feature was not working when avatar A anchored B to C, despite the prerelease tests. In fact I had tested it, observed it working, then changed a small thing in the script. And didn't retest. Bzzt. Same player shoot again.

15. When locking a captive, the higher the pose in the menu (from 1 to 6 for now), the stronger the restraint becomes, and more difficult to struggle out from.

Whew ! That's about it. And don't worry, the menus you are used to are mostly unchanged. I have done my best to keep the buttons at the same place, keeping them predictable, and the workflow stays the same. You won't have to re-learn everything, far from it. The biggest change you'll see is that "Block" and "Mouselook" are now in the "Special..." menu, instead of the "More..." menu, and that there are more menus, obviously. And less clicks to do the usual tasks like setting and hiding timers or choosing your favorite plugin, which is a plus. And all the scripts that have been merged still send their Link Messages the same way as before, so third party plugins won't see the difference.

Have fun !
Marine

Edit : Added point 15, and the Lockable menu actually expires after 5 minutes, not 3

RR Tutorial : Spy plugin

2009-12-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

Hey,

Today we are going to talk about one of the most versatile and complex plugins of the whole RR suite : the Spy plugin. You can find it in the collars I sell, namely the Steel Collar of the Serious Shackles set, and the Elegance Collar of the Restrained Elegance set. It is best to keep it inside its collar, because the collar is fitted with a special LED that lights up when the Spy is active. Be warned, this tutorial is going to be very long and quite technical, for there is a lot to explain and demonstrate.

Now, why such a name ? Isn't it a bit edgy to make a plugin that spies on the captive ? Sometimes, the top wants to keep the captive under tight control, with her permission. This control implies to be kept informed about whatever the captive does, even if she's far away, or even when the top is offline. It does not, however, force the captive to do anything, except teleporting if she's using the RLV.

As it is a complex piece of work, I am going to demonstrate with Mary again. She will wear the collar, I will be her keyholder, and I will control her Spy plugin remotely. This is going to be fun, you'll see !

So first things first, I lock an Elegance Collar around Mary's neck. I click on it, go to Plugins > Spy, and I get this :

Oh wait, it says "This device is currently unplugged" and gives some reference to a disclaimer in the collar manual... hey I don't have the collar manual here ! And last time I tried to read it it was so big and thick and technical that I eventually gave up (let's be honest, that's why you're here reading this tutorial). It tells me to ask Mary to activate her plugin, problem is I have the key so she can't access it herself. Oh well.

I leave the key on her collar, ask her to click on it and to go to Plugins > Spy, and then to select "Activate". And finally to leave the key on because her key belongs to me, not to her. This whole "activation" process is simply a safety and a disclaimer to make both the top and the captive aware that this plugin is able to monitor who is around the captive, and also to listen to conversations and to send them to the top. It is the responsibility of both of them to use these features in a responsible manner.

Oh there are two little lights showing on the sides of her collar now ! They were not there before.

Ok so now the plugin is fully operational and I can control it. But... how ? All I see on the menu is "Get UUID", "New pwd" and "Give remote". Not many possibilities for control here... Actually I'm not going to use this menu much, if at all. I just need it as a starting point in order to retrieve the device that will really give me control. The plugin itself is just a gateway, a firewall that will receive, filter and execute orders coming from a remote. That's why I will not bother with "Get UUID" (but I'll explain what this button is for later) or "New pwd" (which is practically useless unless the password is compromised). I click on "Give remote".

Immediately I am given a device and also some kind of cryptic message like :
/191625/b8e81399-1e83-1d0d-5dc7-c8e7532f1ba8/208720

I'm told to copy/paste this message once I am wearing the remote, and this is exactly what I'll do. The remote tells me that it has acknowledged the code, so everything should be in order.

Let me explain you what this message means, exactly. Let's call it the "connection string", because it is what links my remote to Mary's collar. Technically, the remote sends emails to the collar, which sends IMs to me. That's it. The collar never ever talks to the remote, it doesn't even "know" it exists. It only talks to me. What is very important to keep in mind is that IMs are buffered by SL while I'm offline, and they can even be redirected to my mailbox (you can do that in your Preferences window, in the Communication tab). It is a very handy tool SL provides and this plugin relies on it.

But the remote has to "know" about the collar, and that requires to know its UUID (its unique identifier, it is "b8e81399-1e83-1d0d-5dc7-c8e7532f1ba8" for the sake of this example) and its "password" (which is only a numeric code in order to not accept commands from just anyone but the keyholder, "464928" here). Problem is, the UUID changes everytime the collar rezzes, namely when it is worn (not an issue if it is locked and the RLV is used) and when the captive logs in. In other words, everytime Mary logs in I have to reconnect my remote if I want to send commands the collar. If it is not connected, the collar will just keep doing whatever it has been programmed to do. Send position reports every X meters, relay chat etc.

But we're not there yet, let's try a few things first. As I am wearing my remote and it is supposedly connected, first thing I will do is to check it actually is. I click on my remote and... oh look a wall of buttons !

The "Report" button is what I need. I press it and here is what the collar tells me after a couple seconds :

Internal report for Mary X :
Position : OFF (30 m)
Sensor : OFF (30 m)
Status : OFF
Listen : OFF
Online only : NO
Time : 10:3:20
Time left : 0:0:0

Ok that's a lot of data. What does that mean exactly ?

The collar is fitted with a few very handy technological devices. A satellite locator, a teleporter, a scanner, an biological monitor, a mic, a speaker and it is even linked to the internal timers of the restraint. No less ! Every one of these devices can be turned on and off individually, and for the moment they are all switched off. There is also a general switch that inhibits everything with the press of a button, and reactivates only the formerly activated devices when pressed again.

And after this very long introduction, I am going to demonstrate the use of each one of these devices in turn. You'll see that when used well, the top can control the captive very effectively !

First off I want to know where Mary is at any time. Or at least when I want. I click on "Pos. now" and immediately I am given Mary's location, in the form of a slurl. You know what a slurl is, right ? It is like a web address, but it leads to a 3D location in the SL grid. If I click on it in my chat history my world map opens and I see where she is. I could teleport there so Mary can see me appear in front of her at any time if I choose to ! But it is rude to do so if she's not alone. Remember, the captive is the one monitored, her friends should never suffer from an excess of control from her top ! Be responsible !

Oh the little lights on her collar are flashing red ! This means that I have just sent a command to it. So whenever Mary sees her lights flashing, she knows I am thinking of her :)

I also want to know who is around her right now. I press "Sensor now" and I get this :

Sensor report for Mary X : Marine Kelley (2 m)

Well, duh. And once again the lights flash and then switch off again.

And what is she doing exactly right now ? I press "Status now" and I get :

Status report for Mary X : Away: NO Busy: NO Flying: NO Mouselook: NO Sitting: NO

She's not doing much... Granted this one report is rarely very useful but sometimes it helps.

But what I really want to know is what she does when I'm offline, when it is more difficult for me to request that kind of information. With her agreement, of course !

To do that, I just dig deeper into the "Position...", "Sensor..." and "Status..." submenus. No need to go into details there, but I will show you with the first one. The other two work exactly the same way.

I click on my remote and press "Position...". I am shown this submenu :

The "Instant" button will do exacly the same thing as the "Pos. now" one I pressed earlier, it will give me Mary's current location. However I am not interested in knowing where she is now, I know it already. I want to be notified everytime she walks or flies over 50 meters and when she teleports. To do this I just press "50 m" and then "On" to activate the satellite locator. I get the first position report immediately, and will get one more every time she moves 50 meters from where her collar sent its last report. I could be more precise and set it to 5 meters but that would only mean more reports, I don't want to be spammed.

Oh, now the lights on her collar are not flashing red, they are switched on and stay bright constantly... This means I am actively monitoring her, the lights won't turn off until I shut all the monitoring devices. Which I am not going to do yet. Hehe.

I do the same with the scanner, I go back to the main menu then press "Sensor..." :

Once again, distances, "On", "Off" and "Instant". The meaning is exactly the same except that the distances mean the range of the scanner. Contrary to the locator, the shorter the distance the fewer the reports. I turn it on by pressing "On" and set its range to 20 meters by pressing "20 m". I also get an immediate sensor report. I will get one more everytime something changes in her surroundings (people change position or she moves). The scanner only reports people, it does not report objects (it is not a sonar).

Ok now she is all set, let's review what I've just changed. I go back to the main menu and press "Report" again :

Internal report for Mary X :
Position : ON (50 m)
Sensor : ON (50 m)
Status : OFF
Listen : OFF
Online only : NO
Time : 10:5:40
Time left : 0:0:0

The locator and the scanner are active, the lights are bright red meaning that at least one device is active, everything is nominal.

How about she goes "on the field" so I can test the real power of the collar and the remote ? Let's say I don't want her to know where I am sending her to, provided she is using the RLV (and she is, for the sake of this tutorial). Let's assume her Control plugin is set to not let her know her location. I want to send her to some place out there. For example the Kelley Park in Zhora. There are several solutions to do that. the soft way is to order her to tp there. But she won't because she's a brat and never does what she's told. The hard way is to make her. And that's exactly what I'm going to do.

I open my world map and type "Zhora" and validate. SL shows me the map of the Zhora sim in which I recognize the park, and I want to teleport Mary to its entrance. I click with my mouse on the black road in front of it, then "Copy slurl to clipboard" (that's one very handy button trust me). What it does is translate the point I have selected (the red dot on the map) into a slurl so that I can type it in chat.

I paste this slurl on channel 7 by typing "/7 " and Ctrl-V (or Apple-V) :

/7 http://slurl.com/secondlife/Zhora/185/128/25

And... voila ! Mary is teleported to that spot immediately. Note that it is always channel 7, it cannot be changed yet. Maybe in the future.

I also get a new position report since her locator is active :

Position report for Mary X : Parcel 'Zhora Downtown' at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Zhora/185/128/25

Clear, precise, no way to get mistaken. She is where I want her. And if I want to join her I just press Ctrl-H (not Apple-H) to get my chat history and click on the slurl I've just been given.

Oh and note that it would have worked even if she was leashed by her collar (not by any other restraint though). This is because a force-teleport overrides a no-teleport when it is sent by the same object, in this case her collar. She couldn't have gone back by her own means though, but I could have summoned her back myself through the remote. I will do that now. I click on my remote, go to "Position..." and press "TP here". And tadaa ! She's back, feeling a little like a ragdoll tossed around. That's a good way to show who's in control. She knows that I'll know wherever she is at any time, that I can send her where I want and that I can summon her back on a whim.

Ok enough tossing my captive around, let's go to the mic and the speaker now. The mic is fairly straightforward, and also the most controversial feature in this plugin. It simply allows to overhear whatever is said around the captive. I click on my remote, go to "Listen..." and press "All". This means I can now hear what she says and what people say around her, even when I'm not there. As it is an active device, the light stays bright red while I'm listening, so people have a clue the collar is active. They just don't know what exactly is being monitored.

Now, before you scream, just keep one thing in mind : the captive somewhat "belongs" to the top, and may be required to report whatever she heard at a later time anyway. There is exactly no way to prevent someone from pasting a chatlog or from telling someone else "so-and-so said this and that". If you don't want to be overheard by someone wearing a collar or any other device while you speak, just stick to IMs. Public chat is just that, public. You have the right to report whatever I say on the chat to whomever you like, but you do not have the right to use it against me. You just have to remember that chatlogs are not worth their weight in bytes anyway, since they can easily be modified. Last but not least, the disclaimer the captive has to agree to makes her and her top responsible of the use of the gathered info. Res-pon-sible.

Back on topic. The mic has only one purpose, like all the other devices : to keep the top up-to-date with whatever the captive does. I have been monitored by my top for months, and I must say it felt good to know that I always had this watchful eye over my shoulder. Never did she use it against anybody (I didn't go out much at that time anyway). Does it sound weird ? Not so much actually. It's hard to explain, certainly this feature is not for everyone. It can also be useful inside harems or prisons, where IMs are forbidden and the only mean of communication is plain chat. It helps wardens to stay in control.

The mic will repeat whatever is said around the captive to the top, but only if the latter is over 20 meters away from the person who speaks, to avoid hearing things twice. So if I stay near Mary I will not be repeated what I say, but if I move away and I shout, then the collar will transmit my own words. Let's try :

Marine Kelley: Echo ?

... Nothing.

I move about 30 meters away from Mary and I shout.

Marine Kelley shouts: Echoo ?!

Mary X hears : [Marine Kelley : Echoo ?!]

Neat !

