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Oct 18, 2001, 5:30pm

1) Auto update of avatar data - I hate haveing to dump my data every
time there's an avatar update. It seems pointless, AW should manage this
for me and make changes for me.

2) Fog of War - Or something to make the pop up smoother/more bearable.

3) Triangle count - Can I get some information on the number of
currently rendered triangles on screen? I'm getting some rather piss
poor frame rates and I'm not sure if it's related my graphics card (tnt
2 ultra on a p3 800) or players avatars have far too many rendered
triangles then desierable. I suspect it's the models/avatars some of
the worlds use being far too 'detailed' per say. I'm almost always in
upper single digits or at best, low teens in the realm of frame rates
for almost any world.

4) Fullscreen - Is there anyway to go into full screen mode and perhaps
attempt to gain some frame rate advantage over being a windowed
application?

5) Resize view screen - Default values for the window size, 640x480,
800x600, etc. Or something to help create a nice semi-square viewing
area.

6) Zoom - Sometimes I would like to see some objects a little closer at
a distance. Also good for trying to look at an object on the floor.

7) Drop object - There needs to be something for builders to allow them
to drop an object and have it move down untill it collides with another
objects surface. Not the bounding box but next next surface it finds.
It's hard at times to get objects to lay on tables or carpets to lay on
floors.

8) Avatar Equipment - It would be nice if we could have mind
customization for avatars in the department of avatars being able to
pick up and wear other 'equipment' namely new shirts/skins, belts, hats,
boots, etc. So we the users can look diffrent even if we use the same
avatar.

9) Text Macros - a macro/alias to allow users to send back predefined
text replies.

10) Emotes - I know there are 'actions' but they dont' cover all the
range of possable emotions.

11) Action Tabs - Some models have several actions associated with them,
Might be time to include a tab button list or some scrollable button
array.

12) Face animations - I'm not talking about the blinking eyes, moveing
mouth would be nice too IF triggered by the player. Or perhaps
automaticly when the user sends text.

13) Character states - I want my character to sit in a chair and stay
there, hold a pose, dance till I say stop, etc. Animations that cycle
or freeze frame untill I specify where to move from there.

14) Particle affects - Players want fountains, let them make fountains.
:-) Include it with the animations and you can have spell casting
wizards. Hey it's an idea. :-/

15) Day and Night Cycles - Low light at night, bright durring the day,
rising and setting suns.

16) Doors with locks - Make it a keypad next to a door, user clicks it,
enters a key code and if authorized, they can enter. Truely private
rooms if this and no cliping allowed is set in a world.

17) User object browser - I have build rights into a world, GREAT! Now
what objects exist? A menu to show me would be lovely :-)

18) Line of sight or obstruction block for speech - It's annoying when
your in a area with many rooms and you hear someone but don't see them.
Sometimes I just want to talk to a small group of people in private but
not have to whisper it all or go really far away so others who don't
want to hear, don't.

19) Player Radar - Show me all the indivdiuals in a X radius around me,
but no backgrouns, just a black circle with dots relative to my location
and faceing.

20) Built in Random Number Generator - For the DnD people :-)

That's enough for now.

Oct 18, 2001, 6:41pm

[View Quote] Alright, that was uncalled for. I have some decent and fair ideas. I
don't need you tell me the likelyhood of them existing or how dumb they
are. It's just a bunch of suggestions.

> Would be nice.. don't plan on it..

I could have used without these comments.

> ?

Pop up is what they call when an object suddenly appears in front of
your eyes when before you saw nothing existing there. This is quite
evident when you have a low radius. And don't say "Increase your
radious then" because my frame rate is bad enough as it is.


> Is it really that big of a deal?

Who cares how big of a deal it is, it's would just be a nice feature
to have.

> I can put money on this.. this will NEVER happen.. what about Paintball
> worlds? Clicking on a person whom is zoomed in on isn't going to make
> Paintball fun..

