Extending a Linden robot

I have three "non-me" accounts for dealing with Z&A business. The first one I ever created was "Zanda Slacker". Unless there's been a glitch in his connection you'll always find him hanging out in our main store somewhere, doing something vaguely useful (right now he's available for trolley rides). As a registered scripted agent (AKA "bot") he also handles group invites and he lets me keep an eye on the shop while I'm working at my desk but not in-world.

The second is "CrashTestMistress Resident". When building Z&A items we've always taken myself and Miss Vila as the size guides. However, due to our different timezones, Miss Vila isn't always available to help size things up when I'm building. To get around this problem I created Crash as an avi with similar size and shape as Miss Vila and kitted her out with fairly high heeled boots. As a template to work around she works well. With the help of METAbolt I can have her in while I'm in on my viewer of choice and get things done.

More recently I had a need for a third avatar. Late on last year I was getting more and more into working with mesh. At that point Firestorm (my viewer of choice) wasn't quite up to the job of uploading models so I was always switching over to the official Lab viewer to get that job done. A slight hassle, but no big deal. Until, that is, things happened that meant I was using RLV all the time again. At that point I didn't want to be logging into a viewer that lacked RLV. I also wasn't sure that, even if I could use a viewer that contained RLV and handled mesh uploads well, I'd have access to things like inventory all the time. While I could have used one of the other avis for uploads I also wanted the object's creator to show as something sensible -- either me or....

Meet ZandAProductions Resident.

He quickly became my goto avi for doing things (with Miss Vila's permission, obviously) that I couldn't do due to some RLV fun. As time went on the need to use him for his original purpose diminished. Firestorm now has much improved mesh upload so the need for me to switch viewers has pretty much gone away.

But he does still have a purpose. For the past couple or so months I've been working on a lot of new stuff (which will be getting launched early next week) and, again, because of the restraints I was sometimes in while doing this work, I needed another avi to be the "victim". "The Robot" (has he's generally known to us) was the perfect candidate. Log him in on METAbolt with the RLV module enabled and I was all sorted.

Because we use LockGuard for particle chains and the like I started out by putting some freebie cuffs and collar I'd made on him. However, it seems that METAbolt doesn't support multiple attachments on a single attachment point (or, if it does, I missed how to do it) so he'd end up losing cuffs or body parts. The solution was pretty obvious.

One round of copying his body parts, adding some extra prims, and dropping LockGuard scripts in those prims later and I had a LockGuard compatible version of one of the Lab's robot avis:

This solved the problem nicely and it works a treat.

In this form he's not a good body double for me in terms of checking sizes, but for checking general workings and that I've got the chains/ropes/etc working right he's perfect.

So, thank you for making him mod, Linden Lab. Much appreciated. :)