Mesmerizer 1.4 release, and Owner HUD

CHAOS Mesmerizer 1.4

CHAOS Mesmerizer 1.4 is going up in vendors now, and will be on Marketplace soon.  See the previous post for a description of all the new features.  In addition to the features already described, I will be including with Mesmerizer 1.4 a gift card for the CHAOS Trance Relay/Titler that I described in an earlier post, but never released.

CHAOS Titler

The CHAOS Titler is an optional device that can be worn by the sub to let people nearby see what text is being displayed on their screen (under the control of their hypnotist).  This is intended for use in a public, or demonstration trance situation, but can also provide very useful feedback to the hypnotist of what their trance text actually looks like.  This is especially useful with multi-line messages.  The on-screen text that is displayed on the sub's screen is duplicated by the Titler as hover-text over the sub's head.  This can be enabled or disabled by the publictext and nopublictext commands.  The publictext and nopublictext commands persist across logins.  To avoid confusing the sub during trance, they will not be able to see the hovertext, although those around them will.

In addition to this trance relay use, the CHAOS Titler can be used as a standard titler.  The two functions (title and trance text) are visually distinguished by the title (if any) appearing in white, above the trance text which appears in green.

The CHAOS Titler is a PAN device, and is therefore accessed from the Mesmerizer via the pansend and pansendpars commands.  It supports the following commands:

pansend titler lock - Prevents the titler from being detached
pansend titler unlock - Permits the titler to be detached
pansendpars titler text "some text" - displays "some text" in green.  Empty string to clear.
pansendpars titler title "new title" - sets the sub's title to "new title".  Empty string to clear.

The publictext and nopublictext commands make the Mesmerizer repeat (or stop repeating) all received text and text2 commands as PAN text commands to the titler.  The publictext and nopublictext commands were implemented in Mesmerizer 1.2, so that version or later is required to use the titler as a trance relay (although the PAN commands will work with earlier Mesmerizer versions).

To claim your free CHAOS Titler, simply wear the gift card and click on it.

CHAOS Owner HUD

While finishing up 1.4, I've also been working on the CHAOS Owner HUD.   A very early preview release of this has been available as a freebie in my vendors for a while, but the product version is a huge improvement. It won't be a freebie, but it won't be hugely expensive, either.

While the Mesmerizer is very powerful, it's also a pretty complicated thing to use.  As someone once almost said: "With great power comes great complexity".  But the Owner HUD is an attempt to make most of the common features of the Mesmerizer much easier to use.  The HUD doesn't address triggers - those still need to be defined via the command interface.  What it does do, though, is make many of the Mesmerizer commands easily accessible at the click of a pushbutton.  It also groups the various commands into related functions, which greatly simplifies finding things.  The HUD works seamlessly with the CHAOS Communicator, so it can control Mesmerizers in a different sim, provided they're connected to the same CHAOS Communications HUB as your Communicator.

The HUD has three forms or "modes".  The first is a tiny mode, which is a single button that sits unobtrusively at the top right of the screen:

Clicking that left-arrow expands the HUD into its second mode, the "Button Bar":

The right-most button on this bar shrinks the HUD back down to its minimized form for when it's not in use.  The next button, with a down-arrow, expands the HUD to it's full form.  I'll go through the rest of the main bar buttons from left to right.

The first (left-most) button lets you set the target - the avatar whose Mesmerizer will be controlled.  The floating text above the HUD always shows the current target, in this case "All", meaning that the HUD will control all Mesmerizers within range.  Clicking the Target button allows you to set the target to a nearby avatar, any of the most recently selected 9 targets, or a name you type in.

The next button with a microphone label opens a textbox in which you can type messages to be displayed in the center of the target's screen.  This is useful during trance, when typically the Mesmerizer would display a spiral with the trance text overlaid.  It can be used at any time, though, without a trance or spiral, which can be useful to send an "out-of-band" message to the target.

The microphone/text button works in conjunction with the next button, the one bearing a speech bubble icon.  This "speech" button specifies whether any text displayed via the microphone button will erase itself after about 15 seconds (the default behavior when the button is not pressed), or whether text should remain until either explicitly erased or replaced with new text.  In this mode, the speech button is either red or green (green when there's text being displayed on the target's screen, red to indicate that future text will be retained).

The next button, the Spiral, toggles on and off the Mesmerizer's spiral.   It changes to green when it emits a spiral command, and back to its default color shown above when no spiral is displayed.

The next two buttons - "trance faces" - correspond to the hypnotize and wake commands.

The next button presents a textbox where you can type any channel 99 Mesmerizer command to be sent to the target's Mesmerizer.

Finally, the menu button displays a menu for quick access to a few functions (teleporting to saved destinations, macro commands, and the ability to save or load the HUD's state information, for use during upgrades).

The Button Bar is aimed mostly at trance use.  It greatly simplifies trancing over use of the raw text and text2 commands, and I've found that I always use the HUD rather than the raw commands when performing trances.  For other Mesmerizer functions, you need to expand the HUD, by clicking on the down-arrow button, one in from the right.  This button causes a tab control to drop down beneath the Main Bar, and this tab gives access to the remaining functions of the HUD.  There are six tabs, of which only five are populated in the initial release.  The tabs are: Move, TP/Sit, Dress, RLV, Misc, and Trance.  I'll go through each of them.

Above is the Move tab which lets you control how the Mesmerizer wearer should move.  The top (graphical) row of controls causes them to turn in various directions (relative to how they're currently facing), lets you make them face a particular direction, or causes them to take step forward, back, left, right , up or down.   Other than these controls, the rest of the HUD is non-graphical, and uses labeled buttons to perform actions.

The first column of buttons causes the target to walk (in the direction they're facing), stop walking, walk to an object or avatar, or turn to face an object or avatar.

The second column causes the target to follow you, stop following you, come to you, or to turn to face you.

The third column lets you prevent the target from moving, allow them to move again, or animate them with a built-in or custom pose.

The TP/Sit tab consists of two columns of buttons.  The first column is mostly concerning teleporting the target (to you, to an SLURL that you type, or to a saved destination), allows you to save a landmark as one of those destinations, or lets you play back or edit user-defined macros.  As an alternative to using saved destinations or typing a SLURL, you can teleport the current target(s) simply by dragging a landmark onto the HUD.

The second column of buttons is mostly to do with sitting on objects by choosing from a list of likely objects, or by providing the key or name of the object, resitting on the current object, or standing up. The final button in this column displays the Status menu, which lets you get status information either about the target's Mesmerizer, or about the HUD itself.

The top section of the Dress tab has controls for Outfits, Attachments and Clothing Layers.  Each of these sections has a button to let you see what's available (Outfits) or currently worn (Attachments and Layers), and a button to change (Outfits) or strip (Attachments and Layers).  The Attachment Strip function supports the "Precision Stripping" feature introduced in Mesmerizer 1.3, where attachments can be individually and predictably removed, regardless of their attachment point.

The lower section of the tab allows for navigation of the #RLV shared folder.

The RLV tab allows setting or clearing of a number of restrictions, as well as listing the restrictions currently in force.

Finally, the trance tab contains buttons that duplicate some of the functions from the Main Bar (Hypnotize, Wake, Spiral, No Spiral and the various text options), but it also has buttons to control scripts, and to set whether emotes should be generated on entering or leaving trance, whether trance text should be made available to the CHAOS Titler for public viewing, and whether the on-text event should fire for received text or text2 commands.

The Misc tab currently has no controls on it, and is reserved for future use.

The CHAOS Owner HUD should be available in vendors and on MP within the next few days.