That's why you have a world flag to enable or disable it like with
flying and cliping.


> That's what shift is for..

Shift, while simple, does take unnecessary time when the system can do
it itself.

> That is more of a game thing.. not a VR thing..

VR is but a game, and even still, it's a nice feature, Allows for more
then the just one default model set. Everyone can be slightly diffrent,
and people love customization.

> Would make AW a living hell.. world owners would kill you if you were
> actually serious..

Why? Everywhere else they exist and it's just a simple convience.
Explotations? Okay so ya get a spammer once. Kick him off. People can
do this now with copy paste, it's just annoying.

> Make new ones yourself..

I ment to say Emotes as a text command like "/me ..." in irc. It's
just to something to change the look of the text slightly and denote
it's diffrent in some way. Nothing special.

> What is the point of this?

Some models have so many actions/emote buttons that the users crop the
names to make room for them. This sometimes makes for confusing sound
names and also with a scrollable emote button list, you can have
unlimited buttons in theory. Allow customization and users will love
you.

> Would cause lag and would also be a thing that dealt with the face texture..
> not the AW program.. (I think)

AW has blinking eyes, why not moveing mouths? Rotateing textures is
not a big deal I strongly suspect.

> And when someone forgets to make it stop the lag gets so unbarable your
> computer crashes..

They dont' lag and crash on me now when people dance around or do
emotes. Now, this is really ment for things like sitting down and such.
Don't want people danceing forever, fine, just make it so you can do
things like sit, lean, or stand in a pose. No unneccessary frame rate
killers. Just something interesting to look at.

> So make new textures..

Textures look ugly when trying to do partical affects. Plus you can
do everything from water to smoke, to sparks to fire with particals.
Much more interesting and and quite flexable.

> Get a bot..

I don't want a bot to be half the solutions for what I want in a
world. Bots are but hacks of features the software should already
have. Look at irc bots, Mostly evaporated when service bots came out
with irc servers. See neccessity, fill it with feature. That's what I
say.

> That's what the enjoyment of being caretaker of a world is for..

I don't know what you mean here.

> simple.. type the URL to the object path you use in your web browser..

Again, not sure what you mean here. I don't own the world, i'm
talking about in this case, I'm a new builder and I want the client to
tell me what I have available to me in a simple easy to view format.

> That is a thing called privacy.. you'll never have it..

I like my privacy and so do many others.

> That is a waste of typing.. what would that do?

This kind of comment is really unnecessary. It's just a feature
request. Allows me to see who is around me and perhaps get information
about them. Would be great for world admins wouldn't ya think?
Kick/ban from a small overhead view. I would think so.

> Which is another use for bots..

Again, bots are simply exist to fill requirements the software can't
at the moment, but most likely should if it's a commonly used feature.


Next time please be more kind in your comments and offer only
reasonable and not derogatory statements. It's just a wish list, not
out right demands and nor was I bitching about aw.

Sentack

Oct 19, 2001, 10:54am

[View Quote] As a form of entertainment then, let us agree that said 'application'
does have many simularities to various other products that operate on
the internet, includeing for example "Everquest". (A lousy comparison I
know but It'll do)

They both have 3d gameing enviorments, ment to handle 3d
characters/avatars to walk around the world and interact with other
players. Both applications allow various forms of gestures with there
characters. And both have a secure logging mechanism to make sure that
each handle used is retained for as long as the player feels fit to keep
it.

So, with this in place, both applications could then borrow from each
other reasonable and fitting concepts that would help the playerbase of
both worlds to experience the maximum amount of enjoyment from each
application. So while you may say that ActiveWorlds is not a game
*Snicker*. It doesn't hurt it in the least that it could borrow many
game like elements. Not so that it would actually become a game
*Snicker*. But so that the players would have a larger breath of choices
available to them in the name of entertainment :-)

Sentack

p.s. Titles are near pointless btw, my game is your "Virtual World" is
some other guys "Junk".

