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Mar 10, 2000, 10:04am

[View Quote] If a multiline message was possible, you could create some ASCII art and
use it to flash the "I'm number one" signal.

Common in the USA, some may not know what I refer to, so try this: Hold
your fist up in front of you, knuckles up & elbow down, palm toward your
face. Now uncurl your middle finger it points straight up. See, "I'm
number one". BTW, make certain that there is no one standing in front of
you who knows what this means or you could get punched in the nose.

ScottyDM
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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Nov 26, 2000, 7:23am

Roland;

When we went from 2.2 to 3.0 there was a change in the way AW works that
makes me gnash my teeth in frustration every time I'm using it. My
dentist request that you make these changes ASAP...

Problem:
Moving with the mouse has always been somewhat clumsy, so I've learned
early on to use the keyboard for avatar movements. The keys need for
movement are for the most part different than those used for chatting
and in 2.2 it was possible to walk and talk at the same time. Not so in
3.0. Now, if I've been chatting, I must let go of the keyboard, grab the
mouse and click on the view window *before* I can move using the
keyboard. I *have* to stand still to chat and I cannot chat when moving
(or even during a *brief* pause in movement). There is also the old 2.2
problem of loosing focus during whispering and moving which I'll also
address with the same suggestion.

Suggestion:
Avatar movement keys are the four arrow keys, +, -, PageUp, and PageDown
(so we can move and look at the same time) along with the modifier keys
Shift and Ctrl. Now with the exception of + and -, *none* of movement
keys are needed in chat. There is no technical reason in the world why I
should not be able to type with my left hand while interspersing arrow
key movements with my right. Or to put it another way, the arrow keys
are focused on movement and the alpha-numeric keys are focused on the
chat window.

Quite simply, *always* direct the alpha-numeric keys and punctuation
keys to either the chat entry box or the whisper entry box (unless you
are building and have just clicked in the name box or some such place).
*Always* direct arrow keys, PageUp and PageDown keys to avatar movement
(again, unless you are building, when the movement keys shift focus from
the avatar to the object). As for the + and - keys, make both sets work
the same. If you are not actively typing in a message, they work for
movement (flying). If you are typing they go to the appropriate text
entry box. You will not be able to *start* a sentence with + or - unless
you first click the mouse in the desired text entry box. To restate
this: If the chat/whisper entry box is empty, + and - have movement
focus; if the chat/whisper entry box has text in it, + and - have
chat/whisper focus; when you hit return focus shifts back to movement.
Finally, when you've been whispering to someone, focus should *only*
change back to the general chat when you specifically click your mouse
on the chat entry box *or* the person you've been whispering to leaves.
The purpose of making both sets of + and - keys work the same is because
not all keyboards have a numeric keypad (laptop frustrations). Then
there are the (few) newbies who require three people spend nearly 10
minutes trying to explain how to fly before they finally realize that
there is a second set of + and - keys on the keyboard.

So manage the focus between the keyboard and general chat, whispering,
avatar movement, and building. 2.2 was not perfect, but it was *much*
better than 3.0 has become. I feel 3.0 can better 2.2 in this regard
with a little effort. Perhaps you could come up with some sort of matrix
showing area of focus in a column, and the key or keys on a row with the
intersection showing the rules for changing focus. If you'd like I could
create such a matrix as a start.

Thanks.

ScottyDM
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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 9, 2001, 5:12am

Crazy;

I do not use the mouse for movement. I use the arrow keys (either the
four keys between the numeric keypad and the main keypad, or the numeric
keypad with Num Lock turned off). I've found that in 3.0, right after I
type something, then hit return, I cannot move at all with either set of
arrow keys. If I try to use either + or - key to fly, it just types out
in the text entry box.

I've done a little experiment, it seems Roland has made the arrow keys
so that they move the cursor in the text entry box. Oh joy. trading a 2%
benefit for a 98% frustration. I did not notice this before because I'd
try to move *after* I hit return and my text entry box would then be
empty (so the cursor had no text to move across).

