Extra Obsidian Bare Applier (Darker)
Product Update · 6 years ago · permalink
A customer requested a darker version of the Obsidian face applier, one more consistent with the rest of the skin's tone. If this has ever annoyed you, rejoice; one has been added to the bare Omega head applier button on the Obsidian vendor. If you've already bought it and really want this darker variant (reminder: no eyebrows or makeup included), send rhet0rica a notecard and she'll get you fixed up.
Language diversity survey
Market Research · 6 years ago · permalink
To get a sense of the size of our international community we'd like to know what you speak and how well you speak it! Please fill out this survey, even if you can only speak English.

WCN update 2.3
Product Update · 6 years ago · permalink
After months of agonizing tweaks and internal version number bumps, the WCN is finally updated. This new version has a quieter sound profile, customizable range and power outputs, and cuts down on network traffic as much as possible (at the cost of slightly higher script time).

Standard XVS redelivery available.

To configure a WCN, use /5setup.
Taidee says: "Hello?"
Releases · 6 years ago · permalink
The Opaque Semiconductor Taidee is now available for L$300 in copy-mod form at the fancy new Opaque table in our outdoor sales area. Sit-able, relinkable, and fully capable of protesting mistreatment, the Taidee is the perfect autonomous floor urchin for anyone disillusioned with the plainness of a Roomba. Stay tuned for more "are-you-sure-this-isn't-a-treasure-hunt-prize?" products from Opaque!
Hunt Phase 3
Eisa/NS · 6 years ago · permalink
Phase 3 of the Hunt is now on.

No new materials are added in this phase, only the recipes for the controllers.

The hunt will end some time on November 12.

All previous recipes are still available.

You have no excuses.

Get to work!
Hunt Phase 2
Eisa/NS · 6 years ago · permalink
Phase 2 of the hunt has now started, adding 4 new material types and 8 prizes to supplement the 5 material types and 5 prizes already available from phase 1.

Phase 3 will start on November 4, adding 2 final prizes.

The hunt will end on November 12.

To join the hunt, drop by Club io and click the briefcase by vi0let.
Obscure Product Features 2
Trivia · 6 years ago · permalink
Continuing from last time...

  • NeoVISION and iKON ORAMA eyes don't just support !broken and !fixed, they also support !light error, which will give you spooky red-ring-of-death eyes until !fixed.

  • Akashic Icons are compatible with Lust Industries blinkers, and can charge the core at the Drone Station in Dolly Dreams. Users of devices designed to detect these messages might be surprised to find that using the "silly" function on the icon, which emits the sound of a Jeep horn, produces the text "Wouldn't You Like To Be A Pepper Too?"

  • The love particles feature of the Akashic Icons firmware was also inspired by the Drone Station, where mute, rubbery devotees regularly greet each other with bombardments of multicolored hearts.

  • Certain attachments have sink priority, which causes the particles from the Akashic Icons to go into them rather than avatar center (which is usually, rather unceremoniously, your crotch.) This is true of controllers, icons, and the SuperBit.

  • NS induction and plug-in chargers, including the ARC, internally use the ACS charging protocol, although only the FRG Induction Charger is compatible with Nekobots and ACS constructs. Of the four alternative charging protocols Companion supports (Spectrum+1, UMD, Qetesh, and ACS), ACS is the only type actively under development. UMD chargers are believed to be extinct, Spectrum+1 chargers were deprecated by the developer in favor of an obfuscated protocol which operates on an unknown channel, and only a single charger remains for Qetesh's avatar life meter, located on the grounds of its creator's store.

  • The Demo Stand supports vertical position adjustment with the Page Up and Page Down keys.
  • Status Update: Kampff–Voet Testing Results
    Events · 6 years ago · permalink
    A few weeks ago we instituted mandatory K–V testing for robots in Eisa to ensure they meet with our safety standards and do not generate lawsuits against the company because they are a) too human or b) insufficiently compliant with their own ethical protocols. It's been a little while since the initiative began, and Dr. Kuusisto has offered the following news on progress with evaluations:

    The amount of people we gathered for the testing few weeks back exceeded all of our expectations. Around 45 to 50 participated, which is quite a lot, and more than we even calculated. Now, those who would fail the test are meant to be either a) be scrapped, or b) be re-programmed. We did test runs on a few units to gauge how much a regular "re-programming RP" would take, and we clocked around 1.5 to 2 hours. And, judging from the tests so far, at least 50% of the people taken the test do require this procedure.