Oct 25, 2001, 10:23am

[View Quote] That's basicly what I'm asking for, more gameing material that's
'available' but doesn't take away from the rest of the feature set nor
hinders builders or users. I mean, I think the interface could be
jazzed up a LOT but beyond that, I'm talking about simple things like,
Auto Die roller, Ranged combat resolution, Partical affects for avatars
or triggered partical affects (Spell casting looking stuff or smoke from
gun barrels) And just other 'borrowed ideas'. Can't hurt the system.

Tony

Oct 19, 2001, 2:22pm

I wrote my last request post in some haste, so I take this time now to
clarify some points with further explanations of why and how I would
like to see some of the changes I've mentioned.

Full Screen:
I'm not the grandest of programmers, Heck, most of what I do is in
Unix. But I do know that Full screen graphical applications do work a
lot better then in window mode. Plus a fixed resolution helps as well,
or at least being able to default to some specific resolution standards
(640x480, 800x600) would be nice only because they are recognized and
pleasing formats to view 3d graphical spaces in. I know the screen is
currently adjustable, but sometimes it would be nice just to have have a
menu option to instantly set the screen size to see how the new
resolution fares.

Lag:
I tend to think this term gets abused far far too much. From how I
see it, Lag in this case is when there is a noticeable delay in
communication between two systems. In this case, from Server to client
or vise versa. This lag is usually caused by overloaded servers,
internet delays, or packet loss.
I would assume, although am not positive, that the transmission of a
'action' is but a simple small packet that informs the clients that the
user is performing 'x' action. One simple small transaction that a 2400
baud modem most likely could pick up on in real time.

But in this application, when you receive a 'action' packet, it forces
an animation sequence to be performed. This then stresses your
computers graphics equipment to try and processes the animation. If
multiple people perform complex actions or do so with complex avatars,
then that users graphics processor will be easily overloaded and
suddenly you get very jerky displays and slow reaction times from the
client computer. This is not exactly LAG in my view, but what I refer
too when I talk about "The frame rate dropping" The computer can not
render the display fast enough, and so takes as much cpu time as
possible to try and keep up with things, resulting in the system not
responding well to other commands, resulting in the game appearing to
'lag'.

Why do I make such distinctions separate? Well it's because the
problems are solved doing two very different resolutions. True lag is
usually an internet problem. Perhaps a bad hub, router, Server
overload, etc. Usually this is the hardest to solve.

Poor frame rates can be fixed by the client through better hardware or
reducing the client window size, or looking at lower polly portions of
the world. On the server side, eliminating the use of High polly
avatars and objects helps keep players happy with higher frame rates and
faster response times.

That's my clarification of what's true Lag and the results of Poor
Frame Rates masking as Lag.

Bots:
I can't stress this enough. Bots usually are just player 'patches' to
necessary but unavailable features they want. The best example of this
is found on IRC. In the beginning, players had nothing to help control
their channels. Occasionally they would be taken over by other members,
sometimes the 'maintainers' would find people they didn't want as ops of
the channel, and other times nobody with ops would be around to grant
ops to old time users, forcing them to shout "Get out!" To kick everyone
out and try to regain ops.
(An "Op" btw is an operator, or basically someone who has master control
over the channel, including kick and ban rights.)

So Players created Bots to sit in the channel as an OP and do a lot of
the things I talked of above. They sat around in the channel, oping
people on their op list, kicking people on their kick lists and
providing information when people asked.

Maintainers of irc servers found that all these 'bots' where really
not a great idea. For one thing, they took a lot of unnecessary
bandwidth, they where often buggy and sometimes resulted in erratic
behavior, and people who wanted bots sometimes had no clue how to get or
maintain one but wanted something like a bot to keep there channel in
control.

