Owner HUD preview released, Trance fragments and Mesmerizer 1.1

The Owner HUD preview should be up in vendors this evening.  It's free (although in order to purchase it, you have to give the vendor L$1 which it will promptly refund), so anyone with "owner"-level access to a Mesmerizer should consider getting it.  I've come to rely on it, especially for live trancing, which is one reason that I'm releasing it as a preview - it's so useful even in its current limited state that I felt I shouldn't keep it to myself.  I'll happily accept suggestions for ways to improve it, as well as comments on some of the non-standard UI design choices I've made. 


Since the previous post, I've been experimenting more with the concept of "trance fragment scripts", and I'm getting to like them more and more.  One significant problem with pre-recorded scripts though, is the lack of interaction with the sub.  As I said in my post on hypnosis in second life, one of the big issues I have with prerecorded trances is the lack of participation by the sub - they are pretty much expected to just sit back and watch.  This perhaps isn't such a big issue with fragment scripts, since they tend to be short sequences of messages that you can use within a longer trance, but it still bothered me, so I've tried to at least begin to address it in V1.1.

The minimum sort of interaction that I think is useful is just asking the sub a simple yes/no question within the trance, ideally one in which the answer is pretty-much a foregone conclusion.  Something like "Are you feeling calm and relaxed?" or "Can you hear me?".  The expected answer to both of these questions would be "yes", or some agreed-upon signal that indicated agreement.  To allow for the sub to respond to this sort of question, I've added pause and resume commands to V1.1.  These operate on the currently-playing script, and pause/resume playback.  The pause command takes a parameter, which is a number of seconds to pause before the script will automatically resume.  Scripts themselves have been augmented with a variant of the pause command so that the script playback mechanism can handle that itself rather than having to issue and re-parse the Mesmerizer command.

The way this is intended to operate is in conjunction with the new playscripti command, which tells the hypnotist each line that's being displayed to the sub.  When the script asks a question of the sub, then next line would be something like "pause 60" (or "!pause=60" in script language).  The hypnotist would see the question, as well as the sub's answer, and he can either issue a resume command (if the sub gives the expected response), or issue a stopscript command and take over the trance if the sub gives a response that requires a different continuation.  The timeout (60 seconds in the example above) means that, if the sub says nothing, then the trance will eventually continue anyway.  Of course, the hypnotist can resume the trance early if he so chooses, without waiting for the timeout or the sub's response.

I've only just started to experiment with this, but so far I think it works well.  So well, in fact, that I may have to add two more buttons to the Owner HUD button bar to quickly pause or resume a trance.