You know, if it was not so damn painful to use the mouse to move, this
would not be an issue. The mouse as movement control sucks majorly. That
needs to be completely reworked, but I thought the keyboard focus would
be easier to fix. I have this old drawing app that was originally
released for Windows and Unix, so the programmers did not follow the
Windows Way very closely, thus the pan and zoom are the easiest to use
of *any* app I've *ever* tried. To pan (move) you hold the right mouse
button and move the mouse slightly then stop (while still holding the
button). Shazam! It's like an accelerator, the a small displacement of
the mouse (from where you first clicked the right button) causes a small
velocity in the direction of the mouse displacement, a large
displacement causes a large velocity. You can slide all over your
drawing surface very fast with complete control. Release the mouse
button and motion instantly stops. To zoom click and hold the middle
mouse button (it requires a three button mouse) and if you sweep the
mouse from upper-left to lower-right you zoom in to fit the box you just
drew so that it is full screen size. To zoom out you sweep the mouse
from lower-right to upper-left, the box you drew compared with the full
screen size is your ratio for zooming out. Well, we don't zoom in AW,
but you get the idea. A really great user interface that is fast and
easy to use and control.

Something like this could be done in the AW browser for movement. Click
and hold the right mouse button then move the mouse in the direction you
want to go, the distance you move the mouse is the speed of movement. To
select an object simply click and release the right mouse button without
moving the mouse. The program could have a threshold radius of mouse
movement before it decides the user wants to move their avatar. The
object could be selected on button release if the threshold radius was
not exceeded. Something like this has been done in some VRML browsers,
but poorly. To move faster than a snail you'd need a mouse pad about
half a meter across because you need to move and hold the mouse really
far to get any speed. This is silly, motion should start at 2 or 3 mm
and should be an eye watering blur with a mouse displacement of about 5
cm or so.

ScottyDM

[View Quote]

Jan 9, 2001, 5:29am

Nope, not me.

Sometimes I come on to build, sometimes to socialize. With 90% or more
of the people on my contact list who have their location hidden, how
many would would simply have their presence hidden? What is the purpose
of the contact list anyway? Just ignore telegrams if your busy, it is
easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

ScottyDM


[View Quote]

Jan 5, 2002, 6:03am

The businesses have *always* gotten the shaft. Have you looked at
Uniserver prices? The smallest Uniserver is 25x the price of a similar
sized world here in AW. Go to some place like OuterWorlds and check
their world prices, they are forced to charge tons of money for a really
dinky world. I doubt they can even break even. And they charge more for
citizenship too (but no where near $114 per year).

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 6:54am

That is what I remember too KAH, they looked good until you realized it
was by the month. Also world sizes were pretty small, at the time I had
a PS8-XE which would be the size of a P20 now. I think that was the
biggest world on their list and it was quite a bit. There were quite a
few of what we would call here a P5.

Citizen prices have come down then, I remember $24.95. Not real high,
but a little bit higher (than it used to be).

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 9:04pm

Well, I am completely wrong. At one time there prices were substantially
higher than AW's prices for a similar sized world. Now they are
precisely the same (at least for the few spot checks I made). See:
http://www.outerworlds.com/worlds/

And this is not some hidden page, I found it in "3D Store".

ScottyDM

(Now thinking of mirroring SkunkWks in OW)

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 11:39pm

IP... Internet Protocol? Intellectual Property? (they don't fit)


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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 7, 2002, 12:55am

oh? so AW Corp is hosting OW's Uniserver? sheesh, they want real money
for hosting


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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 5, 2002, 6:29am

"Maybe 3.3 is costing them absurd sums to develop."

BINGO, give the lady a stuffed bear!

Does anyone know what a programmer makes? Then factor in the added
taxes, space to house the bodies, utilities, computers, furniture,
additional software license fees for professional development tools,
etc, etc, etc. You can pretty much count on around $100,000 per year --
unless your developers are senior, then the price goes up. AW Corp is
getting things done because they have FIVE programmers -- that is half a
million dollars a year. Want to know how to save $400,000 a year? Lay
off four of them and go back to the old model of a minor upgrade every 8
months or so...