    So, punch in the numbers to your nearest Texas Instrument, and we get up to, 2×25=50 hours of non-stop roleplay, or at least 37.5 hours. This means to make this work, we need to develop a RP scenario to spread it out over a couple of weeks.

    "Why can't you just send the results over to us, and we'll get the information later?" By doing this I would get swamped with messages, asking, "When will I be reprogrammed?" To answer that question, I'd find it easiest and most convenient to do the announcements in one big swoop.

    So I thank you for your patience on this matter. Thank you.
    Radiant update
    Updates · 6 years ago · permalink
    The ODS 04-9063-D has been updated to version 1.2. This version adds ATOS-compliant IFF and the ability to be repaired using the new (rezless) repair autotool. Existing customers can use a redelivery terminal or the monad already in your possession.
    On non-standard skin UVs
    Excuses · 6 years ago · permalink
    For posterity, regarding Kemono:

  • The standard metalloplastic pattern was derived closely from an old system skin called ZGCY-005 by Liquid Mind Creations. That used system UVs, and there's no way to automatically convert from the system to Avatar 2.0 coordinate spaces.
  • Our team consists of a graphic designer and a modeller; we do not have a true visual artist. As such we do not possess the skill or time to meticulously redraw the skin and do it justice. In the past someone undertook the effort to perform the conversion to a range of Utilizator bodies and heads, but unfortunately they disappeared into the night before we could work out payment terms for the somewhat unsolicited commission, and even then, the work was for the old, pre-Nova version of the skins.
  • There are already a wide range of very excellent robot panel lines and similar intended for use on Kemono bodies which are designed specifically to take its geometry into consideration; the metalloplastic pattern wouldn't look as good, as it's intended for a slightly more realistic figure and has actually been optimized repeatedly for the geometry of the Maitreya Lara body specifically.
  • All of the above is magnified a thousandfold for the Rikugou; it has very bizarre UVs and the metalloplastic panel lines would clash horribly with the body's native seams, sockets, and so on. Odessa Wilde previously expressed intent to make Rikugou skins, but to my knowledge she needs a good kick in the pants if she's ever going to make them.
  • Nova and its hyperdetailed bump and spec maps are not stylistically consistent with cel-shaded anime anyway.
  • And if you really want the skin that badly, there's nothing stopping you from using a compatible body for it.

  • Regarding male Omega-compatible skins:

  • Market fragmentation for male bodies is extreme compared to female bodies. The vast majority of female avatars (excluding Utilizator's bodies, as covered above) use roughly the same proportions, but in our skin survey we found that about a third prefer heavily muscled avatars, and another third prefer lithe or femboy avatars, so three different skins would be needed to cover that alone. This diversity is simply too great for us to invest so many hours of work into a market that's estimated to be a tenth of the size of its distaff counterpart.
  • Feature sparsity is a major problem for all mesh bodies trying to fit Omega UVs. We've found on many occasions that places that are dead spaces on normal human skins (i.e., containing no features that require particular shading) are arranged inconsistently, resulting in the metalloplastic panel lines looking very different between bodies; for example, the breasts on Belleza distort the rings around the nipples. In particular, the Signature Gianni has pecs that are somewhat different from a system avatar and do not line up well with some other male bodies. This is a much more dramatic problem than we've seen with any of the female bodies we've tested, and further fragments the market.

  • Regarding other bodies:

  • You have no idea how much work it'd be.
  • Just no.
  • The Hunt is Live!
    Eisa/NS · 6 years ago · permalink
    Phase 1 of our definitely amazing hunt experience has been up since Wednesday this week. See the news post at EisaNet for more information.

    P.S.: "screws" = "nuts and bolts."
    Exhibition Bugs
    Companion Bugs · 6 years ago · permalink
    Exhibition is Companion's menu system. The current version of Exhibition is version 4, which significantly changed the menu system's structure, allowing for multiple simultaneous sessions as well as multiple access methods through supplementary scripts known as drivers. Companion ships with two drivers, the tty driver and the dwm driver, which control dialog-based menu interactions and on-board touch screens, respectively. (Users of mini controllers, which lack touch screens, may wonder if they can dispense with the dwm driver, but as the dwm driver is also required for responding to most controller touch events, this is unlikely to yield happy results unless you have an alternative access device, such as a remote console and a power switch. It is not required to operate the lid.)

