Archive for the ‘pet projects’ Category

I want to apologize for the lack of updates, my sleep cycle and mood have been pretty messed up since I came back from visiting my family on Easter. I’m working on getting everything back on track. In the meantime, I started working on the lined chrome wrist cuffs remake, I don’t have much to show, but they look really similar to the elbow cuffs anyway.

I have to pretty much redo each pair one by one as those are a bit less tolerant to resizing since there isn’t so many parts to them anymore.

The wrist cuffs are also noticeably thicker than the original, it started with the elbow cuffs, because I was accounting for resizing of the original sculpted prims, and I figured I might as well make it consistent across all cuffs, just to give me a little more wiggle room for fitting.

As a result, the collar is slightly thinner, maybe I’ll fix it, maybe I won’t?

Why would I do the elbow cuffs first? Well… I did not actually plan this, I picked the wrong reference model and only noticed when I was pretty much done with it.

These look so much better with actual holes…

The new collar models are complete (collar body, D ring, triangle ring, round ring). The complexity only dropped by about half, despite only 1/5 of the triangle count.

Oh well, at least the locking mechanism looks much better, some of the click prims are now redundant, and it should be a LOT easier to edit.

I’ll try to update the product picture & push the update sometime tomorrow or Friday.

The Lined Chrome Collar remake is going well, I still have no idea how it will end up looking in-world. I’m thinking about adding a very simple material setup on the backing to enhance it a little compared to the original.

I did a few “fancy” renders to test it, it is a bit subtle, maybe too subtle, but it works.

I have also re-added some of the small details, like the surface rivets, the adjustment holes (actual holes this time!), and the locking post.

This probably wasn’t the most urgent thing in the world, but despite its age, the Lined Chrome Collar is a fairly important product because it contains all the core features used by all the other items… and yet it is still an old crappy sculpted prim.

Since I don’t really have the original models anymore, my goal here is to recreate it as best as I can, but also to correct the many issues of the original, especially the ludicrous polygon count.

The first picture is the original, 15000 triangles… The new one isn’t complete yet but weighs a mere 2800 triangles, with all the parts that are done at the moment.

It took me a couple of days to finally fix that annoying bug where on relog chains could turn into suspensions if you stood in a spot that qualifies for a suspension. I’ve also given a beauty pass to the RLV activator, it uses symbols where text isn’t necessary (UTF characters really), and I tried to make the menus a bit more explicit in what they are doing.

I’ve also added to it a” function to stop all currently playing animations, this can break stuff (but not TouchBound products because of the TB animation manager), but it can also be helpful.

I’ve also added a safety feature that prevents the wearer of a TouchBound item from chaining themselves to an object further than ~2 meters away. This might be seen as a downgrade, but the main reason is to spare you the embarrassment of chaining yourself to a chaining point that you cannot reach anymore as soon as RLV kicks in. It will only affect the wearer obviously, and people playing with you won’t be affected by this restriction.

I haven’t died! I merely took a break.

I’m easing back into work mode with some work on the TouchBound core code, fixing some bugs, and adding small quality of life features, I might be on this the entire week as I’ve left the issues/feature request pile up for a long time.

I haven’t yet decided what will be the next product either.

I’m almost done with the padded cell, I swear! But I did make a few last-minute changes that were requested by some friends. Namely, ceiling padding (yes it is a bit weird with the lamp) and a few requested presets.

I also made a preset “demo” feature but that’s mostly for the store demo than anything.

I can’t really release this weekend as I’m not gonna have the time to do it, so I’ll wrap everything up on Monday or something.

I’m almost done with the padded cell project! All the creasing is done, and it makes everything looks 1000% better in my opinion. I still need to fix a few issues, such as the new anchors having the wrong mesh orientation and the script is getting a bit confused by it.

The new customization menu is really simple with a section for the door label, a handful of color presets for all the parts, and you can choose between creased and uncreased normal maps. If you don’t have materials enabled in your viewer it won’t do anything and… well… it’s 2022! You should be getting on with the program 😛

I might add a menu section with a few common sets of specular properties for the padding, but I know most people are going to tweak to their liking anyway.

I’ve finished the new anchor points that I want to ship with the padded cell as well as some subtle creasing on the wall padding. Picture re-ordering appears to be currently broken on the site.

The creasing was a little bit weird to nail down and I had to tone down the shading on the diffuse texture a little bit to prevent it from breaking the effect.

Also, a goofy picture today, the wordle cell >_>