Now of course, if I hear people talk I might want to respond. Well to make the collar respond. It just so happens that the collar has a built-in speaker, too. All I have to do is to turn on the mic of my remote and to start talking. I click on my remote, go to "Speaker..." and press "On". It tells me that the channel is 6, which means that everything I'll say on channel 6 will be transmitted to the collar and broadcast 20 meters around it ! So I better watch out and not say silly things. Of course the listener will not repeat what I just said (maybe it should ? I have to think about it for later).

I talked about the UUID of the collar and how it changed everytime it rezzed. This is a standard SL feature, and the direct consequence is that when Mary logs on, I cannot send commands to her collar through my remote until I "reconnect" it. That's why I am given a new "connection string" everytime she logs on, if I hold the key to her collar and it is activated. All I have to do is paste it like I did the first time. But if I forgot to do it, or for some reason I missed it (maybe I was in Busy mode), I can retrieve it by clicking on her collar, going to Plugins > Spy and to press "Get UUID". That's what this button is for !

Ok, last thing. Let's get real techy now. I'll explain what a command really is and I'll show you how to control a captive even when you're offline ! It's not hard, you'll see.

You already know that the remote sends emails to the collar, and that the collar sends IMs to the top. The remote is just a small email client with buttons to send commands easily, that's all. You absolutely don't need it in fact. It's just there to facilitate your life but a good email client (yes Yahoo and Gmail qualify) can replace your remote quite easily and safely.

Firstly let's analyze the connection string, which is what makes me able to send emails to the collar. As a reminder, the connection string is this message :

/191625/b8e81399-1e83-1d0d-5dc7-c8e7532f1ba8/208720

It is divided in three parts :

- The channel 191625, which is the command channel of the remote. If I'm not using a remote, I don't need to bother keeping that number in mind.
- The UUID, this strange 36-character-long alphanumeric string. This is the unique ID of the collar, and is part of its email address. I repeat, this thing changes everytime the collar rezzes. The full email address of the collar right now is b8e81399-1e83-1d0d-5dc7-c8e7532f1ba8@lsl.secondlife.com. Which means that if I send an email to this address, the collar will receive it, analyze it and possibly execute it !
- The password, "208720", because the collar must not execute everyone's commands, only mine. It will be the subject of the email. That's right, the subject is just a number, the body of the message is the actual command.

The commands are all explained in the manual of the collar so I will not demonstrate them all, but let's try a few here. Suppose I'm still online and near Mary, within chat range at least. I now switch to my Gmail webpage, from which I will send an email to the collar directly. Let's recap : I need the UUID, which is now b8e81399-1e83-1d0d-5dc7-c8e7532f1ba8 and the password, which is now 208720(and it won't change until the plugin is reset or it is changed manually with the "New pwd" button).

I prepare the following email :

To : b8e81399-1e83-1d0d-5dc7-c8e7532f1ba8@lsl.secondlife.com
Subject : 208720
Message : speaker Hello this is Marine !

That's all. I press Send on the webpage, and what happens ? Mary's collar says the message I have just written after "speaker" (which is the keyword the collar recognizes as "say the following on channel 0").

One very important thing to say : my personal email address, the one I use with my Gmail account, is never disclosed. The collar does know who sent the message but it does absolutely nothing with that information, it quickly forgets it. So my address is not compromised. It makes no difference whether I send the message from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail or even the remote in SL, what matters is the command and the password, that's it.

I log off.

Mary logs off too, but she relogs not long after. I'll play the "offline top" for a moment here. Mary's collar sends me its connection string, which I receive in my mailbox since it is an IM and I'm offline. It is now the following :

Notice that the channel and password didn't change, but the UUID did. I need this new info in order to command the collar from my mail client (e.g. at work). First of all I want a report, so I write this email :

To : d19986e5-48d0-05f1-f41d-e8b6721dc656@lsl.secondlife.com
Subject : 208720
Message : report

Easy huh ? Minutes later I get a report in my mailbox. It takes a little time because SL buffers incoming emails and outgoing IMs, there is nothing that can be done to make this system faster.

I want to know where she is right now. Another command to the collar :

To : d19986e5-48d0-05f1-f41d-e8b6721dc656@lsl.secondlife.com
Subject : 208720
Message : position instant

Once again, minutes later I receive a position report.

You may wonder how to manage several captives at the same time with one remote. Truth is... it is not really made for that yet. I am planning to add a proxy to be rezzed in-world, which would get all the UUID changes and provide aliases to the top so they don't have to reconnect everytime. The downside of this is that the proxy would have to be kept somewhere so the top has to own land. But it's not done yet, it's just in the plans.

Whoa. That was a long one, told you it was a complex plugin !

Hope you'll have fun with it, control freaks ! *g*
Marine

Such a beautiful day

2009-11-19T14:08:00.000-08:00

And such a perfect one ! Sugar and I got partnered yesterday, both wearing white wedding dresses (you don't see that often outside SL !), and both terrified, but happy :)

Before you ask, our ceremony was quite simple and short. We didn't want to make anything huge or pompous or never-ending, we wanted to stay ourselves, and to stay true to each other.

It took place in Allure, Amethyst's private sim. This sim is not only beautiful, it is also where I used to spend my time when I was a noob, hidden. I held fond memories of this place, and now I'm going to hold even more !

Dear Amethyst. You know her. We all do :)

Speaking of Ame, she has made us the honor of not only assisting to the ceremony, but actually taking it in charge ! She has prepared everything that we weren't handling ourselves. Everything was set, to the finest detail. That was so sweet of her !

We had to choose a time when not many of our friends were online. This was because of several RL schedule contraints, both for Sugar and for me, which ruled weekends out. Yesterday morning and noon (SL time) were when it was best for us, when we were less likely to be interrupted. And despite that awkward schedule, all those who could come, did. Some even rushed online just to avoid being late, and one was sick but managed to stay there as long as she could !

Thank you so much for being there and witnessing our union, Sabrina, Tess, Daisy, Jayleia, Jessica, Devious, Eve, Inara, Mija, Chorazin, RubberMan and Chyanne... And Gin and Valar for being at the reception after the ceremony... And all the others who would have liked to come but couldn't... Warm kisses !

Jay, Inara, Chorazin, Daisy

Jessica, Inara again

Tess, Devious, Sabrina, Jessica again

So while people were arriving, a little before 10am SL time, Sugar and I were readying, "hidden" behind the hill, both shaking in anticipation, almost sure that something would go wrong. SL was acting up a little because of the rolling restarts going on at that time, stressing the asset servers a lot, paintaing my veil in grey and turning Sugar's flowers into blobs. But nothing we couldn't handle.

And then... Tadaa ! Here we come. Very slowly. Walking straight, side by side, looking forward, too scared to think, while Amethyst is standing up there waiting for us at the altar.

Once there, while we were totally not daring to look at the guests, Ame welcomed everyone and asked us a few questions. Then we went on to our vows, holding our hands, both almost crying.

And... a very,
very,
veeeery long kiss ^_^

After the ceremony, which lasted no more than one hour (we wouldn't want to bore our guests to death, would we ? And most of them were very thirsty near the end anyway *g), we all walked across the sim and headed to the reception room. Appreciating the beauty of the landscape on our way.

Once there, the guests settled around the pyramid of champagne glasses which were only waiting to be filled.

So the bottle of champagne was opened with a loud "pop", and I filled the glasses from above, slowly (risking a spectacular and stupid death in the process). A real fountain.

The rules in order to be granted a glass were simple : either kiss Sugar, or me, or both. For some reason we ended ex-aequo. Maybe we'll have to do it again *g*

We danced...

Our slow

And danced...

With Sabrina

And danced again...

Two wild twirling white tornadoes

Till we were all worn out and only a cake would save us from total starvation !

Hurry up, RubberMan is hungry !

And finally, when stuffed and back home alone, guess what... we crashed together !

It was all so perfect ! I will never forget that day :)

Marine

Sugar & Spice

2009-11-17T03:35:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

You may wonder why I've been so silent lately, well there you have it :

My friend Ollalla and I are getting partnered !

Oh I know, I know, "it's about freakin' time", I heard that a lot lately :) It's been three years after all !

Now, if you've read my blog since the beginning you might have an idea of who Ollalla Sugarbeet is. If you don't, well let me introduce her. Again.

Sugar (that's her nickname, she doesn't really like to be called "Ollalla") is a very sweet and cunning person, who has been living with me since we were noobs. She has helped me with every single project of mine, not technically but socially, to understand the long-term impacts of my decisions. I can say that almost all the good significant decisions I took were taken after discussing with her, while almost all the bad decisions were taken by me alone. On every project. RR, RLV, Banishment Program, Maze, SLBI Computers, SLBI Greylist, SLBI Trackers and so on and so forth. In a way, she is the element of rationality and stability in my crazy race for perfection.

This is because she has the eyes of the hawk. And she knows a lot of people, how they think, how they feel, chances are she even knows you ! All this knowledge allows her to anticipate whatever would happen if a change was implemented to whatever system, at the social level. In our couple (I almost said in our team) she is the social element while I am the technical one. Both equally important in regards to the projects we do together. And God knows we have accomplished a lot, together and separately.

She has also always been there when I was feeling down. Always ready to drop everything when she felt I needed to be cheered up, and she has, several times. Always ready for some action when things were looking blah. And always ready to turn the tables when able !

Our friends tell us that we are an exemplary couple in SL. Given how fast things change in this virtual world, 3 years almost feel like 30 ! And given how many temptations SL offers, how easy it is to stray from a promise, and how easy it is to finally get burnt out and quit, leaving the other party alone and sad, it is a wonder we went that far. Or is it ?

I think not. Sure we have changed. Grown up from noobish status to less-noobish status. Got our share of drama. Felt let down by people sometimes. Lost ourselves into careless fun with strangers (and we still do it and it is still as fun). Got little carried away when having fun together. But we never ever lost faith in each other, or grew bored of each other. After three years, it is still as refreshing to be together, so no, it is not a wonder at all that we went that far.

Oh of course, partnering in SL may mean as little as a name on a profile, or as much as an actual RL wedding. To me, it is a way to say "Thank you for being there and believing in me". And "I enjoy every minute I spend with you". And above everything else, "I always had and will always have your best interests at heart".

Because you're my priority in SL, Sugar. Now take my hand and let's keep walking, shall we ?

Marine

RestrainedLife 1.22.1

2009-10-18T05:11:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

As promised here is the latest version of the RLV, which is a minor update but interesting nonetheless :

- Updated the code to match the one of the SL viewer v1.23.5.
- And for RealRestraint fans who like to spend time bound, the ability to focus the camera on objects at all times, even when "blocked" (meaning a huge prim blocks their clicks, to make the restraint feel even more "real").

Download it here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

MD5 hash for the Windows zip file :
2b5efeb94cce38cc56c7ce73325ab20d

Have fun !
Marine

PS : This is the 100th post on my blog. Yay !

PS 2 : I had to re-upload the zip file a few hours later, because I messed up with the version of the SL viewer, it showed 1.23.4 instead of 1.23.5. Fixed now, and the hash code has changed (new one is up there). The old hash code was e24da2cab06c2062dd88d1345615cfda

RestrainedLife 1.22.1 coming soon

2009-10-17T12:14:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

Just a quick post to say that I have a working RLV 1.22.1 on my Mac, and that it will soon be released for Windows. This new version will include :

- Compiled from the latest SL 1.23.5 with its notecard changes.
- The ability to focus your camera through HUDs. This one is made for hardcore RealRestraint fans who like to spend their life bound and blocked, but who regret their camera can't focus on objects because of the blocking prim on their HUD (which is made to intercept touches). It also discards right-clicks while holding the Alt key, since it would allow you to sit or touch objects through a HUD. This change does not apply if you're in Mouselook view, though, it wouldn't make sense.

As this update is not really urgent, RLV 1.22 works with SL 1.23.5 already, and as Real Life is rather busy at the moment, please be patient while the compiler warms up. Thank you !

Have fun,
Marine

RR Tutorial : Gag plugin

2009-10-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Hi !

Today we are going to talk about a plugin everyone knows, the one you find in any RR gag. This plugin is rather easy, but half of it is RLV-oriented, and that's the hard part. As the easy part is really easy, and not worth a tutorial, let's assume that the captive is using the RLV so I can explain everything smoothly.

We all know what a gag is for, it is used to make chatty captives shut the hell up. Oops. Hrm. Sorry, I get carried away sometimes. But you will agree that some really do need it ! *g* What ? Who said "just as you do" ?!

Very well then, I'll demonstrate it for you since you insist ! Let me lock it on "Medium" and... mmmmph ! Now everything I say seems to be garbled, except my emotes with appear normally but are... truncated. It is not very easy to make myself clear anymore, save for very short sentences.

But you already knew all this. Let's take a look at the plugin shall we ? I click on my gag, then go to Plugins > Gag... and once again I bang into a wall of buttons :

* "Typing" and "Cheating" are irrelevant to the RLV, which takes all these into account.

