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Jun 1, 2006, 10:09pm

Ah yea and here's an prime example: AW 1692s 4781e. All the moving vehicles
along the raised highway. Works fine in 3.6 :X

Jun 2, 2006, 6:55am

o rly? I was told by another AWI member to post them here, and/or email to
beta at activeworlds.com o_O.

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Jun 3, 2006, 5:45pm

eerr is your subiect and message talking about the same thing? *confused*
To change where chat.txt saves, click browse first, and navigate to the
folder where you want the file to save at.

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Jun 4, 2006, 4:00am

My reaction as well. I'm going to pretend this was an oversight because I
just can't believe they would enable a global chat nanny over a world as big
as Alphaworld. I rarely use any cuss words but if I want to use it in a
conversation between my friends 100 miles away from GZ then that's my own
business. Who asked for this silly regulation o_O

Actually what's 10x worse though is no web links in chat anymore. I depend
on the convience of auto-linking in day to day chatting, as do most people.
*grumble*

- Com

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Jun 4, 2006, 4:11am

No ascii? Ick, your right. Lotta people gonna lose their special trademark
faces now :(

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Jun 4, 2006, 4:32am

Actually you know, I didn't even think about it at first...but what about
all the non-english speaking communities in AW? Don't they sorta need the
extended ascii characters? o_O

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Jun 4, 2006, 5:29pm

I hope so. That or YASBB. Right not there's no way to do propdumps :(

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Jun 4, 2006, 5:29pm

I hope so. That or YASBB. Right now there's no way to do propdumps :(

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Jun 6, 2006, 12:31am

See andras? you need to get the word out some more :D
YASBB = yet another survey/build bot. It's my personal favorite just because
its soo fast at what it does. Combine it with proptool and you can go a long
way with mass editting.

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Jun 10, 2006, 12:42am

Getting down there lol :P

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Jun 5, 2006, 4:36am

Yea :D Been having a blast. Sorry yall have to hear so many complaints; 4.1
is pretty awesome despite its bugs ^_^
Lookin' forward to when its all polished up.

- Com

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Jun 6, 2006, 4:01pm

It still doesn't quite seem to be where it was at before. It's closer, but
still needs some work. Changing it to huge would be a welcome change, it
sure made building more enjoyable ;)

There's also a number of buildings constructed during the week of huge cell
space that are no effectively unalterable because of the changes...

By the way, wasn't the whole the whole debate about raising it in the first
place because of lag reasons? Is it worth noting that 4.1 is significantly
faster than 3.6? About 25% faster. I think you got your headroom now ;)


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Jun 6, 2006, 7:32pm

I'ma happy Commie :D
Thanks JP ^_^

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Jun 6, 2006, 7:27pm

The past week, while AW was having troubles and building was disabled, I got
back into playing Oblivion, a modern PC RPG game. Along with this, I was
fascinated by the "AWE" equivalents available for oblivion. These are large,
60MB+ download texture packs which sport 1024 and even 2048, and in some
cases even 4096 version textures for common outdoor textures in the game.
Most of oblivion's textures are by default 512x512, whereas most of AWE's
textures are 256 with default AW at 128.

Along with these texture packs there are communities of modders which were
discussing the technical limitations of such high res textures. The claims
are universal, and should hold true for any 3d windows app.

As I always suspected, it's indeed true that there is zero performance hit
using high res textures so long as your video card has enough Video RAM to
hold it all. However, even it does run out memory, it merely overflows into
the system memory instead. When this happens, you won't notice an overall
drop in fps but instead stuttering as you move from area to area, or turn
around.

If anyone reading this is a professional in how the computer handles VRAM
overflow and can offer further information, please do so.

Anyway, this led me to wonder how much is "enough Video RAM". So I
downloaded a handy lil' tool called Video Memory Watcher. As the name
suggests, it monitors video RAM represented in a bar graph. Time for some
benchmarks!

In my tests I kept my vis at 120m, and stood still while everything loaded
and checked for memory usage. In each area, I would set the benchmark
standing point as my home and restart the browser, so I'd get a clean memory
bank for each new area.
I chose 120m vis because I figure that if you can operate and use 160-200m
vis in a developed area, then it's likely you have a pretty modern computer
with a 256MB video card.

-------

Standing at SW City GZ at 120m vis, facing west
Town square park is a high density area with many textures and details.
There are also TONS of images in the area which count towards video usage.

With AWE: 55MB
Without AWE: 49MB

Standing at East Ending at 120m vis, facing southeast
East Ending is an urban area, packed with buildings and details.

With AWE: 53MB
Without AWE: 45MB

Standing at central Orton Strip Mall at 120m vis facing east
Orton is infamous as one of the laggiest places in AW, and quite likely the
laggiest spot in SW City anyway. It's pretty unlikely anyone would be going
there here at 120m vis though lol.

With AWE: 67MB
Without AWE: 54MB

Standing at SW City Ballpark at 120m vis facing west
The above tests all take place in highly dense areas of town. The ballpark
area would closer resemble a more average density area you'd come across in
AW.