I agree with everything that AW Corp is forced to do. But I do not agree
with the size of the increase (should be $4.95 instead of $9.50) nor the
length of the trial period (should be 4 weeks instead of 2 weeks). I
also feel it is stupid of AW Corp management to NOT SAY ANYTHING until
24 hours before this was implemented. A heads up in the newsgroup and
via their e-letter would have given us some idea, and time to get used
to this. And for them to get something rolling before the situation gets
desperate.

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 5, 2002, 5:22am

Yes, Uniserver prices are fabulously high. The smallest Uniserver is 25x
the price of a similar sized world here in AW. So packing up your world
and moving it to another Uniserver just because you are upset with
prices is kinda dumb.

However, once they solve the migration between Uniservers problem (and
about 2/3 of the things they cite in their web page about doing this are
simply bogus, they are thinking in the wrong paradigm), then they can
drop prices. Why? Consider this. A community is people, if you have 300
regulars who spend an average of 10 hours a week in your Uni, then
hardly anyone gets to actually talk with hardly anyone else. Make that
30,000 regulars and you end up with a couple of hundred on line at any
one time. If AW Corp were to charge a reasonable fee for a Uniserver
*and* they did not have the technology to allow people to move around,
then you'd have thousands of isolated islands with very few users in
each.

Why lower Uniserver prices? To grow.

Internet based VR *will* be the future. Who will lead? It will not be
any one company, but a technology (a protocol really), and *open*
protocols are an absolute must. Internet VR will be way to big for any
one company to handle.

Consider the web, that is http. How many companies publish and sell a
web server? Apache (the most popular), iPlanet, Zeus, Microsoft, and
there are probably dozens of other smaller companies. And how many
different web browsers? The last number I saw was somewhere around 30
unique web browser vendors. Now at least on some basic level *all* these
web browsers can interact with *all* these web servers. So it is the
protocol that will rule, not Microsoft, Sun, or some group of open
source developers. The enemy? Why those old protocols that no one
remembers any more, like Archie, or Gopher.

If web sites are kind of like worlds (looking at the eventual future of
Internet VR) then how many can we expect? Well, how many web servers are
there (multiple sites can be run from a single web server). I'm not
really sure, but back when Code Red was crunching IIS web servers
(Microsoft) right and left, I saw a world map with estimates of how many
*infected* IIS servers there were on each continent. I remember North
America had an estimated 630,000 infected servers -- and that was only a
fraction of IIS servers, not all got infected. I run IIS, and due to my
config I escaped infection, I also run a total of 21 web sites
(including OPs) on my big IIS server. And IIS is not the most popular,
Apache is.

So what might a *successful* world/uniserver company look like someday?
How about thousands to tens of thousands of active Uniservers running
world-wide. 100s of thousands to a million or more active world servers
running world wide (and many running multiple worlds). And that would be
one out of two or three big companies along with a dozen or more smaller
companies creating this software.

And where will all the citizens come from? I read somewhere recently
that it is estimated that there will be over a billion humans (not bots,
agents, or spiders) using the Internet by 2004. A billion people, maybe
half will be citizens in at least some Uni somewhere.

So the long-term name of the game is to get your protocol named as the
world standard for Internet VR, or to at least get something close
enough (perhaps in a compromise situation) that you can rapidly
re-purpose your product line to fit the world standard. Who is likely to
have the most muscle in negotiations? Well, the companies with the most
users, the most installations, and the biggest server customer base (Uni
and world owners).

So in my opinion, AW Corp *needs* as many *cheap* Uniservers out there
as they can possibly push. Then need to price their larger models so
that their customers *can* afford to compete on price with them for
citizenships, and for world server "parking" fees (the fees paid to a
Uniserver owner to have your world appear on their list).