* "Slashes" will make the gag complain or not when I say something like "/ao on" or "/hug so-and-so".

* "Notif owner" will decide whether my keyholder will receive a message when I cheat by speaking on channel 0. Note that this button is poorly worded, but "Notif keyholder" did not fit. I could have called it "Notif khldr" or "Ntf kh" or "Mxmsfgbh", but it would not have been very clear...

* "Emote" will make the gag truncate emotes or not.

* "Drool" will make me... drool. Or not. That depends on how messy my keyholder wants it !

* "Ch. evasion" (meaning "Channel evasion") is fun. When I say something, my chat is automatically redirected to a random channel, which changes every 30 seconds, in order to avoid those pesky "gag translators". If I deactivate channel evasion, my chat will fall back to channel 1, but I can change it to, say, channel 12 by simply saying "channel 12".

* "IM blockable" is a little trickier, and only I (the wearer) can see this button. If I set it to Yes, then my keyholder can decide to prevent me from sending IMs to people at any time.

* "IM restriction" only appears to me (the wearer) or to the keyholder if "IM blockable" is set to Yes. It gives the keyholder the ability to prevent the captive from sending IMs to anyone. She can also prevent me from sending IMs to anyone except to herself, provided the gag is locked and she has the key.

That's about it... this one was rather simple after all !

Have fun,
Marine

RR Tutorial : Wriggle plugin

2009-10-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

Hello there, we are going to talk about maybe the most misunderstood and underused plugin of all the RR suite, yet it can prove itself useful in certain situations.

Sometimes a captive may want to change position, if her restraints allow. Or rather, when she thinks that if she was bound that way in RL, she would have a chance to wriggle to a different position. For example her hands could be cuffed behind her back, and if she was fit and nimble enough she would be able to move them to the front after some squirming. That's the purpose of the Wriggle plugin, to give the captive a chance to wriggle to a different position, when possible.

First of all, you cannot wriggle from just any position to just any other position, it has to make sense. You can move your cuffed hands from front to back, back to front, but not from the sides to the back or whatnot, because it would imply a change in how the cuffs are locked, and that wouldn't make much sense without the key.

But enough chit-chatting, let's try a practical example. There, my hands are cuffed behind my back, and I'm blocked. Remember the tutorial about arms restraints ? When my hands are cuffed behind me, I can't touch anything anymore. But right now it may be a problem, I might need to touch something, operate something, or open a box, or do whatever I need to do that my cuffs prevent. In other words, I need to move those hands to in front of me ! And if I don't have a key, there is only one solution : the Wriggle plugin.

Let's just look at the menu of this plugin, I go to Plugins > Wriggle and here is what I get :

It asks me to choose which pose I am aiming at, i.e. where my wriggling would take me in case I succeeded. There is only one choice, "1 Hnd front", because realistically I could only move my hands to the front from where they are. So I press that button.

Whoa. What's this ? "Progression", "Chances", "Pot"... are we in Vegas now ? Where do I insert my tokens ? Well ok, hold fire and let me explain. "Tokens" in this plugins are the tries that you spend when you try to struggle out from your restraints. Remember that tutorial ? Struggling consumes tries, and you recover them more or less quickly depending on how well you are doing. Well Wriggling also consumes tries, that's the same energy source (your sweat). Basically this means that you can either struggle or wriggle, but not both. Wriggling is meant to be easier, though.

So what you have to "pay" for wriggling is tries. When you attempt to wriggle, you have 3 choices :

* Soft, consuming one try
* Medium, consuming two tries
* Hard, consuming three tries

And for every attempt, you have a chance to progress or not. Of course the harder you wriggle, the higher the chance, and it is stated on the menu itself.

When you wriggle, you do not actually lose tries right away. They go into the "pot" instead, with a 1:1 ratio (i.e. every try you bet goes into the pot). But if you fail an attempt, the pot loses double the amount of tries you have just bet ! But before talking about the pot, let's try to wriggle a little.

I press "Soft", and immediately the restraints says "You progress a little in your wriggling..." and I notice the progress bar on the menu has gained a little step (marked with a ">") to indicate that I am making progress. The goal is actually to fill up the progress bar. At the same time, the Pot is equal to 1, because I have "spent" one try in order to attempt this move. And succeeded so far. Okay then, 9 more steps to go.

I press "Medium" because I feel lucky (even if there is no stupidest thing to say than "I feel lucky", it could even qualify for "famous last words"). Notice that "Medium" has exactly one more chance than "Soft", but it costs 2 tries. This time the restraint says "You progress a little in your wriggling, and your chances of success are now higher...". Woohoo ! All the probabilities have been increased by one ! It's going to be easier to wriggle now, and cheaper ! Oh, and I've made one more step on the progress bar, and the Pot is now equal to 3 (1 for the Soft move, then 2 for the Medium one).

Ok so now that I have made 2 steps and both were successes, my 3 tries spent are all in the pot. If I pressed "Cancel" now they would be given back to me, and my progress would have been cancelled, and I would be back to square one, not losing anything and not winning anything either. But I won't press Cancel. I would if I desperately needed the tries in the pot to, say, struggle.

Let's fast-forward a little instead, let's say I have made 6 steps and the pot is now 8. I choose "Hard" this time, spending 3 tries to maximize my chances. However this results in a failure, and the pot is now reduced by twice the number of tries I bet ! That's 6 tries lost ! It's back down to 2 (even if I only spent 3 tries, but they obviously didn't make it to the pot).

This leaves me no choice than to go ahead, because the pot has suddenly become far less interesting. If I pressed "Cancel" now, I would only get 2 tries back and lose all my 5 steps, after having spent 8 tries. That would be 6 tries wasted ! Note that if I wriggled Hard at the beginning of the progress, and missed without losing all my steps, the pot would go down to 0 but not lower. This is interesting because it saves me from wasting too many tries.

Ok, this is pretty straightforward from now on, I think you got the point. The strength of the wriggling can be Soft, Medium or Hard, the stronger the more chances but also the more expensive. Internally, the plugin "throws a 10-sided die" at each wriggle attempt, the lower the result the more likely to progress one step forward. If the result is low enough, then the chances are even increased for later, but if the result is too high they are lowered instead !

And what happens if I actually manage to make all 10 steps ? Well the cuffs are automatically relocked into the pose I have selected in the first place (in this case "1 Hnd front"), and I get back all my tries because this is actually a new pose !

Oh, here is a little hint for you since you've read this far : the more you struggle (and make progress in struggling), the looser the restraint, hence the higher the chances at wriggling ! It is something like... hmm... *cough*onemorechanceperfivesuccesses*cough*. Hey, I've said it !

Have fun !
Marine

RR Tutorial : Leash plugin

2009-10-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Hi there, let me tell you about one of the most popular plugins in the RR brand (and this feature is provided in many other brands as well) : the Leash. It is always useful to fasten a chain to the cuffs of your captive to force her to follow you, or to force her to stay there. Note : at the time of this writing, the version of the RR suite is 1.17, including a way to make a leashable restraint behave like a leash handle, or "anchor". In other words, to make it possible to leash another captive to this restraint, even without its wearer's consent. This capability is not present in earlier Leash plugins.

First of all, let's take a look at the menu. I go to Plugins... > Leash :

This is pretty straightforward actually. I can be leashed, unleashed, yanked, leashed to another captive and the length of my leash can be changed. Easy. Oh, what is this "Multi" button ? It is used for multiple leashes that go to the same spot, but for the moment no RR product uses it (I made it primarily for my own bit gag and nipple rings actually, but shhh don't tell). Don't press "Multi" though, it would hide the chain and would not find any slave prim to spawn secondary chains from. Therefore, in the present case "Multi" means "Hide" and "Single" means "Show". That might be a good feature for you, but use at your own risk.

I press "Leash" and immediately a chain is attached to my collar. It's dangling from it, not being leashed anywhere. In fact I am leashed to myself. What's the point to being leashed to yourself would you ask ? Well if I am using the Restrained Life Viewer, then I am unable to teleport until I am unleashed. This is the only way to restrict the teleport abilities of a captive through the use of RR products : leash her, she can't teleport, unleash her and she can. Ok that was a side note, but an important one.

There are several ways to use a leash actually. The first one is when the top leashes the captive's restraint directly. The result would be a chain going from the restraint to the top's crotch... Ouch ! That's gotta hurt. Meet my alt Mary (the blonde on the left), who is going to demonstrate it for you :

The second way would be to use what I call a "leash handle", a small handle to carry and attach the leash to. In other words the chain woud not go to the crotch anymore but to a special attachment that the top wears, usually on a hand. The leash handle can be retrieved by the top directly from the Leash plugin of the captive, by pressing the "Give handle" button. Once the handle is obtained, the top (Mary in this case) wears it and the leash immediately connects to it, nothing to do.

I have to mention a... bug there. Yes, there are some known issues with this tricky piece of plugin. If the top unwears the leash handle, the chain disappears, but the captive is still leashed to the top and unable to teleport. Only there is no visual cue anymore, and that may be confusing. So don't do this, once you wear your leash handle, don't unwear it before unleashing your captive, or if you do it is better you leash her again afterwards, to see the chain again.

However, the top can drop the leash handle to the floor. Mary simply right-clicks on her own leash handle, and selects "Drop". And see what happens :

I can move around only so far away from the handle that is now on the floor, no matter where Mary goes. I am effectively leashed to the leash handle that has been dropped, and no longer to Mary.

Now, Mary can choose to get her handle back, while I'm still leashed to it ! She just right-clicks on the handle on the floor and selects "Wear" (or if she decides, "Attach > Right Hand" or wherever else she likes). This will make her walk or run or fly to the handle and wear it automatically. And...

... I am now leashed to Mary again, to her carried handle to be exact. Easy !

Now, maybe Mary does not have permission to rez things where she is, or maybe she sees other leash handles around (there are many around SL, as they are looking very simple and can even be modified), and wants to leash me to one of them, even if it doesn't belong to her. For instance in a public BDSM place. Well, she can !

She simply clicks on a ring in-world (riveted to a wall, floating in the air, half-buried into the ground etc) and Woosh ! I am instantly leashed to that ring and no longer to Mary ! However if she did that to another ring afterwards it would not work, she would have to leash me again first. And once again, if that ring belongs to her she can Wear it directly too, even if she was already carrying a handle (the ring, which is a handle, would probably replace the one she is carrying).

Another fun thing, since we are talking about leash handles... Since 1.17 a restraint that contains a Leash plugin (in other words, a leashable restraint) can also serve as a leash handle ! That way the top can literally make "chain-gangs" of captives. To do this, simply press the "Anchor" button on a captive's restraint (for instance a collar) while another captive is leashed to you, and you will see the latter being leashed to the former. For example, Mary is now wearing an Elegance Collar (which is leashable) and has me leashed to her. Please note that she must not be wearing a leash handle anymore, because otherwise it would conflict. She clicks on her collar, goes to Plugins > Leash, and presses "Anchor"...

I'm now leashed to her collar directly ! And if she presses "No anchor", the leashes goes back... to myself. This means that I am still unable to teleport, but at least my movements do not depend on the other captive, in this case Mary. She has broken the chain-gang.

While "Anchor" is active on Mary's collar, every leash that she activates from my restraints are automatically connected to it after 10 seconds at most. This happens only because Mary wears a restraint and is also spawning leashes. My leashes wouldn't connect to Mary's collar automatically if I was leashed by someone else, unless that someone pressed "No anchor" then "Anchor" again on Mary's collar.

That's about all there is to know about the Leash plugin. Changing the length of the leash is a no-brainer, it goes from 70 cm (as close as possible without making the avatar bounce around) to 15 m. Oh and the top can "Yank" the captive, which means giving a tug at the chain to pull the her close without changing the length.

One fun thing to do with the leash handle is to drop it on the ground and turn it into a physical steel ball, that is slighlty ovoid (so that it doesn't roll too far). It would act like a ball-n-chain-like fetter ! Very frustrating for the captive, believe me. Hehe.

Have fun !
Marine

RestrainedLife 1.22

2009-10-10T10:18:00.001-07:00

Hi there,

As promised, here is the latest version of the RLV, with the features we have been discussing in the previous post (read the comments if you want to know everything).

In short, scripters will be able to tell the viewer whether they want to lock an attachment point empty, or occupied, or both. The old command, which was doing only both, has been maintained so the existing scripts do not stop working. They can also tell the viewer which point they want to lock, or all of them (exactly like the @remoutfit and @addoutfit commands do). It is much more consistent and flexible now.

There are also two new commands to prevent the user from opening scripts, or textures. These ones act exactly like the old notecard restriction, and add to the security when it comes to preventing the sub from communicating. Hehe.

