2014-12-25

An exchange of gifts

Like last year Mistress and I had the chance to spend time together and to exchange gifts. Although, in these days of mesh and size issues and the like, it's not so straightforward to arrange gifts any more. So first off we both half let on what we had in mind as our in-world gifts and worked out who would go where first to get what.


Given that my main gift to Mistress was pretty easy to sort we started with that. We've being talking about replacing the old sculpt dining table in our house for ages so I took today as the perfect opportunity to gift her this:


It's the Dutchie dining table. Mistress was really delighted with it and our shopping plans got put on hold for a short while as we both explored the menus.


It's got pretty much everything you could want from a fully-scripted table and handles between 1 and 8 avatars and provides menus that are appropriate to the arrangement. This includes some really sweet romantic moments.


And wine. It has wine too. Mistress was delighted it had wine.


Next up was a little trip out. First was a visit to League so Mistress could get a demo for a dress she'd mentioned to me a couple of months back and which she seemed to have forgotten about. Sadly though, as much as we looked, we couldn't find it! So Mistress rummaged through the notices and notecards she'd had over the past couple of months to try and find out what the deal was. Meanwhile I found and bought myself a new pair of front-gartered wool stockings. Well, I do have at least one short dress and it's chilly this time of year. ;)

Mistress finally found out that the dress in question was only available at Uber so we then headed over there and she picked up the demo and then took me to have a look at her gift to me...


Ever since we found out during The Femdom Hunt V that Think Kink would be releasing a male version of their ISO suit Mistress has been pretty clear that I'd be getting one; so today was the perfect chance for that to happen. While no demo was available to try on there was a copy rezzed out and, just looking at it, it was obvious that it had been made with a reasonable male shape in mind (the rezzed copy actually seemed to be a fairly good match for my own shape, which was a surprise and a delight). So, without any hesitation, Mistress gifted me a copy.

We then headed back home and I unpacked my purchases while Mistress tried on the demo for the dress I wanted to get her. That was an instant hit and, before I got to try my gift on...


A couple of gift dress purchases later we were back home and it was my turn. After unpacking and checking the instructions (which aren't 100% clear about what needs to be worn, or how you get at the menus; but it seems pretty intuitive what to wear and once we figured out you get the menus from touching the top of the head of the suit it all fell into place) Mistress sat down with a cuppa and had a play.


She had some fun playing with the various colour options (not that I could see them that well given that the suit imposes some pretty cool windlight effects on you) and working through all the different restrictions and punishment options. There's enough scope in the menus of the suit that all sorts of fun things (well, fun to Mistress anyway) can be devised. She's already decided that it needs to go into the list as a specific item, both as a thing in its own right and possibly also an outfit to combine with a forced walkabout.

We did notice one odd thing and that was a single prim that was constantly floating in front of my face (you can see it in the following image).


Originally, while we were trying to figure out how to actually get at the menus, we entertained the idea that this was the prim to touch (remember that the suit itself is rigged mesh so touching it isn't a thing) to get them but that didn't really seem very likely. Finally we figured out that it was the particle emitter for the breather of the mask so I edited and made it invisible (coincidently, just after we logged off to say goodnight in RL, Ilana IMd me to say there was an update coming real soon and, it turns out, the visible breather prim is one of the fixes -- that's what I call customer service, letting me know that a problem I hadn't got around to reporting yet is fixed before I've even had the chance to let them know!).

Oh, yeah, the breather.... While Mistress did seem rather taken by the very anonymous look with the full-face hood she seemed to adore the open-face mask and breather. So, in the end, she went with that.


She then turned off most of the restrictions, made sure the vision-restriction plate was set on the easiest level (you can see a bit of it around the edge of the image above, see below for better examples), set the renamer with a name of her choice and set the gagging option to a reasonable garble. She then informed me that she was collecting on the allowance payment of "Wear the outfit of your dom(me)'s choice for 3 days" and that I'd get to enjoy my Christmas gift until Sunday...

After that it was time for Mistress to head for bed.


Meanwhile I've been left in a fairly murky world that looks something like this:


Only, that isn't exactly what it looks like. What it actually looks like, when I take a photo that shows my HUDs, is this:


So I'm left in a state where I can work, I can build, I can get around, but it's made rather frustrating by having my vision obscured and by colours and light being all wrong. Not that I can really complain, the vision restriction options can get a lot worse -- what I'm on right now is the easiest of the options.

Overall we're delighted by the ISO suit so far. The only niggles I've noticed are that there's no "quickstart" documentation that explains the essentials of what to wear and what to explain to your owner (or if there is I couldn't find it) and that the suit's alpha-auto-change system is hardcoded to expect the suit itself to be held at the very top level of your #RLV folder (something I'd never do as I have a carefully laid out hierarchy of folders in there and having a single restraint at the top level would ruin that).

The quickstart documentation thing isn't such a big deal as, as I've said above, once you've figured out how to get at the menus it all falls into place; or so Mistress tells me anyway -- I only saw the menus for the brief moment that I used them to add her as a "trusted operator" and then I handed all control over to her. I'm not sure the #RLV folder thing can really be solved (unless some method of soft-coding it is introduced) but it really isn't that big a deal for us. If Mistress is locking this on me it'll be in a specific configuration so I'll just wear the correct alpha and that'll be that. Nobody else will be getting access anyway.

As for the look of the suit... This is where the materials/no-materials issue starts to creep in. My desktop machine really doesn't handle advanced lighting at all well (and it turns out that my recent driver update didn't have quite the positive effect that I thought it initially had) so I normally run with it off (framerates are terrible with it on). As such the suit looks like this:


Overall I think it looks just fine, although the breather on the facemask looks very flat and featureless. The real magic happens when you turn advanced lighting on:


Suddenly lots of detail appears and the breather doesn't look quite so 2-dimensional. Personally I think TK have done a great job of making it work fine with ALM turned off (in fact they've made a feature of this difference if you read the details of the product) and it's inevitable that ALM will be more and more favoured.

For now I'll have to make do with the loss of detail and plain flat shine while Mistress (who always has ALM turned on) gets to enjoy the full detail of the gift she kindly got me.

Actually, for now, all I'll be doing is trying to get used to the environment the suit is imposing on me and hope that Mistress doesn't decide to make it worse before it gets better. And, of course, figure out if I'm able to build in it.


Merry Christmas Mistress. Thank you for a lovely gift. ;)

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