Hence came Services. ChanServ, NickServ, MemoServ, etc. These are IRC
Server maintained "Bots" That can help you register, maintain and
control a channel, register and maintain a NickName (A problem in irc),
and Send messages to people while they are off-line (MemoServ). This
then eliminated a LOT of bots, because
1) The services usually became stable very quickly being maintained by
the irc server admins.
2) One interface, thus making it easy for people to ask other users
how to use it since most likely they too have used the services.
3) Constant updating, allowing for the latest security and feature
patches to be added without having to apply the patch yourself.
4) Users did not have to run the bot on their own machine, saving them
from any expenses that created.
5) Saved the irc server owners bandwidth costs.
6) irc server owners can actually HELP users with any channel or nick
issues, having admin support to the services.

So as you can see, "Services" Helped eliminate the need for a lot of
bots. Now did they completely wipe out everything with services. Nope,
you still see role-playing bots and game bots and Info bots as well.
But they tend to be very specific and concentrated on just one set of
services that are obscure and very custom. But those bots also don't
have to have lots of generic code to deal with things such as oping,
deoping, kicking, etc. They just need to do one specific thing and
that's all. Services do the rest.

I don't see why this can't be true for ActiveWorlds. Since the
situation is almost the same, and one can see that the results could
easily be the same as well. For the most part, ActiveWorlds already
takes care of a lot of the features that IRC has/had issues with.
Nickname control, off-line messaging, basic channel/world control to
name a few. But bots still exist in high frequency and they tend to
again, perform a lot of the same functions. Auto Greeting, Kick
control, auto reply to chat commands, Day/night background changes,
gaming activities (Rolling dice). All things that could be combined
into a service like device or in the case of things like Day Night
Control, and Auto Kick, could be included as functions or features of
the World server software.

Just an idea.

Sentack

Oct 22, 2001, 11:21am

[View Quote] You guys are seriously no help. Have you anything else to say other
then "This sucks!" Do you think your the only ones with good ideas or
something? *Groans*

As for this idea, it's not bad but perhaps we need to alter it some.
For one thing, maybe the user should have some more information, such as
some of the following ideas.
1) Last time online tab - A tab to inform when the user was last
online or made visable to this user (If and when ignore/hide/visable
flags are added in. They are on Feature Vote.)
2) Last Message sent Tab - Last time we sent a telegraph to someone.
Kind of usefull.
3) Notes Tab - Rather silly but potentionaly usefull.
4) Catagories - Originize your friends. Again silly but when it comes
ot contacts, I think ICQ.

So this would at least give one a lot more information about who they
know on thier contact list and what relationship they have with them.
Then perhaps a mass mailing to all users in all catagories or just one
for update request. The good friends will respond to you, the bad ones
(Or idiots like we see around here) Won't. If they don't, then most
likely you don't need to know them anyway.

How's that?

Tony

Oct 22, 2001, 1:13pm

[View Quote] Alright that's true. I myself was getting a bit nasty there. It just
seems every idea out there gets slapped more then anyone tries to come
up with a better solution. It's easy to poke out the flaws in an idea
then try and come up with more constructive criticism or admit any
similar alternative solutions.

Sentack

Oct 23, 2001, 1:14pm

[View Quote] Ya know, you could put some effort into actually trying to be helpfull
instead of a one line complainer.

Tony

Oct 23, 2001, 4:08pm

[View Quote] You gave an explination of why you wouldn't like that kind of message,
not why it's usless nor any help as to further develop the idea. "Its
sucks because I wouldn't like it!" is not what I would call constructive
critisim. And what's with this bug in your ass? You can make comments
but I can't make any back at you?

Oct 23, 2001, 6:44pm

[View Quote] Reasonable, understandable and acceptable. Plus not one deragitory
comment in the whole thing. He at least brings up some reasonable ideas
as to why this could be abuseive. Maybe this was in the mind of those
who didn't like the idea but if you don't explain the reasons such as sw
chris has done here, then it just sounds like complaints. In any case.
Thanks, Good point, well taken.

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