And finally, I'm sorry to say that the "Add To Outfit", "Take Off Items" and "Replace Items" commands that you get in the context menu have to be disabled while an object is locked on the avatar. I have tried to do otherwise, and it works, but the viewer has a fundamental flaw : it cannot tell whether a folder is up-to-date according to the asset server or not. If the folders appears to be empty, then the viewer believes it is empty, and sends its command to the server without knowing what it is actually treating. That's dangerous, because you could do a "Take Off Items" on an apparently empty folder, but that actually contained locked objects. Of course, they would have been reattached, but still. Not secure enough.

That's why we are reverting to the old behaviour (pre-1.21) which said "these context menu items are disabled as soon as something is locked on you". This is more secure, and is not a serious loss of usability because "Wear" still works as expected, including the automatic reattaching of locked items if needed. But if I find a secure way to allow these menu items even when something is locked, regardless of whether the folder is up-to-date or not, then I will code it.

Gosh that was long and technical. Sorry !

Download the viewer here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

MD5 hash for the Windows zip file :
cc9588adaa134dd4415c9561660032c1

Have fun !
Marine

A request for comments

2009-10-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

There has been a growing concern about the @detach:[point] restriction, which locks an attach point to the state it is when the restriction is issued. For example, @detach:spine=n would lock anything that was attached on spine, or lock the spine empty... in any case the spine would not change at all until @detach:spine=y is issued.

However... in very laggy places, upon relog, things do not rez as fast as they should and the restriction is issued before the object to lock, so it would be locked out. When it finally attaches it is too late, the viewer detaches it automatically, and obviously the product is not working as it should. I have heard of two separate examples of it already.

So the obvious solution would be to divide @detach:[point] into two commands :

* @detach:[point] to prevent whatever is attached there from being detached, and
* @attach:[point] to lock the point empty

Pros : It solves the problem, and it is more or less consistent with @remoutfit and @addoutfit respectively.
Cons : It requires a new command, nerfs an already existing command... so it kinda breaks existing content.

This is why I'm asking people who make products that use this @detach:[point] command to post comments here to tell me whether they agree to this change for 1.22 or not. I don't want to break content but I don't want to refrain myself from doing the right thing if nobody is actually impacted.

Please only comment about that issue though, no need to stray to any other subject.

Thanks !
Marine

RestrainedLife 1.21.1

2009-10-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

The version 1.21 of the RLV brought a little improvement in usability, but brought a bug along with it, it broke the @detach: commands...

Here is a fixed version, which took a while to make due to the intricate consequences of maintaining this particular command. But it seems to be working now, so here is it.

Download it at
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash for the Windows zip file is
10618c0006e55289eaaae1fcec2a9de8

Have fun !
Marine

RestrainedLife 1.21

2009-10-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

Today we are having an interesting release for the RLV : 1.21 allows you to use the "Wear" contextual command again, even in the cases when it was hidden before (typically when something was locked). Same for "Add To Outfit" and "Take Off Items" !

And there was much rejoicing.

Aside from that, there is also a fundamental change to the way exceptions are handled. Exceptions are the way a restraint allows its wearer to send an IM to someone even though IMs are restricted, for example. Before this version, any restraint could issue an exception to a restriction set by any other restraint, in other words a collar could issue an exception to allow the sub to send an IM to someone even though she was gagged and unable to IM.

It still works that way now...

... but...

... some people were concerned that the security of the RLV was only mild, since a sub could use one restraint herself in order to allow her to do things another restraint was restricting (we are talking about sending IMs, receiving them, hearing chat, speaking on channels and accepting teleport offers here, only).

That's why now the RLV provides more secure versions of these commands (@sendim, @recvim etc, all the commands that accept exceptions) on top of these regular commands (that would be @sendim_sec, @recvim_sec etc, respectively). When these secure commands are used, only exceptions that are issued by the same object that issued the restriction are taken into account. In other words, a collar could not issue an exception to @sendim if @sendim_sec was issued by a gag. Simple as that. It does increase the level of security of the viewer, without breaking stuff.

Let me paste the release notes here :

- fixed : A clever way to cheat around @shownames (thank you Talisha Allen).
- changed : Reinstated "Wear" on the contextual menu even when something is locked and no attach point is contained in the name of the item. This holds the risk of kicking a locked object off, but it will be reattached automatically after 5 seconds anyway. Even "Add To Outfit" and "Take Off Items" work. This was a MUCH awaited feature !
- changed : Added support for reattaching several objects at the same time. Objects will be reattached at 1 second interval.
- added : @defaultwear restriction. When this restriction is set, the "Wear" command will work like it did before this version, i.e. disappear if something is locked and no attach point information is contained within the name. This is for subs who tend to abuse the Wear menu and kicking off locked objects a little too often.
- added : @versionnum command to retrieve the version number directly, instead of having parse the "RestrainedLife viewer v1.20.2 (1.23.4)" string. Here it will return "1210000".
- added : @permissive command that tells the viewer that any exception to @sendim, @recvim, @recvchat, @tplure, @recvemote and @sendchannel MUST come from the object that issued it or will be ignored (without this command, any object can set an exception to the restrictions issued by any other object).
- added : @sendim_sec, @recvim_sec, @recvchat_sec, @tplure_sec, @recvemote_sec and @sendchannel_sec to do the same as @permissive, but one restriction at a time (i.e. exceptions to @sendchannel from other objects won't be ignored if @sendim_sec is set).

Go grab it at http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

MD5 hash for the Windows zip file :
a10f708fbd6573ceec19d4667ab74727

Have fun !
Marine

RR Tutorial : Control plugin

2009-09-13T15:23:00.000-07:00

Hello, let's talk about one little devil of a plugin : Control. This plugin is one of the "RLV plugins", which means it makes sense only if you are using the Restrained Life Viewer ("RLV" for short).

Its purpose is to issue restrictions to the captive. This is better to have it in a collar, but it could go in any RR product, of course. With it, you can keep you captive "under control" (hence the name) by restricting her ability to :

* Edit (so she can't open boxes and steal stuff)
* Rez (so she can't litter around)
* See the names of the people around (so they can play tricks on her)
* See the name of the region and parcel she is in (so she can be lost somewhere)
* Use her map (the world map is hidden anyway if the location is restricted)
* Open her inventory (this is a very hard restriction, very controlling, personally I love it)
* Read notecards (this too is very hard, but sometimes needed)
* Fly (should be restricted at all times, if you ask me)
* Talk on private channels (to restrict her from using radars and other weapons)

You can specify exceptions to the private channels restriction though, in case she needs to speak through a gag (the latest RR gags do channel evasion and set their own exception anyway, so no need to worry about it anymore), or control their restraints through the use of channel 77, etc.

Notice it can't restrict the captive from teleporting. This is the role of the Leash plugin actually.

Have fun,
Marine

RR Tutorial : Allow plugin

2009-09-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

Hi, we are going to talk about a fairly simple plugin for a change : Allow. This plugin is one of the "RLV plugins", which means it makes sense only if you are using the Restrained Life Viewer ("RLV" for short).

Its purpose is merely to provide exceptions to restrictions issued by other plugins or even other restraints. The captive is either "Allowed" or "Denied", it is as simple as that. When "Denied" no exception is given, it is like inactive. But when "Active", the following things happen :

* The captive can be teleported by the keyholder. In fact she won't even have the choice to decline teleport offers.
* The captive will be able to hear the keyholder, even if she is deaf to everyone else.
* The captive will be able to receive IMs from the keyholder, even if she can't receive IMs from anyone else.

That's all. What ? Already ? Told ya it was a simple one.

Have fun,
Marine

RR Tutorial : Legs restraints

2009-08-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

Ok this one will be easier than the arms restraints tutorial, let's talk about... legs restraints (hey how did you guess ?).

Just like in real life, when a captive has her legs restrained, she is either able to walk very slowly, or all she can do is crawl. She will always be able to move a few inches, of course, but will not go very far.

For this tutorial I will use the Police Legirons, in association with improved Police Handcuffs with 6 poses, a prisoner belt, and one prisoner jumpsuit that might remind a few memories to some of you (if you're old enough).

Let's lock them all... First the hands, which I lock in front of me with the elbows chained back, this is the "3 H+E front" pose. I can still touch in that pose, it does not block me. And no need to lock the belt, as it is part of the arms cuffs system. And now I lock my legirons with the "Taut" pose. This pose allows me to hobble around and is by far the most natural for this kind of restraint. So I press the forward key and try to walk...

First impression : I walk funny, like I am about to fall over. No wonder, this chain certainly looks short ! The walk changes and the built-in one overrides my own walk, the one in my AO. Well it wouldn't be able to override it well if my walk was the highest priority, some are but not mine (this is something I am very careful about because highest priority walks tend to mess restraints up, especially the ones which don't refresh their poses).

Second impression : I don't go very fast, way slower than the normal walk speed. I can't run either, it would not be easy to sprint while wearing those, I guess !

Third impression : It seems I am going slower and slower. Am I walking in mud now ? I'll go down to a full stop if I keep pressing the forward key. This is because I am slowly getting winded, and must regularly release the forward key and press it again to get my "full speed" back. Knowing this, some captives can race against each other to reach the key first !

Have you noticed that a chain seems to link my arms cuffs to my legirons, too ? This only works with the Police Handcuffs though, for technical reasons. But this is what allows for a few interesting positions like... a hogtie (in cuffs, it's dangerous so don't try this at home !). So before I lock myself in a hogtie, let's make put the arms cuffs into the right pose. I click on one of them and select... umm... ok "4 H+E Back". Immediately my arms are double-cuffed behind my back, very securely, and my touches are restricted (as explained in the Arms Restraints tutorial). How will I command my legirons now ? No problem, I just say "/77 leg" and I get the menus to my legirons. I choose "Hogtie" and...

Now this position is not very comfortable, and you guess I would not go far if I tried to move. Well I can only squirm on the floor, going way slower than even the hobble walk earlier. It seems that the tighter the pose, the slower I get.

Anything else ? Oh yes, you may notice that every time you sit on something while your legs are restrained, the pose stops. This is not a bug, because you can imagine how silly you'd look if you were sitting on a couch while in the "Tight" pose, which keeps you straight... you would look like standing still, your legs half buried in the couch.

Have fun !
Marine

RR Tutorial : Autolock plugin

2009-08-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

Hello there, we are going to dwell into another one of the most complete and versatile plugins in the RR suite : the Autolock plugin. It is also part of the standard issue, so every restraint has one.

You have already heard about normal keys, RealKeys (I hope), release timers, long timers, RL timers etc etc... yes that's beginning to be a lot of concepts to learn. The Autolock uses all these concepts and more, so this is complex stuff. Very few people grasp all its subtleties, so don't be ashamed if you master only 25% of its capabilities. Bear with me, this tutorial is going to be very long.

The primary purpose of the Autolock plugin is very simple : your victim is free to roam around, unrestrained, and you want her restraints to suddenly lock her down and good, automatically, preferably at the worst moment, while you're not around. The Autolock plugin is a way to program your restraint in advance and to start a countdown, transforming your victim into some kind of "human bomb". It certainly feels that way from her point of view anyway !

The best way to see this is to compare it to the release timer : the release timer is the time spent after being locked, that unlocks the restraints after it expires, while the Autolock counts the time to spend before locking, and executes all kinds of things when it reaches zero. I will often say things like "when the autolock triggers", this just means "once the countdown is finished and the Autolock plugin must execute what it has been programmed to do".

That being said... well let's just look at the Autolock menu. I click on my cuffs and go to Plugins > Autolock :

If I press "More...." I get a second page :

(It's better to show both pages now because they are complimentary)

Whoa. Where to start ? These two pages show a lot of informations so please bear with me while I walk you through them all. Let's start with the text on the menus, before going to the buttons. Both menus show exactly the same text by the way.

These menus show the "next pose" (in other words which lock will be chosen if the autolock triggers in the cuffs) and who will get the key when it locks. For example, "2 Hnd back by Marine Kelley" would mean "these cuffs will chain themselves to the 2 Hnd back pose if the autolock triggers, and Marine Kelley would be given the key when it does". The key could also be made to stay on the cuffs, in which case it would show "keys avail.". This pose depends on the poses the cuffs know, it would be different on straps, ropes etc. Oh speaking of ropes, Autolock there is called "Autotie" because some terms change and there is no key on the ropes, but the principle and the buttons are the same. Just so you're not confused.

Then they show the time to wait before the autolock triggers, after "Lock in". It also mentions whether the time is counted only while the future captive is online ("(SL)"), or all the time even while offline ("(RL)"), and whether it is running or paused. Oh, and if the Long Time plugin has been set to hide the timers, then "Lock in" will not show the time either.