    There are three common ailments that affect Exhibition:

  • Duplicate dialog menus. This is caused by an insipidly complex series of events involving a remote access device (including the Screen Console Manager), resulting in multiple sessions for one user key. Although pains are taken in the tty driver to prevent this from occurring, it sometimes happens anyway. The easiest way to resolve this is to reset the exhibition-tty module, which will clear all current sessions without causing exhibition-core to rebuild the entire menu system from the ground up.

  • "Your viewer does not support textbox entry. Please switch to another viewer." For reasons that still bewilder us, the Singularity Viewer does not fully support entry through textboxes, and may instead present a standard dialog with a single button labelled "!!llTextBox!!". We recommend using Firestorm or Catznip instead. Users commonly choose to run Singularity under the mistaken impression that its poor support for advanced graphics means that it is necessarily more attuned to running on low-end computers, but nothing could be further from the truth; all modern viewers allow the user to disable various graphical enhancements.

  • Screen distorted and/or graphics missing. This is almost always caused by modifying the model line in the _oem file. Companion uses the controller's self-identified model to determine a) the screen geometry, and b) battery auto-positioning settings. We warned you not to mess with it!
  • Obscure Peripheral Features
    Trivia · 6 years ago · permalink
    A number of peripheral devices include not-so-obvious features and commands worth mentioning. Here are some examples:

  • The SuperBit provides the mood command. This can be used to set the text that appears under your SuperBit's titler. The SuperBit improves compatibility with the NS Simple Mood Manager protocol, so the NanoCom Region Monitor will also display this information.

  • Most Akashic Icons (excluding the Incandescence lightbulb head and the 'Loyalty' NS logo icon) include a cheat script that lets you see local chat even when your ability to hear is disabled, including when your controller is powered down. This is intended for roleplay use. Click the icon to toggle this.

  • Ornamental Status Lights display the unit's "working" status, which can be toggled on and off with !working and !done. This is also activated automatically when processing text, e.g. when voice filters are enabled. Additionally, when standing on a charger, OSL version 2 elements will show the current battery capacity (all segments will be fully lit once the battery is recharged.)

  • The Chassis Specification Unit also responds to the !working condition, producing continuous disk access sounds.

  • NeoVISION and iKON ORAMA eyes have support for !broken and !fixed, and will spontaneously blur your vision temporarily.
  • Battery Handshaking and You
    Companion Bugs · 6 years ago · permalink
    The post-attach process in Companion 8.4 is particularly prone to misbehaviors, especially during login. These issues stem from the unpredictability of the order in which devices attach, particularly the battery and the controller itself. The following problems are well-described:

  • Battery suddenly appears to drain to 0% capacity (often reporting "battery level at 50%" first). This seems to be associated with cancelling a login after the controller has identified the battery; on the next login, it attempts to finish the handshaking process, only to discover that the battery's UUID has changed and is no longer valid. Ejecting and re-inserting the battery should update the relevant information and stop the controller from reporting that the battery is empty.

  • Teleport subsystem (FTL) disabled, especially repeatedly after teleport, and issue recurs even after applying a full power profile. The Core Services Bus module believes the controller is stuck in emergency power mode (5% power or less), and is restoring the emergency power template accordingly. This also seems to be caused by the controller erroneously reading the battery as empty. When a full (or nearly full) battery is properly recognized, this template isn't cleared because the power level is above 10%. Changes in Companion 8.5 should reduce the frequency with which this problem occurs, but in the mean time it can be resolved with a partial SSM reset, i.e. reset bonds followed by reset power.

  • Sudden spike in temperature reported by ATOS, resulting in loss of system integrity and being unable to boot, possibly occurring more than once. ATOS has incorrectly identified the charge level change caused by inserting the battery as incoming power (i.e., from a zap.) Several efforts have been made to quash this bug, but it still occurs from time to time. Repair the unit and then try reset sentinel immediately after booting up to prevent repeated overheating. Note that this can also be caused maliciously by a high-powered energy weapon, although a bug in 8.4.2 and 8.4.3 actually causes the system to ignore most such nuisances.

  • These bugs were not well-understood at the time of Companion 8.4.0's release, and due to their rare nature are most commonly encountered by controllers that have been in service for some time.
    2017 Halloween Treasure Hunt: Slightly Delayed
    Events · 6 years ago · permalink
    Despite our best efforts, Eisa's annual Halloween festivities are running a bit behind anticipated schedule. They should be in place to start this Saturday, at the latest.