Two years of building

I'd have to dig around some more to be completely sure, but some time around now, two years ago, I started having a proper read of the RLV API. I'd been using RLV-enabled items for some time before then, having first looked at RLV about a year before on my original avatar, but it was when I entered SL as Antony that I started to have a proper explore of what it had to offer.

And, as a software developer in RL, it was inevitable that I'd finally crack and have a look at what's involved.

What very first started it was a friend, who I got to know at Stonehaven, gave me a script that would allow you to create a kind of "safety call" list for RLV. Simply put, it let you set things up so that if someone denied you IMs and TPs you'd still be able to interact with the person you set up as your "safe call" (for those who know RLV, it was simply adding some UUID exceptions to the relevant restrictions). The problem with the script was that adding someone to it was a little cumbersome -- you had to edit the script itself. Moreover, you could only add one avatar to the script so if you wanted more than one person on your "safe call list" you had to be wearing multiple copies of the script.

A day or two later, as an exercise in learning, I decided to rewrite it and have it load the "safe call list" from a notecard. The resulting script is still in my inventory and I can see that I created it on January 7th 2010.

A couple or so days later, with my curiosity about RLV, and Second Life scripting in general, growing, I decided to have a proper go at making something. The first thing I made was a cube that was worn on the right hand and was touch to lock and touch to unlock. I don't appear to have a copy of that any more so I'm not sure exactly when that was.

By the 24th of January I'd progressed to making my first "proper" RLV-enabled restraint: a simple sphere that locked on your head and made some changes to Windlight settings (this was to go on and become the Z&A Ball Helmet).

At this point I wanted to make a bondage device, something that would be rezzed in-world and you'd get locked on. I soon realised that this was where the business of needing to understand how to talk to an RLV relay came in.

The next two things I find in my inventory date from February 8th 2010. The first is a simple cube that, when an avatar sat on it, they'd be "locked" on it (by having the ability to stand denied). A subsequent touch of the cube (by anyone, including the victim) would release them. This was my first proper test of talking to a relay (there's lots of debug code inside that does an llSay() of just about everything happening).

The second build of that day was something I made to get to know how to a) play an animation when an avatar sits on an object and b) how to get chains to appear when an avatar sits on an object (in other words, this was where I went off on a tangent to get to know about LockGuard).

By the end of the day I'd married the two bodies of code and had made my first ever "lock and hold" RLV device.

That wasn't the end of it, of course, that was just the start. I kept improving the code, kept added more to it, kept learning, kept making it do more, and started to make a couple of other items to drop the code in.

And the reason why I'm thinking about all of this now and waffling on about this? Well, it wasn't long after that that Zardia twisted my arm into opening a shop and putting some of these things up for sale. So, between us, we built our first 14 products, polished the code up, and went into business together, fully expecting that within six weeks we'd have decided it was a bad idea, that nobody would want our stuff, and we'd move on. It didn't quite work out that way. Which is why, next month, this is happening:

I'm still a little amazed, and very much thrilled, that people like our builds. That never gets old. And I still find myself looking at this:

and feeling amazed that we started out with a little booth in a mall.