The next line shows the timer that will be set on the cuffs once the autolock triggers. Once again, if the Long Time plugin has been set to hide the timers, this line will be scrambled as well.

Finally, in the case of arms restraints, there are a "Block" and a "Mouselook" settings (they don't make sense for other kinds of restraints, and you may ignore them). These settings may be set to "Yes", "No" or "Default". I recommend leaving them to Default. This means that depending on the pose you chose, the captive will be blocked/mouselooked or not, and the Autolock will not mess with these settings. If you set them to "Yes" or "No", then they will override whatever block/mouselook toggle the restraint was set to for this particular pose (and it will stick, exactly like if you had clicked on "Block"/"Mouselook" yourself on the main page of the restraint menu). Ok that's complicated. Leave that to "Default" and don't worry about the rest.

Now that you know about the internals of the Autolock (which are all displayed on the text we've just reviewed), let's play with the buttons.

On the first page of the plugin, you can see the "More..." button that makes you go straight to page 2, "Main..." that brings you back to the main menu of the restraint, and "Run"/"Pause" to start/stop the countdown. Let's say I have not changed anything to the Autolock yet, it is still brand new. So it should show the first pose ("1 Hnd front"), timers at 0:0:0, SL time, the keys will be kept (because of the "by Marine Kelley" text) and I will be blocked/mouselooked according to whatever I set "1 Hnd front" to do in the first place ("Block : Default, Mouselook : Default"). So far so good. That "Run" button is just begging to be pressed, y'know... it's like... I can't help myself... I just can't... resist...

... I press "Run".

"Device autolocking in 1 minute. Last warning, get ready..."

Eek ! What happened ?! Hey where are all the buttons ? All I see now is "Ok", "Copy/Paste" and an empty button ? And I read "*** Autolock running, no access for the wearer."... the wearer is me, right ? Autolock is running... well duh, I just pressed "Run" ! How long is it going to take before it locks, I didn't even set a countdown, will it run indefini --

"Police Handcuffs 1.16 (RW) (r forearm) automatic lock triggered"
"Police Handcuffs 1.16 (RW) (r forearm) has been locked by Marine Kelley (type 1 Hnd front)"

And an IM from the cuffs to me, because I was the keyholder when they locked :
"Police Handcuffs 1.16 (RW) (r forearm) automatic lock triggered (Type: 1 Hnd front, Time: 0:0:0, Keys: Kept, Block: DEFAULT, ML: DEFAULT)"

Ok... that's not funny. Let me review what happened while I unlock my cuffs. I can because I have the key and no timer is set (phew !). So, I pressed "Run", which immediately started the countdown. As no initial countdown was set, it set it to 70 seconds automatically so I could get a warning 60 seconds before it triggered. It also hid all the informations from me, for self-bondage purposes, y'know. I mean, I could have unworn the cuffs (since they were not locked), but the countdown timer would have resumed itself as soon as I worn them again later anyway, and I had no option to stop it. Oh and about the warning... I would not have gotten any if the timers were hidden thanks to the Long Time plugin (that's a very useful thing to know when you want to surprise your captive). You may have noticed the "Copy/Paste" button too but I will not talk about it now, it is advanced stuff.

Back to the buttons. Yes I will leave that "Run" button alone this time. On the second row are perhaps the most important buttons to make the Autolock plugin work, after "Run" : the countdown ! You can reset it with "Clear", or add time to it by pressing "Delay +30mn" or "Delay +3h". "Delay" is a synonym for "countdown", but is shorter. Just remember that these buttons set the time to wait before the autolock triggers. Use them to set the countdown you want, then press "Run" and you are guaranteed the victim will get locked eventually.

The two top rows are the actual poses, which vary depending on the restraint you use. They are always equal to the poses you see on the main menu of the restraint. In our case "1 Hnd front" and "2 Hnd back".

Let's go to page 2, which bears even more options ! If you only use page 1, you can have your captive locked down eventually and you'd get the key. She would just be squirming somewhere, anxiously waiting for you to pick her up. But page 2 is where the fun is. Let's review its buttons too.

The bottom row allows you to go back to page 1, or to go directly to the main page of the cuffs, or to switch between "online time only" or "calendar time" for the countdown timer. For instance if the time is 6 pm and you want your captive to be ready for you before you come back from work tomorrow at around 6 pm, just set a 24 hours countdown (delay) and set it to "RL" with this button. Or maybe only 21 hours, so she has time to "bake" a little before you come back. Hehe.

The second row from the bottom lets you add a random delay between half an hour and two hours with the "Del +1/2h-2h" button, or a random additional time within the same interval to the release timer with the "+1/2h-2h" button, or to choose to leave the keys on or to keep them once the autolock triggers. You could, after all, decide to set a long release timer on your captive's cuffs and to leave the keys on, so that anyone can play with her ! Personally I always keep the keys.

The second row from the top lets you add time to the release timer. Notice the buttons are exactly the same as on the main page of the cuffs : "No timer", "+30 mn", "+3 h", and they act exactly the same, except that they don't add time to the release timer right now, they program the plugin to add time to the release timer after the autolock triggers (after the countdown is expired).

The top row lets you choose whether the captive will be Blocked, forced to stay in Mouselook (leave both to Default, that's safer), or to uh... "Copy/Paste".

Before I talk about "Copy/Paste", let me recap this all by giving you an example. This is a tutorial after all, not a user manual.

I take the keys to my cuffs (it's important that I am the keyholder now, because I want to show you a little something later). I go to page 1 and set a delay of one hour by pressing "Delay +30mn" twice (I can check that countdown on the "Lock in" entry). Right now I could wait for hours, the plugin would not fire the autolock because it is "(Paused)". I must press "Run" to start it. But before, let me choose the pose (I want my hands cuffed behind my back this time, so I press "2 Hnd back"). Then, I go to page 2 by pressing "More..." and add time to the release timer, so that once it triggers I will not be able to free myself anymore until that timer expires too. Therefore I press "+30 mn" once. I think I'm all set, that was short. Going back to page 1, I press... "Run".

Immediately you can notice my menu has changed again to that stupid "you can't do anything" page. At least it has the decency to tell me that one hour will pass before it locks me down. Nya nya nya. I'm so screwed !

I also hear my cuffs saying things to me...
"Device autolocking in 1 hour."

Then nothing. 30 minutes pass...
"Device autolocking in 30 minutes."

"Device autolocking in 15 minutes. Think about finishing what you're doing before getting restrained..."
"Device autolocking in 5 minutes. Time to pack your things up and go to a safe place..."
"Device autolocking in 2 minutes. Make sure you're somewhere safe."
Ok I'm getting anxious now...
"Device autolocking in 1 minute. Last warning, get ready..."
/me gulps.

And finally...

"Police Handcuffs 1.16 (RW) (r forearm) automatic lock triggered"
"Police Handcuffs 1.16 (RW) (r forearm) has been locked by Marine Kelley (type 2 Hnd back)"

And I get an IM from the cuffs on top of it, because I was the keyholder when they locked, a short report to tell me everything went according to the plan :
"Police Handcuffs 1.16 (RW) (r forearm) automatic lock triggered (Type: 2 Hnd back, Time: 0:30:0, Keys: Kept, Block: DEFAULT, ML: DEFAULT)"

Sooo... my hands are now cuffed behind my back, I am blocked (because the "2 Hnd back" pose is a blocking one and the Autolock was told to leave that setting alone), and a timer of 30 minutes is running. Everything went according to the plan indeed !

I'd like to point out that if my cuffs were already locked at that time, then the Autolock would still have worked, and would have added half an hour to whatever their timer was set to at that time. Remember the Autolock adds time to the release timer when it fires, it never reset it. This is handy to make your captive believe her cuffs are going to stay, then to eventually set a timer to them. You could even simulate the RL security plugin by setting an autolock that counts calendar time ("RL" button), leaves the keys on and does not set any timer. There are a lot of wicked things you can do with an Autolock, your imagination will help you here.

One last thing, I wish to explain how the "Copy/Paste" button works. This is very advanced stuff but can save you a lot of time if your captive wears a lot of restraints. It can also screw a game up royally so you have to be careful.

In short, what it does is export its settings to other RR products worn by the same avatar. With conditions and limitations. When you hit "Copy/Paste", every other restraint that the captive is wearing and that satisfies to the following conditions :

* Its key must be held by the same keyholder
* It must not be running

... will have the following settings replaced by what was exported :

* Whether the key will be kept or left available
* The countdown
* Whether the countdown is online time or RL time
* The release timer
* The state Running/Paused (so it can be set to Running but not be paused that way)

Please note that it will not replace the pose (which would not make sense anyway, since different restraints do not share the same poses), nor the Block/Mouselook settings (for the same reason). This is very important to remember : take the key and choose the pose on every single restraint first, then choose one of the restraints to copy/paste from. The restraints you don't hold the key of will be ruled out from the copy/paste action. Which may be a good thing.

For example, I wear my Police Legirons and I change the pose on their own Autolock to "Hogtie". I take their key and the ones of my handcuffs ! This is one step to not forget ! I need both keys or the Copy/Paste action will not work. Read this twice.

Then I go to the Autolock plugin of my handcuffs and set it to the same settings as before : one hour countdown, half an hour before release, keys kept, pose "2 Hnd back". Then I hit "Run". I now get that little page telling me I can't do anything, but at least I can still "Copy/Paste", so I press that button. What happens ? As I am the keyholder of both restraints, the legirons accept the export and change their settings, and therefore start their own Autolock as well. I even get a confirmation :

"Police Legirons 1.16 (RA) (r lower leg) : Autolock updated [Type: Hogtie, Time: 0:30:0, Keys: Kept, Block: DEFAULT, ML: DEFAULT]"

I could confirm this on the Autolock page of the legirons as well. Check it is running if you like. And yes the Block and Mouselook settings make no sense on legs restraints, ignore them.

You already guess the outcome... In exactly one hour I will be squirming hogtied on the floor where I stand. There is nothing I can do to avoid it now. Isn't that a wonderful feeling ? *g*

Have fun !
Marine

RR Tutorial : RealKey plugin

2009-08-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

Ahaa ! Now we are contemplating a difficult one, yet this is one of the simplest user interfaces in all the RR products ! The RealKey... many people know that name yet few really know how it actually works. This may be my fault for explaining it badly, or for burying its manual deep into my notecards. Let me correct that mistake here.

But first of all, I must stress out the difference between the regular key (the one you get when you press "Take keys"), which is just a piece of internal information contained into the restraint, and the RealKey which is a key-shaped object that the top wears. We will call the former "normal key", and the latter "RealKey" to avoid confusion. And the plugin itself will be called "RealKey plugin", which is like the keyhole in which the RealKey is inserted in.

The purpose of a RealKey is to act as a "master key", meant to override the normal key, regardless of who the keyholder is. Many people mistake this with the concept of "owner", but this is not what it is. It is a master key, no more no less. Keys can be given, copied, sometimes stolen, and it is the responsibility of the captive to trust the one they give a RealKey to, or to change their password if things go wrong.

Wow, that's a lot of new things at once. Password, owner, master key, normal key, responsibility... What now ? We're here to have fun, not to bother about passwords here !

Well yes and no. A RealKey is useless without a RealKey plugin to connect it to, and a RealKey plugin is useless without a RealKey. Both work together or not at all, like a key and a keyhole. Or like a Keymaster and a Gatekeeper *g*

Because of course, like in real life, a key cannot open a door if it doesn't match the keyhole. In other words, both prints must match in order to open. In our case, both the plugin and the key must share the same password. This password is a high number (usually 6 digits) that is meant to be kept secret by the captive and the owner of the RealKey. At the time of this writing the RealKey still discloses the password to its wearer, but a future version will make it safer. Please remember that changing the password once in a while is always a good idea.

In order to make things clear, let me guide you with basic example of how it works and what it does.

I am wearing a brand new pair of police handcuffs. They are straight out of the box, their password is a default one that is more or less unique to me, and it is the same for all new restraints that I wear (gag, straps, blindfold, legirons...) until I change it. I always recommend to not stick to the default password though, in case someone finds a way to guess it. The function was quite trivial a long time ago and fortunately I have rewritten it quickly to make it much safer, but still. So let's change it. I click on my cuffs, then go to Plugins > RealKey, the menu is quite simple so no need for a snapshot for once. Besides I don't want my default password to show here. I will change it to a random one first, by clicking on "New pwd" :
Plugin : "My password is now 354125"

But no need to set it to a random number actually, I'd rather set it manually so I can remember it. I click on "Set pwd" and say "909090" on the channel it indicates me :
Plugin : "Please say the new password on the channel 7840, it must be a positive integer. Ex : /7840 123456"

Me : /7840 909090

Plugin : "My password is now 909090"

Ok so I have set the password (the print) of the keyhole. Now to set the same password on whatever RealKey will be used to open these cuffs. Wait, where is the RealKey by the way ?

