I have a character who is the face of our team, our hacker Beta is addicted to Simsense chips. Now my character wants to make sure that she can supply the best simsense available to our hacker. She has all the hook ups, equipment, contacts all she needs to do is turn it into a chip she can sell on to her hacker.

How does all of that work?

How do you then take that simsense recording and turn it into a BTL? How can I also do a bit of digital magic, so that it is not leisurely sex, but hot steamy sex with the chemistry of a formula 1 car?

I understood that BTLs are like in Strange Days, recordings of sensory experiences, memories and perceptions, how does simsense figure into all of this?

Why do you want to produce Simsense yourself? You can buy them in a shop legally. And your personal home videos will probably never be as good as professionally produced Sims... Or are we talking about BTL? You can find the rules for making a BTL chip or -deck in the Unwired source book.

Edit: Memories are not a part of Sims, btw.

Strike that, reverse it. The recorded memories in Strange Days are effectively simsense. Better-Than-Life is what you get when you turn the dials up to 11. See, your normal simsense has sensory and emotive tracks which are edited to conform to standards and content-so you can feel how tight the underwear is, but you're not going to have an orgasm over how tight the underwear is or feel like you're getting a rope burn across your nethers every time you walk. BTL amplifies the sensations to those levels and beyond; it's like living in hyperreal mode with the sensory apparatus of a god...and that's before you crank up the emotive tracks or do any editing.

BTL is like LSD. You drop/chip it, and your mind is expanded to new heights that was never before imagined!

There are certain things that only home videos can only do. That cheerleader from class being done by the football coach in the storage shed. It is not about sex it is about fulfilling fantasies, evidence, dehumanization, power. In this case the character is addicted to living her life through the life of my face, it is a drug and she cannot get enough of.

With added use comes tolerance, it is no longer enough that it's the football coach it has to be more. I am not talking about setting off the levels at 11, but of slowly twisting the nobs by degrees so that the demand for more stays.

So, if I can't jack up the levels of experience through artificial means then I have to do it through situation, drugs, and creativity.

-Chrysalis

Oh! That's the long, slippery slope to "Black Beetles", the BTL recordings of people who are tortured...

To death!

While Unwired doesn't list actual prices for the studio editing gear for simsense, the simsynth, I believe older products such as Shadowbeat, actually did.

As an alternative, if you're slotting your own moodchip BTLs while making your recording, the heightened, more-real-than-real emotions the moodchip induces into you will get recorded by your simrig into the wet record you're producing. The Reality Amplifier chips in Unwired may also be helpful. Specifically, the amp chip "Oracle" which cranks your real sensory inputs up to BTL levels, although slotting "Breakdown" would be good if you wanted to produce a home-BTL from the POV from a BDSM Submissive/Bottom.

One of the reasons BTLs are called "Better than life" is because it is factually true: the sensations your brain recieves from a BTL chip are more intense than your nervous system is capable of recieving, naturally. Basically, it's like running extra current into your gray matter, and forcing an endorphin dump.

I just didn't have the word count to get into the nitty-gritty mechanics of simsense production in Unwired, which is why there aren't simsynth prices in there. I would like to return that topic when SR4 does a media sourcebook, though. For now, I'd recommend using the PAB prices as a guideline, since PAB units are very similar to simsynths, but simsynths are probably a bit cheaper because there is a wider market for them.

The other comments here about homemade simsense recordings not being as high-quality as professional simsense recordings are definitely accurate (even if you turn them up to BTL levels with a simsynth), but just like there's always a market for amateur porn, there's always a market for amateur simsense.

AH and Adreal covered it pretty well. but a Sim has certain protection built in, like if you go to the movies in RL and see someone jump out of a plane. You know the person is falling and good camera work gives you some of the feeling but you are not going to get all the adrenaline rush or feel what it's really like to have the wind pulling at your body and cloths, but you have an idea, a suggestion. The BTL strips out those , you odn't just feel it like it really feels, you're getting a rush in excess of what the real thing give you.