So, I submit that it is *not* a silly business move to allow your
Uniserver customers to make a profit by selling citizenships and world
"parking" at a few % below what you sell it to the end users for, and
still be able to make a comfortable profit. There is retail, and there
is wholesale, it's been this way ever since money was invented.

Now here is the tough part, the long term name of the game may be to win
the protocol race, but meanwhile *survival* is an absolute necessity.
Will AW Corp survive? Probably, a year, two, even three... Will they win
the protocol race? Sadly, I don't think they have the vision to, but
hey, they could get lucky (and luck is as important as any other single
factor).

ScottyDM



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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 8:55pm

Yea, it is about the trust. If I were investigating an unknown company
and they wanted my CC for me to take a peek, welllll, maybe... I'd go
poke around their web site and see if I could find their cancellation
page. I'd look to see if I could find how to contact the company. If
these things were hard to find or worse, missing, I'd delete the
software -- no matter how much my buddies were raving about it.

AW has plenty of easy to find contact info, but their cancellation page
is buried.

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 9:16pm

Xoom has a history of deleting sites that they feel violate their ToS
without notice. They also don't do backups. If you use Xoom to host
files you must have your own local backups.

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 9:33pm

"And I bet they could travel between universes too..." I'll take this to
mean that the Shadoks were way smarter than AW Corp, that they did not
have to download a new bicycle to get to the other "universe".

<rant>
You know, AW has some stupid, imprecise, and misleading language: For
example calling the AW browser a "plug in" (into what? it is a stand
alone program). Or those new 3D "Home pages" (a micro-world really,
inaccessible from http). But the longest running gag (stupid joke) on
the part of AW is the naming of their server products.

A World Server serves up world content -- well named.

A Stand-alone World Server does the same, alone -- also well named.

A Galaxy Server is really a stand-alone world server that does not
require AW hosting -- a real galaxy will have millions and millions of
stars, many with worlds, so where the heck are all the other worlds,
this is a stupid name.

A Universe Server, at one time, when the AW universe was the only one in
existence, this name made perfect sense -- now, it is just a stupid
name. Since a "Uniserver" is really a server of servers, it could
rightly be called a Meta Server, or if you prefer a more colorful name,
Galaxy Server is a much better fit (but already taken).

Now a joke (to make a point):
This question was seen on a recent astro-physics exam:
Part 1: Define universe.
Part 2: Give two examples.

</rant>

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 11:48pm

Uni = one. The only one possible. The only one that could possibly
exist.

The so-called "parallel universe" idea in science fiction is just
another aspect of the one universe that exists. Astral, Spiritual and
other planes of existence still exist within our one universe. Even
Buckaroo Banzai did not leave this universe when he was traveling across
the 8th dimension.

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 9:45pm

The way I understand it, you don't even have to reconnect. Just use it
once then forget about it... Next month a charge for $9.50 shows up on
your bill. And by the time you look at your bill, AW my have also billed
a 2nd month. Of course they could get quite a few people who challenge
those charges, particularly if they do not make it easy or obvious how
to cancel.

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 11:50pm

Yep, I found it too, after a bit of digging. Let's just hope their web
page does not go down or gets lost. But the biggest problem is the
forgetting...

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 6, 2002, 11:54pm

That is the way I understand it too. My impression is that the software
is "hard coded" for a particular total land area and total number of
online visitors. My understanding is that the privately owned Uniserver
does not need to communicate with the "mother ship" in order to discover
these things the way a world server communicates with the Uniserver.


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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

Jan 7, 2002, 12:01am

You don't have to pay the 40%. Only pay it when you want upgrades after
the first year. (I think the 40% entitles you to all upgrades for the
next 12 months after you pay.)

Another model that AW Corp might try is the yearly maintenance contract.
For software in the $10,000 US and up range 15% to 20% per year is
pretty standard. Of course if you "forget" to pay for a year or two,
then want to upgrade you have to catch up on all your missed years or
pay full retail again.

ScottyDM

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always #5 FOO = ~FOO; // the sound of a beating heart

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