Experience Tools & RLV

Last week the first phase of the Experience Tools feature arrived for Premium Members of Second Life™. I think by now most bloggers have covered the arrival.

Serenade for a Fae

Serenade for a Fae by Aelin Quan, on Flickr

According to Google we are the top three reporting on Experience Tools. There are plenty of links leading to the SL Forum and Wiki. So, finding information on how to use the Tools and what they can do should be easy.

What I am not hearing is what people may do with these for the RLV (Restrained Life/Love Viewer) experiences? Nor have I heard much from merchants that may use the Tools to handle Demo’s.

We currently use a HUD (tkPBA and others) to get RLV functionality with a RLV capable viewer. The main Linden SL Viewer does not have RLV capabilities. This means new users and I’ll say ostridge-users, those that never look at SL outside of their viewer, have no idea there is such a thing as RLV.

RLV is a big part of the adult experience in Second Life. However, RLV is about viewer control far more than it is about adult play. Now Experience Tools builds into the SL Viewer much of the functionality that RLV brings to the third party viewers. We have seen the Ex-Tools used for play areas like the Cornfield. Now Premium Members can build Cornfield like experiences.

As the Tools are implemented in third party viewers I expect we will see more of their use and less RLV use. But, I don’t code for RLV and asking Marine Kelley, the primary coder for RLV, I find she is just starting to look into Experience Tools so today I doubt anyone can answer the questions I have. May be in a month or two we will start to find adult experiences and toys coming out that compete with RLV. Or… possibly not. But, I do think we will have a better idea of what we can do with Ex-Tools.

One of the big things for Ex-Tools was to be how merchants could implement demos. We were to be able to try a demo and see if we liked it, without it ever becoming part of our inventory. That would save me a lot of clean up time. But, will we start to see that now?

I keep finding places where the merchants are offering rigged-standard size and fitted mesh without demos… So, I suspect switching to a newer style demo is going to be slow.

4 thoughts on “Experience Tools & RLV

  1. The temp attach demos don’t Need XPtools for that scenario to work, although I guess technically temp attach is part of XPtools when they first tried working on them. I’ve been using temp attach for demos of my steampunk hats for over a year now and also use it for things like temp drinks attachment vendors.

    XPtools allows people to automatically attach things to visitors, but I would imagine you would not want to walk into a store and without warning have clothes demos auto attached.

    where I think XPtools will help merchants is with teleport maps. The old way was to sit on a prim and move it. With xp tools its proper teleport. It’s such a simple things XPtools allows creators to do, makes you wonder why it wasn’t possible before now :-p

  2. I’m reasonably familiar with both RLV and Experience Tools (I was very much part of the closed beta for those).

    I think they’re going to complement each other rather than compete. That’s partly because when someone accepts an experience this (among other things) means scripts in the experience don’t need to call llRequestPermissions before interacting with you.

    Marine has always upheld the principle that RLV shouldn’t do anything that could be achieved by a regular LSL script, so ( at least in principle ) there should be no overlap.

    Most of the time there isn’t — RLV can’t animate you or force you to allow a temp-attachment to attach to you, for example, while Experience Tools can, while Experience Tools can’t force sit you on anything or remove your clothing layers or change your outfit.

    The only thing both can do, as far as I can tell, is force teleport you.

    What does worry me, though, and I know Marine is aware of this, is the possibility that someone might abuse Experience Tools to force attach an RLV relay to people, coded to accept that someone’s commands without asking for confirmation.

    However, I take some comfort from the fact LL apparently intend to come down very hard on anyone abusing Experience Tools (they remember the notorious \Griefer Monday\ as well as do the rest of us who were around on that eventful day the first time llTeleportAgent rolled out) and, once TPVS adopt the Experience Tools UI, it will be very easy indeed to identify and AR the owner of any object that uses Experience Tools maliciously.

    So, provided those of us who use RLV are cautious about which experiences we allow, it’s probably not as risky as at first I feared it might be.

    • Thanks for your insight on RLV-XPTools.

      The limitation of XPKeys to premium members also reduces the griefing possibility.

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