I can make the plugin create one for me, or I can use an old one. I will create a new one. To do this, I click on "Give RealKey" and voila, I am given an object that I Accept. This object is the actual RealKey, and I must wear it to use it.

When I wear the RealKey, here is what it tells me :

RealKey : "My command channel is now 5437 and my password is 1111" RealKey : "To change my password, say the new one (must be a positive integer) on that channel while wearing me. Ex : /5437 123456"

Wha ?! I have to set a password again ?? But I just did ! I've set it to "909090" not "1111" !

Well that was true for the plugin (the keyhole), now I have to do it for the key itself in order to make them work together. On a side note there were ways to make both password synchronize automatically but none was really satisfying, and all were error-prone. It's better to do it the old fashioned way : by hand. Only that way you know what you're doing. So here goes :

Me : /5437 909090

RealKey : "My password is now 909090"

Now I'm all set, the prints of the key and the keyhole match, they should work together. The only thing I have to do is to find someone to give this RealKey to, because I won't be able to use it on my own restraints (it would be too easy otherwise). Meet my Mistress Gin, who was kind enough to agree to participate in this tutorial. Isn't she cute ? ^_^

Before I give my RealKey to Gin, as I don't want her to be able to give it to half of SL (even if I know she won't, this is just for the example), I will set its permissions to no-trans. And then I give it to her, hoping she will put it to good use, and I lock my own cuffs, preventing her from accessing them by clicking on them.

So she wears her RealKey (as I said, she is told my current password when doing so, but that will change in the future), we can see it showing in her right hand. All that she has to do is to click on it and... nothing happens ?!

This is because my RealKey plugin is set to respond only if the cuff has been touched less than a minute before. This is handy because sometimes a top wants to "steal" the key of only one restraint, among all the 25 restraints the captive is wearing, while they are all set to the same password. This behavior can be changed by clicking on the "Mode" button, to set it to "Inactive", "Active on Touch" (default) or "Always Active". Attention, "Inactive" means the plugin is totally deactivated. It won't respond to any RealKey regardless of the password until the mode is changed back to "Active on Touch" or "Always Active".

So Gin must click on my cuffs first, and gets this :

"Sorry Gin, you are not authorized to manipulate Marine's Police Handcuffs 1.16 (RW) (r forearm)"

And then, following this message, an IM sent by the same cuff, directly to Gin :
"RealKey plugin is now active for 60 seconds."

I can't see this message since it is an object IM, but Gin does. So she clicks on her key again and... bingo ! She gets the menu and we can see she now holds the key to my cuffs ! She used her master key to bypass my access and get full access ! Giving me only reduced access by doing so, since I don't have the key anymore...

That's all there is to know, really. To recap :

- Set your password on your RealKey plugin (once)
- Create a RealKey
- Set the same password on the RealKey you got, while wearing it (once)
- Set the permissions on the RealKey
- Give the RealKey to that special someone
- Special someone wears the key, clicks on your cuff and then their key (or sets the Mode to "Always Active")

Wait, there is one more fun thing to do with a RealKey ! Like in real life, I could "accidentally" stumble on one, left somewhere on the floor, that I could use to unlock my own restraints (but once again the key must not belong to me)... So Gin drops her key on the floor, away from me. I walk to it and...

"Marine Kelley has found a RealKey that opens their restraint, resetting timer and returning keys to the wearer"

I'm given my normal key back ! And my timers, if any, are now stopped so I can unlock myself. Woohoo !

This is very handy for many kinds of bondage games... Imagine a bunch of 5 RealKeys dispatched around the house, 4 of which being empty and the 5th being set to open your restraints... Or a script added to a RealKey (they are mod after all) that makes them physical after a set time, and you place them high above the head, beyond reach. The captive would be able to retrieve it only after it fell on the floor (remember to block her and to chain her legs first, so she can't jump or build things to sit on). Please note, the mode of the RealKey plugin (inactive, active on touch or always active) is also taken into account when bumping into it, so take care ! Your top could very well totally disable your RealKey plugin if she wanted ! The plugin must be set to Always Active, because the key won't "touch" the restraints...

Have fun !
Marine

PS : Several people see the RealKey plugin as an easy way to get loose should things go wrong. This is not what it is meant to be at all. Please remember that at worst you can always hard reset your restraints ! This is why the RealKey gives all the power to its owner, and none to the captive. If the top starts acting crazy, log on with the SL viewer (if you were on the RLV) and hard reset your stuff. Then change the password of your RealKey plugins, just in case. The last thing a RealKey holder wants is to have her captive get away by handing a RealKey to a friend of hers behind her back. It would break their trust into the restraints if they didn't have means to completely affirm their control over how the keys are managed.

RR Tutorial : RL Time plugin

2009-08-19T10:27:00.001-07:00

Hi, this tutorial is about the RL Time plugin (a.k.a. RL security timer plugin), which is fairly easy to understand actually, so I will keep it short for once.

Click on your cuff, go to Plugins > RL Time and look at the menu.

Once again you hit a wall of numbers, but if you have read the Long Time plugin tutorial you should be familiar with their meaning already. You can add hours, days or even weeks of time on the restraints of your captive, before she is unlocked. But the big difference is... the time is not added to the regular release timer (the one that is counting down before release), but to another timer specific to this plugin. And this timer does not count online time, it counts calendar time ! Hence the name "RL Timer".

This plugin was made primarily as a security timer to release the captive at a set date, regardless of how long she had spent online in the meantime. For instance you want to keep your captive for 8 hours online, or until next Tuesday, whichever comes first, because she has to attend to the wedding of her best friend that day. This is where the RL Timer plugin comes in handy. Once it reaches its date, it resets all the timers and gives the key back to the captive, exactly like the regular release timer.

Told you this one would be short !

Have fun,
Marine

RR Tutorial : Long Time plugin

2009-08-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

Hi, welcome to the Long Time plugin tutorial. This plugin is part of the "standard suite" of scripts contained into RR products, in other words it is common to every single product I sell. Its purpose is triple :

- To set the release timer to a very long time

- To set the release timer to a random time

- To hide and show the release timer everywhere in the restraint (and other timers as well, such as the Autolock timer)

When you go to the menu of this plugin, you suddenly hit a wall of numbers...

Whoa. What language is it now ? Wait, I'm going to explain. The 3 buttons above "Main..." are about adding random times : from half an hour to 2 hours, from 2 to 6 hours, and from 6 to 12 hours. The 3 buttons above these are fixed times : plus 12, 24 or 48 hours (hence the name of this plugin !). I insist, these buttons add time, so you may press them several times to lenghten the timer.

What they do is simple : they simulate many clicks on the "+30 mn" and "+3 h" buttons of the main menu. Either randomly or a fixed number of times. You may have noticed there is no "No timer" button there, in fact at the time of this writing you must go back to the main menu to clear the timers... Sorry that's an oversight, I will work on this later maybe.

The two buttons on the top row are interesting... By pressing "Hide" all the timers on all the menus are hidden (except maybe on some third-party plugins, and the one you are on right now). When hidden, the timers don't show anywhere but on the Long Time plugin, and no warnings are issued before an autolock triggers. And how do we show them again ? There is no "Show" button ! Well... that's the role of the "Default" button actually. In our case, "Default" means "Show". This is a legacy from Tesscatraz, where cuffs were designed to never show any time, no matter what the guards were doing, it was like a "factory setting". The factory setting on the retail RR products is to "show the timer by default", hence the "Default" button. I know it is a bit confusing.

It is fun to hide all the timers on your captive's restraints by pressing "Hide" on this plugin, then to set a timer without telling her how long she is going to stay bound. And even to set an autolock to automatically relock her a bit after she is unlocked ! You can be sure she will curse you !

Have fun !
Marine

RR Tutorial : Plugins Browser

2009-08-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Hi, this tutorial is meant to explain what the Plugins Browser, which is the portal to every single plugin contained in the RR products, is.

First of all, what is a plugin exactly ? It is a script that is contained into a restraint, provides a user interface (one menu or more) and follows a certain access scheme. It is called a "plugin" because you "plug" (put) it into the restraint and you usually don't have to do anything else, it is usable right away because the Plugins Browser registers it. But in order to access the plugin you want, you must get the appropriate access level.

Remember the "full access", "reduced access" and "no access" concepts ? Let me remind you. "Full access" is what you have if you hold the key to the restraint, or the key is available. "Reduced access" is what you have if you are the wearer of the restraint, and it is locked but you don't have the key (or it is available but a timer is running). "No access" is for everyone else. The Plugin Browser follows the same principle. Some plugins can only be accessed by those with full access, some can be accessed by anyone with full or reduced access, some can only be accessed by the wearer (with full or reduced access), some can be accessed by anyone with full access, but never the wearer.

Oops, sorry for the headache. Let's just say you can generally access most plugins if you have the key, and you can't if you don't. There are only a few exceptions.

To access the Plugins Browser, just click on the restraint, then "Plugins...". The menu you get is the Plugins Browser.

What you see here is the list of plugins available to me (with full access) in my own Restrained Elegance cuffs. I chose those because they have two plugins that the wearer can never access ("Engrave"). You can see them on the menu, only their names are hidden, it is written "(not owner)" instead. Sometimes there are so many plugins that all do not fit on one page, this is why you must press the "<<" and ">>" buttons to navigate through all the available pages in order to find the plugin you want.

You can also see a little text explaining all kinds of things. This text is like a Message Of The Day that is contained into one of my servers, in my house. It is refreshed by the restraint once a week. Yes, sometimes the text is completely silly, because we can't be serious all the time ! Try with a RR Ringgag and you'll see *wink*.

Ok I click on one of the buttons that shows an actual name, and voila it goes to the desired plugin (in this case, "Long Time"). If I click "Main..." on that menu (99% of the plugins have this "Main..." button there) I go back to the main restraint menu directly. There is no way to go back to the Plugins Browser without going through the main menu first, once again for technical reasons.

There is also a "Last Plug" button on the main menu. This one is handy, it goes directly to the last plugin you have visited without having to search for it again. Of course if you lose the required access in the meantime it will default to the Plugins Browser instead.

Let's give you a little demonstration to understand the concept of "access", I'll sacrifice myself for this (yeah, right)... I lock my cuffs and start a 30 minutes timer. This gives me Reduced access for 30 minutes because I have the key but a timer is running. Now I click on the cuffs, check that I have Reduced access by seeing the "Tug", "Squirm" and "Struggle" buttons, and press "Plugins...". As you can see, most of the buttons are unavailable now, they just show "(no key)" (I have the key but I can't use it). Oh wait, there is one I can still use, it is called "Color elegance". This means that despite my predicament, I still have control over the color of the cuffs. That won't get me anywhere closer to freedom, but it sure will just make me prettier *g*

Have fun !
Marine

RR Tutorial : Arms restraints

2009-08-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Hello again, today we are going to look specifically into arms restraints. They are my favorites ! We will use the police handcuffs we used in the Locking tutorial, because they are easy to use.

The purpose of arms restraints is to restrain you in a way that you won't be able to defend yourself, nor use anything around you. After all, it is hard to open a door when your hands are tied, let alone protect yourself from whatever your captor wants to do to you... But then again, this depends on the way you are bound.

As the "Real" part of the name "RealRestraint" stands for "Realism", the Police Handcuffs (and all the other arms restraints I make) are meant to do exactly that, prevent you from touching anything around. SL being made the way it is, this is an all-or-nothing feature : either you are able to touch or you're not. There is a RLV plugin called "Touch" that can do something in-between but it works only if you're using the RLV, of course, so we won't talk about it here.

This is why the handcuffs "force" you to wear a HUD (an object that sticks to your view and that only you can see) when you wear them the first time. This HUD is not a "control HUD" per se, you won't see hi-tech buttons and monochromatic displays like in supersonic fighters, in fact you won't see anything at all, it is invisible until the cuffs activate it.

When the cuffs are unlocked, or locked and chained in a way it makes sense that you can still use your hands (for example, in front), the HUD remains inactive. But as soon as your hands "look" secure enough to prevent you from touching, the HUD suddenly pops into view and you realise that you cannot touch anything anymore. Just like in real life !

Well, that's the theory anyway. In practice it is more flexible, subtle and versatile than this.

First of all, let me show you. These cuffs are the basic ones, they lock my wrists only, either in front of me or behind my back. I click on them and press "Lock", they just lock without a chain (as explained in the Locking tutorial). I press "1 Hnd front", they chain my hands in front of me (that too is demonstrated in the Locking tutorial). Now I will press "2 Hnd back"...