With AWE: 33MB
Without AWE: 23MB

Standing at AWGZ at 120m vis facing north
Last but not least here's the ol' world GZ.

With AWE: 48MB
Without AWE: 38MB

-------

Well I think that's all the tests we need. It covered highly developed and
dense areas as well as average areas. So it looks like your typical build
scene is only going to be using something around 10MB more video RAM with
AWE. In any case, a 64MB video card would be fine for AW. If you crank you
vis way up high, you'll want a 128MB though.

The point of this topic wasn't to promote AWE though. It's more of a
shoutout to world owners to not be so conservative with your textures. You
have plenty of headroom! Any video card newer than 2002 should have 64MB or
more video RAM. Seeing as how its mid-2006 now, it's only fair for AW to try
its best to keep up with the PC industry. As such, AWE 2.0 will be catering
to the 128MB and 256MB video card users. Textures will be further heightened
to 512 and 1024MB resolutions.

If your world is using the AW object path and your interested in using
higher res textures, your welcome to upgrade your OP to AWE 1.4 content. The
zip is setup here at www.swcity.net/files/awe/AWE.zip and you can read what
exactly you'll be changing here
http://www.swcity.net/files/awe/readme_1.4.txt

PS. minor note - I noticed a slightly higher FPS using AWE during the tests,
because of the cleaned up objects in the OP. About 3-5% faster.

Jun 7, 2006, 3:41pm

Need less "mights" and more absolutes ;) Should look into it.
Right now I've just did some tests. 1028 and 2048 work fine. 4096 and
beyond don't, though. Not that you'd need a resolution that high...

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Jun 7, 2006, 7:26am

Playable piano now on display at AW 2200s 3613e. It's a more-lifesize piano,
not a giant one. Also you have the option to lock out the piano for 2
minutes so only you can play it globally. This prevents people from
interrupting. First design model anyway, I'll keep tinkering with it ;)

- Com

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Jun 7, 2006, 3:56pm

o_O?

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Jun 7, 2006, 10:47pm

There's an instrument directory here:
http://chuckbrown.com/pages/generalmidi.html

Jun 8, 2006, 4:08pm

It's possible. You just have to make a big long AAA sequence. Would take
forever :P

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Jun 8, 2006, 6:20am

Try changing it to software rendering mode and see if it becomes stable;
Just as a test.


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Jun 8, 2006, 3:21am

You can probably run them through a batch...


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Jun 11, 2006, 7:56pm

* Property cache corruption no longer crashes the browser but instead
deletes the current cache and starts over.

Jun 9, 2006, 7:23pm

Sounds like somebody goofed up on the downslide's passive seq file. Or the
avatars.dat which refers to it.

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Jun 10, 2006, 4:28pm

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Errmmm...huh? No. The browser shrinks it down to the nearest lowest power
of 2 resolution. 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, and 2048 are accepted resolutions
(not including pre-64 sizes).

No point in using higher quality resolutions if your going to degrade it
with poor compression. I won't do any more than 5/100 compression for mine
in the AWE pack. Usually 2 or 3. Compression has nothing to do with
in-world performance because it's all converted into the unified .ras format
in the end.

See my earlier thread - For World Owners: Texture Research a few posts down.

- Com

Jun 11, 2006, 11:59pm

What, just getting frequent 'waiting for server' notices? How often is "half
the time"? Does it happen when your busy doing something or just standing
still? My guess is that you might be overloading the connection too much to
keep a steady connection, like if your building too fast. But it could just
be the server having a bad day. It's happened to me and a few others
before.

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Jun 12, 2006, 6:37am

You got a lot of enthusiast gear in that setup there, or I'm at least
assuming that based on the prices...I believe the topic was more about just
how low-you-can-go and still get a workable computer.
The bang for the buck is a steep steep curve when it comes to the cutting
end stuff.

$200 sound card? Can get a pretty good one for around 70.

$400 video card? First a current generation card yes. But a previous gen
are still very fast for around 200.

$800 CPU? Yikes. Can get a good one for $300.

$100 should got you waaaay more than 60. Shoulda been closer to 200-300GB.

All that was for a standard computer, not even budget rate.
Check newegg.com for prices.

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Jun 12, 2006, 6:41am

Oh yea speaking of low prices, you can get one for less than $442 if you
decide to go with an assembler instead. I know Dell usually carries the
budget line for $300 plus shipping and tax.


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Jun 13, 2006, 4:29am

And as I so hatefully found out, you can't change the PSU without probably
needing a new case. Because the dell cases are shaped around the parts
inside. If you can find a PSU with exact same port positions you win though,
but I sure couldn't :P
Course if you don't mine scooting it back a few inches and letting it dangle
there, then its fine...

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Jun 13, 2006, 6:32am

Why would I want another dell PSU? They're crap :P

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Jun 16, 2006, 6:47pm

Yea, sort of pricey. You don't want to skimp on the PSU though, it's a
critical foundation component that everything depends on. I won't spend less
than $70 on mine personally; not that price = quality, but that's the
general going rate of the good ones anyway.

- Com

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