Thursday, December 6, 2018

Second update to the Police Collar

Hello there,

So I thought I was done with the new Police Collar after the latest update, but... I improved it a little more lately, especially the speech monitoring feature.

Until now it would monitor the speech from the sub and punish her if she sent more lines than she was allowed. But there's a way to be more devious than that : by allowing a certain number of characters per minute !

So the big change is that now the Tolerance for the speech monitoring will be in characters per minute instead of chat lines. This includes characters put between double quotes inside emotes, because those should count as well.

There is also the new concept of "Penalties" added every time the sub is punished for talking too much. In short, every penalty decreases the tolerance, I'll explain below the exact calculations. For now, here is the list of changes and fixes :

- added : Beeps when recovering characters or clearing penalties.

- added : Limited access to the plugin to the sub so that she can check her own stats and turn the sounds on or off if needed.

- changed : Now the speech tolerance is counted in characters per minute, including those between double quotes within an emote.

- changed : Made the plugin menu clearer and more comprehensive when showing stats.

- changed : When punished for talking, the sub is now given a free 10 characters allowance for a limited time to let her "comment" on the zap itself.

- fixed : There should be no monitoring going on while the collar is unlocked.

- fixed : When Absolute monitoring was on, Relative monitoring did not punish for being too far from the keyholder.




To update your collar and get these new features, you need to go to one of these locations :

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


Once there, click on the updater and follow the instructions. If you already got the previous update (this one), you can choose "UPDATE" on the menu instead of "REPLACE", which will replace your "*Zapper" script with one named "_Zapper", which is exactly the same script with a different name, and of course the new features detailed above.

If you do not have the last update, you absolutely need to choose "REPLACE" on the menu instead of "UPDATE" because one of the changes involves a script contained in a child prim, which the updater cannot reach. If you do not get a "REPLACE" option, contact me (Marine Kelley) to get a manual replacement.



Ok, so what's the deal about penalties and characters per minute ? Let's get into details now.

When speech monitoring is activated, the sub is given a tolerance of 60 characters per minute. If she stays under that limit, fine, she won't get punished. If she send emotes like :

/me says "This is a vocal message"

Then the "This is a vocal message" part counts against the character allowance (but not the double quotes).

If she goes over her limit, then she gets punished, no surprise there. But she also gets one penalty, or more if she goes way over her limit, like twice or three times her allowance.

Each penalty lowers the tolerance like this :

* 1 penalty : Speech tolerance loses 15%.
* 2 penalties : Speech tolerance loses 25%.
* 3 penalties : Speech tolerance loses 50%.
* 4 penalties : Speech tolerance loses 80%.
* 5 penalties : Speech tolerance loses 90%.
* 6 penalties or more : Speech tolerance loses 90% and one character per penalty beyond 5.

For example, if the speech tolerance is 60 (which is the default), then it goes down to 51 characters per minute with one penalty, 45 with two, 30 with three, 12 with four, 6 with five, and then 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 (you can't go under 1).

Every minute one penalty is removed, so if the sub has talked too much, it may take minutes before she is back to her full allowance.

Also, the intensity of the punishment for talking is now tied to the number of penalties. In other words, one penalty won't hurt much but three and more will be really painful.

The number of characters she is allowed goes up by a sixth of her tolerance (adjusted by the current penalties) every 10 seconds. In other words, if she has no penalty and a 60 character tolerance, she gets back 10 characters every 10 seconds. If she has 1 penalty, she only gets back 8 every 10 seconds and it will stop at 51.

Here is an example when having said 30 characters in a 60-character tolerance (hence 30 characters of allowance left), with no penalty :


And after having been punished twice in a short time, the tolerance goes down to 45, written twice for more clarity, both in the allowance line (marked "Chars left" in the menu) and in the Tolerance line so you see the effect of those two penalties on the initial tolerance :


Note that although the penalties are cleared over time, the number of punishments is not, it must be cleared manually by the keyholder.


When she gets characters back (so every 10 seconds), a short "beep" is heard. When she gets back all her characters (so her allowance is now equal to the adjusted tolerance), four rapid "beeps" are heard.

When she clears one penalty, another "beep" is heard with a different tone, and a two-tone "beep" is heard when all the penalties are cleared.

If all those beeps are annoying for you or the people around you, you can always turn them off yourself or have your keyholder do it for you. The Zapper plugin is now available to the sub even when locked, but she only gets minimal access. It is useful for having a glance at the stats at any time.

When the sub gets zapped, she is given an extra 10 characters allowance if she wants to comment on the punishment and won't be punished again for it. Comment like "Ouch!", "Ow!" etc. Be careful, that's only 10 characters and only one chat message, she cannot hope to cheat through this extra allowance.


You might think that all those rules and constraints are complicated, maybe superfluous. The goal here is to convince the sub that it is better to remain quiet than to try to game the system, as it becomes harsher if she keeps testing it. You can think of the complexity as a way to get some psychological leverage over the sub. Hehe.


Have fun !

Marine