"Marine is now prevented from interacting with the environment."

Wait... what just happened here ? My screen took a slightly reddish tint, and now when I click anywhere I get the menu of my cuffs instead of what I expect the object to do ! Except on other HUDs I'm wearing (like my AO, radar etc), which still work.

Well this is just the RR HUD doing its job, because my hands are cuffed behind my back. No opening doors, using teleporters, cuffing other people anymore... I can't do anything ! This is what I call being "blocked", as in "having my touch ability blocked". I'm locked and blocked.

On a side note, when I click anywhere in the world, all I get is the menu to my cuffs. This means that if I were wearing other RR items, such as a ballgag, I would be unable to click on it to operate it. Instead, I can say "/77 gag" (without the quotes) to get the menu to the gag, because "RR Ballgag" contains the word "gag".

So you think it was simple ? Let's proceed to some... advanced stuff now. Why is it that everytime I lock my hands behind my back I'm blocked, and as soon as I lock them in front I'm unblocked ? Back, blocked, front, unblocked. Well because this is the default configuration, and it is actually entirely customisable. Let's do this now. I click anywhere, get the menu, press "More..." and locate the "Block" button. I click on it and...

"Marine is now allowed to interact with the environment."

Woohoo I can click again ! I can tell because my screen gets its normal color back (is it me or does it feel colder now ?), and I can click anywhere again. I unlock my cuffs, rub my wrists, then lock them behind my back again and... here goes nothing. I am still not blocked. Wtf ?! Is it broken now ?

Well no. This is because "Block" is a toggle, and its state depends on the pose you choose, and on whether you want this particular pose to block you or not. If you were blocked when leaving that pose, you will be blocked again when you come back to it, otherwise you will still be unblocked. This is perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about the arms restraints : you are blocked according to the pose, you can change the default settings at will, and they will stick until you change them again.

You have certainly noticed the "Mouselook" next to "Block" on the menu. What does it mean ? It is a feature similar to Block, but instead of blocking your clicks it forces you to stay in Mouselook (a.k.a. "first person view"). This is handy when you want the captive to be forced to see things from her own point of view, and not cam around. For example when she's in a cell.

Now, I know, Mouselook is painful for most people. This is because they are used to see their avatar but frankly Mouselook is more immersive. You *are* your avatar. It just takes a little time to get used to it. Remember, while in Mouselook you can still do everything you do in third view, but you have to use a few keyboard shortcuts : Ctrl-T for the IM and group window, Ctrl-H for the chat history, Ctrl-I for the inventory, and of course Alt to click around, including on windows and menus.

But I digress. "Mouselook" makes your screen go black while while you're not in Mouselook, and spams you with "go to mouselook" messages every second or so. That's painful, yes. Like Block, Mouselook depends on the pose (it is always off by default), and is independent from it. You can be Blocked, or Mouselooked, or both, or none.

One last thing, the "Autoref" button. This one is specific to restraints that trigger an anim (arms, legs, Elegance collar). You may have noticed that some furniture, and even some Animation Overriders, break the cuffs animation when used. When you walk cuffed, you would expect your hands to stay cuffed, right ? This is the role of the "Autoref" button. It is On by default, so the cuffs always override any animation (you could see it as an Animation Overrider overrider), but if sometimes you need to make them yield to a furniture (for instance one that holds your arms over your head while you are cuffed in front), you can do so by clicking on Autoref to turn it Off. This works only if the furniture or walk that you want the cuff to yield to is priority 4, the highest priority. It is a toggle too, you click once to turn it off, then once again to turn it back on, but it does not depend on the pose at the time of this writing.

That's all for today, this tutorial was not so simple, was it ?

Have fun,
Marine

RestrainedLife 1.20.2

2009-08-16T02:54:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

Here is the latest version of the Restrained Life Viewer (1.20.2) with the new "adult-compliant" flag (Linden Lab have modified their login servers and in consequence every third-party viewer has to be updated, or have "Adult" replaced by "Mature" in the top menu bar). There is also a crash fix for when your viewer automatically reattaches a locked item that had been kicked off by another one, and a workaround @tplm.

Grab it here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The MD5 hash for the windows zip file is
2f0dec59517e409e5d8522ca4c6b14b8

Have fun !
Marine

RestrainedLife 1.20.1

2009-08-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

This is an urgent release due to two crashes that occurred in some conditions in the 1.20 version, including one that could become a crash loop on login. So if you are annoyed by some unexplainable crashes, that you didn't experience before 1.20, you may want to download this one.

- fixed : crash to desktop when hearing chat from an unrezzed avatar while under @shownames (bug introduced in 1.20).
- fixed : crash to desktop when forcing an object to be detached then locking its attach point right away, which would trigger an infinite loop (introduced in 1.20).
- fixed : OOC exception to the redirection was not working all the time (thanks Moss Hastings).
- fixed : a cheat around @shownames (thanks Jolene Tatham).

Grab it here :
http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The hash for the Windows zip file is :
84385495bdfca02df6f8d2fcffd65c54

Have fun !
Marine

RR Tutorial : Struggling

2009-08-06T10:10:00.001-07:00

Hi, this tutorial is about what is called "the struggling game"... in other words, how to get the hell out of these cuffs you inadvertantly locked on yourself without checking you had the key.

So you're stuck there, hands behind your back, keys far far away from you, you absolutely need to get out and you definitely don't want to cheat (or can't, if you're using the RLV). How to do this ? Well as with many restraints in real life, if you're nimble enough you can try to struggle out. It takes time and it is not guaranteed to work, but at least you have a slight chance.

To struggle out, you need to play a little game of logic and memory. The goal is to guess a sequence of moves, by trial and error. The more errors the longer it takes to get out. You have noticed that the menu changes when you're locked and you don't have the keys, or when you have them but a timer is running. This is what we called "reduced access". You have access to your restraint but can only do a few things. And you certainly can't unlock them. This "reduced menu" shows in particular "Tug", "Squirm", "Struggle" and "Examine" buttons. What are these ?

They are called "moves", or "tries", and are the necessary steps to take, in the right order, to achieve freedom. Let me try to explain how it works, internally. Imagine a random sequence of letters A, B and C, knowing that :

- There are always the same number of letters on this restraint (more than 20, but it depends on the restraint)
- There are always the same amount of A
- There are always the same amount of B
- There are always the same amount of C
- The amounts of A, B and C are always different (there are more C than B, and more B than A)

Now, imagine that A means "Tug", B means "Squirm" and C means "Struggle". The question is, what is the first letter of the sequence ? If you think it is A, press "Tug", if you think it is B, press "Squirm", and if you think it is C press "Struggle". Of course you may argue that you don't have a clue since it is random. Well not totally random, as I said there are more C than B, and more B than A, but that's all you know for the moment. Let's press "Struggle". If the first letter of the sequence is C, then it goes away, and the restraint says "blah blah feels s/he's making progress". Otherwise the letter stays there and the restraint says "blah blah struggles fiercely in his/her restraint, to no avail.", and you know the next move is either A or B, but not C.

For example, let's say the internal sequence is CBACBB. You don't know this, of course. You press "Struggle", and the first letter is C, so it matches, and the C goes away. The sequence becomes BACBB (one less, you get closer from freedom). Let's say you now press "Tug". As the first letter of the sequence is not A, you just waste your try and the sequence does not move. You now know that the next letter is either B or C, since A failed. You press "Squirm", betting on B. And you are right again, the first letter of the sequence is B indeed, and it goes away. The sequence becomes ACBB, and you're even closer from freedom. Once the sequence is entirely depleted, you're free !

As you keep "making progress" (in other words guessing the right letters and making them go away), you slowly proceed to getting loose, the restraint even shows it on its menu : "locked and very secure", "locked and secure", "locked", "locked but getting loose" and "locked but almost escaped". Sounds easy, right ? All you have to do is to try the moves randomly and eventually you'll get out ?

Wrong. You have only so many "tries" before running out of energy and deciding to give up for a moment, exhausted. Typically you have like 10 more tries than the number of moves to find (hence about 30 tries). When you run out of tries you're stuck, no matter how close to freedom you are. But you aren't stuck forever, you will slowly recover tries as time passes... When you recover a try your restraint says something like "blah blah gathers what's left of his/her energy to fight his/her restraint some more...".

The rate at which tries come back and allow you to struggle further depends on several factors :

- The closer from freedom you are, the faster they come
- The more failures you had in a row before running out of tries, the longer it takes
- You cannot recover more than 2 tries in succession before trying to struggle out again, to prevent you from just camp somewhere waiting for energy to come back; you have to participate to your own escape of course

Before you start wondering if you suck at this game because you have depleted all your tries and did not make much progress, just know that it is very hard to struggle out from your restraints without running out of tries first. Some people can do it sometimes, but they are very well trained at this game. 99 times out of 100 you will have to wait to recover, and it takes hours. Just like in real life !

But you know what ? We have only scratched the surface here. There is more to know about the struggling game ! Let me explain what "Examine" does...

When you press "Examine", the restraint will give you a clue about what is to come. It will tell you what one of the next three moves is, with a slightly more important chance that it will be the next move, or will plainly tell you nothing. If you "Examine" once, it does not cost you anything, provided that you try a move after that (not another "Examine", or it would cost you a try). And if you fail that move, it costs you 2 tries instead of one ! You cannot "Examine" over and over again, it just costs you tries for nothing because it just tells you nothing anymore, you have to actually struggle again first.

Wait, there is more ! Usual restraints like police handcuffs tend to be rather plain and predictable... In other words, a move has a good chance to be followed by the same one. Such a sequence would look like CCCBBACCBAAACC... Stronger restraints like shackles (designed to keep captives restrained for a long time) are much trickier and their sequence is fuzzier, like CBABCCABACCBCAB.

Want more info ? You already know that different kinds of restraints have different strengths. Some are tighter, some are stronger, some are easy to struggle out from, some are nightmares. For instance, it is much easier to push a ballgag out than to remove a collar ! Strength and tightness influence the rate at which you recover tries, how fuzzy the sequence is, the number of moves to make and the efficiency of the "Examine" button.

Complicated ? I know... You basically know everything there is to know, in theory. Now it is time to practice ! With all you've learnt, how long will it take to struggle out of your cuffs ? There is only one way to know, right ?

Have fun,
Marine

RR Tutorial : Timers

2009-08-06T10:06:00.001-07:00

Hello and welcome back to this series of RealRestraint tutorials. Today we are going to talk about timers. I assume you have read the "Locking" tutorial first, if you haven't please do so now, you'll need it to understand what I'm going to talk about here.

So what if you lock your friend up after a lost bet, but you're not sure you'll be there when she needs to be released (notice I didn't say "when she wants to be released") ? Timers are your friends in this instance. Remember these "No timer", "+30 mn" and "+3 h" buttons on the second page of the menu ? Before I start explaining what these buttons do, let me expose what a timer means, in the first place.

By default, when a restraint is locked after being unlocked, it is meant to stay locked until "the end of time". Or "until the keyholder wishes to unlock it", whichever comes first. In other words it has no timer by default, or rather an infinite timer. But when you start adding time, the timer suddenly becomes zero, then is immediately increased by the time you specified. And as time passes, the timer decreases as well, slowly, down to zero. When it reaches zero, the captive gets her key back and she is able to unlock herself. Until then the key is just out of her reach.

Now, you may have noticed that the menu always shows two timers, not one. Well it's simple, the first one goes up, it is the time you have spent restrained so far. The second one goes down, it is the time you are going to stay restrained. Easy. And a third one shows the longest time you have stayed restrained, just so that you can gloat to your friends. Hehe.

So let's go back to your locked up bet-loser friend. She can't do anything with her cuffs besides struggling (more on that in another tutorial). She cannot add time because no timer is set, meaning she's on an infinite timer. If she could add time she could free herself in half an hour, which would be too easy. She cannot do anything, and she wants her key back so she can unlock herself here and now. If you left the key on, she could be able to unlock herself indeed.

But instead you click on her cuffs and go to the second page with "More...". Let's say you want to be a bit nasty with her and trick her, so you just press "+30 mn". What happens ? The cuff says that 30 minutes have been added to its timer, and that it is now going to stay locked for 0:30:0, that's 30 minutes in total. So far so good. Your friend grins because she thinks you're a softie. Half an hour only, pshaw !

This particular timer counts online time only (not all do that, for instance the RL Timer plugin counts time regardless of online status). This means that your friend is going to have to bear half an hour bound there. She can of course go AFK, but that's half an hour during which she is not going to go anywhere. Even if she logs off in the middle, she won't be magically released when she comes back one hour later. Her cuffs will stay on for half an hour because you decided so.

But this little pest is still grinning, obviously taunting you. It would be a good time to gag her, perhaps. Because... you press "+30 mn" again. What happens now ? The cuff says that it added yet another 30 minutes, pushing the time up to one hour. She is not grinning anymore, she's now glaring at you ! Poor girl. Of course she has little say in this.

What about the key ? Obviously she wants her key back, one hour may feel a bit long for her. Well let's give her the key back ! You press "Leave Keys" on the first page of the menu. What can she do now ? Can she just take the key and unlock herself ? Not at all. The key sits there, for all to see and use, but she is powerless to use it herself. All that she can do is struggle, and add time herself ! She couldn't add time before, until you added time yourself.

Now it is time to show her who's in control. You take the key back by pressing the "Take Keys" button, once again granting yourself the right to access her cuffs, and nobody else, then you go to the second page and press the "+3 h" button. Immediately her glaring look transforms into a pleading look, surely you can't leave her bound for 4 hours ! Can you ?

Yes you can, and you do. You don't log off, but you wander outside while knowing your friend is safe and secure in your house. Sometimes you check on her, sometimes you go AFK to do some RL chores, and eventually the timer expires. When it does you get a message from the cuffs saying that the time is up and that your friend got her key back and is now able to unlock herself. She can, because she's now granted "full access" again (she has her key, and is under no timer).

And she frees herself so... perhaps now is the time to... uh... run... quickly !

Marine

PS : I know someone who stayed more than 1800 hours straight in restraints. That's like 4 hours a day, everyday, for more than a year. You can try to beat her score. Hehe.

RR Tutorial : Locking

2009-08-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first tutorial for the RealRestraint products. This one will tell you everything you need to know about how to lock a restraint, what a restraint is, what keys are and why there is no concept of "ownership".

First of all, let me lay out a few words and concepts... What you are using is a restraint, that is meant to keep yourself or a friend of yours secure. This is independent of any BDSM consideration, and that's why I won't use the terms "sub" and "domme" too much. I will use "captive" and "top" respectively. I will also assume that both players are female, for convenience. "She" and "Her" can be used as generic terms in English anyway, when the gender is irrelevant.

So, to me, "secure" means "having her under control at any time". In other words, if you leave your captive hogtied on a bed for a couple hours, you may expect to have a good chance of finding her still hogtied on the same bed (albeit maybe a little furious) when you return. Many things could have happened in the meantime, but if you did things right she should be unable to call for help, or to get out by her own means in your absence.

But, but... where is the "safe, sane and consensual" part in this ? What if the captive doesn't find it fun anymore and decides to leave ? It is a game after all, isn't it ?

Well, if the captive decides to leave for whatever reason, it is her choice and responsibility to break the rules and cheat out. The whole concept of "restraint" in SL is based on the assumption that the captive is not going to cheat out and ruin her reputation in the process (provided the captor is not a jerk or a lousy dom/me who just doesn't care for her prisoners). And as you have certainly noticed, reputation is everything in SL. If you're known as someone who casually cheats out of your restraint when you start getting bored, then only casual players will want to play with you in the future.

Okay, that being out of the way (sorry for the looong intro), let's get our hands secure and dirty. All my products work more or less the same way : a few core features (lock/unlock, take/leave keys, set timers, struggle out) common to all restraints, and a bunch of extras (plugins, animations etc) specific to each restraint.

All the restraints I make are commanded by touch only, seldom by voice commands (though some third-party plugins allow that). This is because my arms restraints can prevent touching, allowing for interesting power exchange games. Using voice commands simply ruin that but some people need them. The only other exception is the fact that the captive can operate one of her restraints by saying its name on channel /77. Or a part of its name, or even just "*". The rest of the world needs to be able to touch it to operate it.

When you touch a restraint and you have access (i.e. the key is available to you), you get a menu with several options. The most obvious one being... "Lock".

What happens when you click on "Lock" ? Well basically... not much. The restraint says it has been locked by you, you see the "Lock" button has changed to "Unlock", the "Take keys" button has become "Leave keys" because now you hold the key to that restraint automatically, but at first glance nothing else happens. Let's do this again, in slow motion this time...

You click on the restraint, the menu appears. You press "Lock" and the restraint says "blah blah has been locked by so-and-so". In the meantime, keys disappear from view, the restraint is made to think that "now only you have full access to it" since you own the key, and the captive is unable to remove the restraint anymore, if she's using the RestrainedLife viewer. The concept of "access" is fundamental to my products. You have "full access" when you own the key, unless you are the wearer and a timer is running. You have "reduced access" if you are the wearer and do not have full access, and you have "no access" in every other case (in world it gives you an "unauthorized" message when clicking on the restraint). These different kinds of access change the buttons that appear on the menu when clicked on.

So what now, that the restraint is locked ? These are cuffs, you'd expect them to actually chain your wrists in front of you or behind you, right ? Why are my arms still dangling free then ? Well that's the exact purpose of the six buttons on the two top rows of the main menu. They usually have bizarre names, but they are all explicit. Let's click on "1 Hnd Front".

"Tshkshk shriiik... shrik"

That's it, and my hands are now secured in front of me. Whatever I do, they will stay in that position until I'm uncuffed by clicking on the "Unlock" button. Which may or may not be in my reach, depending on who owns the key... Right now I can, because I have "full access" (I have the key and no timer is running). Look at the line on the menu that says "(by Marine Kelley)", this means I hold the key. I hold it because when locking my cuffs I am automatically given the keys, to make things easier.

We have been talking about "keys" quite a lot since the beginning of this post... let's clarify that a little. The "key" is merely an internal piece of info contained inside the restraint, that tells it who is granted full access. The key can be "available" (it shows "keys on") or held by someone who is commonly referred to as "the keyholder". Once again because I don't think a dom/me owns cuffs, they own the sub held in the cuffs, but not the cuffs themselves. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against setting an owner and a secowner etc, but I stick to realism here, and in RL cuffs have keys, not owners. And as such in SL it is less dramatic to "leave the keys on" than to "revoke owner rights". I will never stress this enough : as far as BDSM is concerned, restraints are just tools to make sure the sub is kept under control. Some subs need more control, some less, but admission of ownership lies in the mind, heart and soul of the sub, not in the steel or leather she wears.

But I digress. That's all there is to know about keys anyway. Either you hold them or you don't, and if you're the wearer and your cuffs are locked and a timer is running, whether you hold your own keys or they are available to all matters little, you won't be able to unlock yourself.

Oh and now, where is "Lock" ? My hands are cuffed in front of me, but what if I want to have them just "Locked" without a pose, and without having to unlock them first ? I could want to keep my timers up, after all. Well the "Lock" button has migrated to the second page because the first one suddenly lacks room. Just go to "More..." and it will show. In fact a lot more interesting options will show.

The "No timer", "+30 mn" and "+3 h" buttons will be explained in the "Timers" tutorial, while the "Block", "ML" and "Autoref" buttons will be explained in the "Arms restraints" tutorial.

But for now, let's end this first tutorial by getting free again. I go back to the first page by clicking on the "Back..." button, then on "Unlock"...

"Tshik tshik tshuk"

All free again ! And as I'm using the RLV, all the abilities that were taken from me while I was cuffed (typically, the ability to touch objects that are far away) are now restored !

I hope this helped you to understand the very basics of the RealRestraint products...

Have fun,
Marine

RealRestraint Tutorials, Tips & Tricks

2009-08-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

The RealRestraint brand is a brand of comprehensive but complex products, and the standard manual is long and sometimes difficult to understand. Therefore, many users only use at most 10% of their features, missing most of the fun...

So here is a series of posts which are all about clarifications, tutorials, tips, wicked tricks and hidden features, and overall ways of driving captives nuts. Needless to say, everything that will be told in these tutorials only apply to RealRestraint products, of course.

This particular post is the entry point of all, referencing the links to each tutorial. Be sure to check back here, for this will be updated regularly !

The Basics
Locking
Timers
Struggling
Arms restraints (Block/ML/Autoref)
Legs restraints (Hobbling)

The Standard Plugins
Plugins Browser
Long Time
RL Time
RealKey
Autolock

The Specific Plugins
Leash
Wiggle
Gag
Spy

The RLV Plugins
Allow
Control
Outfit
Sit
Touch

Various Tips & Tricks
Customising your own restraints
Fun with the autolock

RestrainedLife 1.20

2009-08-03T09:36:00.001-07:00

Hello there,

As promised here is the latest version of the RLV, v1.20, which is still working on SL 1.23.4. Take a look at the new features :

- added : @notify command to let scripts be notified when a particular restriction (or just any restriction) is issued or lifted by an object. It does not disclose the object itself, just the fact a restriction has changed. (thank you Corvan Nansen for the idea)

- added : @detach: command to lock a particular attachment point. When using this command, any object worn there is locked on, even if it is not even scripted, and no other object can kick it off. If the attachment point is empty, this command will lock it empty, even if another object is attached to it with llAttachToAvatar(). (thank you Chorazin Allen for the idea)

- changed : improved the attachment point calculation in the names of inventory items. Now it looks from right to left (to be consistent with how the RLV renames items when worn), and will select the candidates with the longest names first. In other words, it makes the RLV ready if the number of attachment points is increased (like adding "chest (2)" and the like).

- changed : hide custom text in friendship offers when unable to receive IMs.

- changed : OOC text (text between "((" and "))") is not redirected nor hidden anymore. (thank you Henri Beauchamp for the suggestion)

- fixed : HUDs and unrezzed objects and avatars were immune to @recvchat (they could always be heard). (thank you Jennifer Ida for reporting this)

Download it from http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint

The hash code of the latest Windows version is
23eefa30089f6557d93ba47903bafc1d

Have fun !
Marine

PS : There has been a problem in this version that I had to fix urgently (@notify:2222/detach=add would have to become @notify:2222;detach=add or @getstatus calls would get confused). Thanks to Chorazin Allen for pointing that out ! I didn't change the version number because I didn't want to generate it all again (taking more than an hour of building), and it's not worth it since the error was corrected right away. If you have downloaded RLV 1.20 before 1:30pm the day it was released, please redownload so @notify has the correct syntax. Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience !

Some news about the next RLV

2009-08-01T15:25:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

Once again I am silently working on the next version of the Restrained Life Viewer (1.20), which should hit the shelves soon... Here is a glimpse of the features :

* A command to prevent attaching/detaching per attachment point (ex : @detach:spine=n). That way you can make a full set of attachments become undetachable, without counting on listeners and all. And it applies to no-mod items, for instance no-mod shoes that you want to lock.
* An improved algorithm to guess the target attachment point from the name of the object to attach. Now it will choose the right-most occurence, and in doubt it will choose the longest name among all the candidates. For instance, "Purple top scarf (chest)" will choose "chest", and not "top" like before. Retaining the longest name also allows for more attachment points, if it ever happens. For example, "Purple top scarf (chest (2))" will choose "chest (2)" and not "chest" or "top". Handy !
* It won't redirect OOC (Out Of Character) text anymore (text that is contained between "((" and "))" ). This was necessary since @rediremote, because the avatar could have been rendered completely mute, with no way to ask for something out of character.
* It fixes an age-old bug that would ignore chat restrictions for HUDs and unrezzed avatars/objects.

There is no ETA yet, but everything I've mentioned hereabove is already coded and works. So this RLV 1.20 should be ready pretty soon. I need to test a little more, of course.

Have fun !
Marine

Having troubles running RLV 1.19 on Windows ?

2009-07-18T11:26:00.001-07:00

Hi !

I have been told of a rare problem occuring to some people when trying to run the latest Restrained Life Viewer (1.19) on Windows. Despite installing it normally, all they get is an error message saying this :

"This application failed to start because the
application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application
may fix the problem."

Not only this message is unclear and vague, but following its only advice does not help at all, it just wastes your time to reinstall everything. I will be frank with you, I have no clue why nobody had that problem before, nor why only a few people do now, and not me. It seems to be happening on freshly installed systems mostly. RLV 1.19 has been built exactly like 1.18, which has been built exactly like 1.17, which has been... well you get the point. I did not change anything to the way it is built.

There is a quick fix to overcome that problem for good and enjoy the latest RLV if you run into this. Simply download this file on the Microsoft website

If you have problems to download it from there, here is another source where you can find the same file :
http://www.softdevlabs.com/Hercules/vcredist_x86.exe

Run a virus check on it, then run it if everything is ok. This executable is supposed to install all the missing Visual Studio C++ runtime libraries that should have been shipped on your operating system. Now, I do not guarantee it will work, it did on the sytem of a friend of mine who experienced that problem, and all is okay now.

Long story short, if you're having this problem, download and run the executable and it should be solved for good.

Marine

PS : Thanks Cleo Collins for the link to the microsoft repository. I only had the softdevlabs one before.