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Apr 21, 2003, 7:37pm

I suppose it would depend mostly on whether or not RenderWare supports "per vertex" texturing for the terrain mesh. Right now, the texture is pplied per polygon, so to have each vertex of a specific polygon assigned the texture of a neighboring polygon could lead to a bit of complication since there are three quads to choose from (or 4 or 5 triangles to choose from) at each vertex, but I suppose a set of programatic rules could make the decision.

TechnoZeus

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Apr 22, 2003, 6:38am

That should work... not real effeciently I would guess, but at least possible.

TechnoZeus

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Apr 21, 2003, 8:33pm

By the time you specify all of the timing and such, it would actually take more cell space than the animate command that way.

TZ

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Apr 22, 2003, 6:35am

There are other things along the same line which could be done though, like allowing parameters to control filmstrips more, chain together unrelater textures, or turn one object into another.

TechnoZeus

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Apr 29, 2003, 12:58am

Yep. Tokenizing the commands is an old idea, and a good one in my opinion. As for shortening them in text form, I suggested a long time ago that a system of bbreviation could be supported which would use the period character as a delimiter, and also that either the "create" trigger could be assumed when no trigger is given or the format of following a command name by a colon such as used to work with certain commands in older versions of AW could be supported on all commands.

Examples...

This example uses the implied create trigger...
activate sign "clicked"; sign "click here."

This example uses period delimited abbreviations...
c. co. red

This example uses the appended colon command syntax...
sound: forest1

For more information, see my November 23, 2002 post entitled "Ancient Wishes" news:3ddfffdd$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com

Here are some examples given in my Ancient Wishes" post...
c. Mu. 0 seed plant tree bigtree time=10
a. Mu. 1 chair time=60 name=object1, Mu. 100 onlight offlight time=1 name=object2
b. Tel. 30N 40W +1.2A +180
a. Tel. 3139N 106E +0; b. W. +0 +0 2.5A +180
c. Sc. 2 1 .5 time=50
b. Ac. +2S -1E

TechnoZeus


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Apr 30, 2003, 1:01am

It would appear you misread my statement. I said "...Tokenizing the commands is an old idea, and a good one in my opinion. As for shortening them in text form..." which it would seem either I didn't state clearly enough or you didn't read carefully enough... or both. :) I think it's a side effect of me writing so thoroughly that people end up skimming my posts. Hehe.

Actually, there's no reason why a two byte token system couldn't be used. That would allow the first byte to categorize the second byte, so that it would even be possible to distinguish between older and newer versions of the same command if a command's function changes drastically, such as what happened to the animate command back when Active World 3.0 came out. For now, it would make sense to simply have the first byte indicate whether the second byte should be expanded into a trigger, a command, or a parameter keyword such as "mask" or perhaps a value keyword such as "off" which would allow up to 256 possible in each category plus the option to add more than that through the simple addition of a category such as "additional commands" if necessary at some point in the future.


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May 5, 2003, 3:15am

I apologize for my posts being hard for you to read. I try to make them as clear as I can manage, but different people have different ideas of what's easier to understand.

TechnoZeus

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Jul 7, 2003, 10:43pm

It's not just about the data stream though. There are other reasons to tokanize commands.

TechnoZeus

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May 5, 2003, 3:18am

Then it has to accept the risks associated with being tourist enabled.

TZ

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Apr 25, 2003, 12:57am

The unfortunate thing is really that this kind of situation has not been handled consistantly from version to version, but sometimes that's unavoidable. As it stands right now, in build 481 of the AW 3.4 public beta and in every build I tested all the way baco to build 402 of AW 3.2, you can get away with adding a fake trigger and all the commands you want after it whether they are real or not. Here's an example...

fauxtrigger nonexistantcommand unknown_parameter test=yes ; create texture water1

It used to also be possible to add fake parameters as long as they were set to a value. This could have come in handy if AW 3.0 had supported a mask= parameter with the animate command rather than just a "mask" parameter, because AW 2.x would have ignored that parameter. Ideally, I would think it would be best if eventually you could type in a command any way you want and the parts of it that are understood would work but you would get a warning from the building inspector about any parts that were not understood. This, of course, would not be an AW 3.4 issue, and probably not even an AW 3.5 issue, but in preperation for the ability to add such warnings it would be good if those parts which are valid would work, even if an unknown command comes before them. I'm cross-posting this reply to the wishlist newsgroup, so people can take their pick which newsgroup to follow up in... depending on whether they would like to discuss what really "needs" to be done in AW 3.4, or what they would like to see done eventually.

TechnoZeus

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May 5, 2003, 3:45am

Yes, it would definately be nice to have e-mail forwarding options.

Specifically: the ability to have telegrams e-mailed to you which would otherwise get deleted from the universe server for taking too long to be delivered; the ability to periodically have all unread or undelivered telegrams beyond a certain age e-mailed to you and optionally removed from the universe server or telegrams list at that time; the ability to send all telegrams in your telegrams list to your e-mail address as a single e-mail, and delete them from the telegrams list at that time.

TechnoZeus

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May 5, 2003, 3:49am

Actually, a join sound would serve a distinctly different function from a join pending indicator anyway. Neither would serve the purpose that the other would.

TechnoZeus

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May 5, 2003, 4:00am

You need to change something, and then change it back, before dumping the elevation map. Otherwise there are no pages to save. For example, select a terrain cell and rotate the texture,. then rotate it back, or raise one node and then copy a different node and paste it over the modified one.

TechnoZeus

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May 5, 2003, 4:04am

Yep, but you can still make use of that in some cases. Backup those two files, and then delete them. Then modify a terrain square in a world on that server and change it back, then save the elevation dump. After doing that, restore those two files from the backup. This isn't exactly straight forward, but it works.

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 3:00pm

I like both ideas. A citizen number tab would be helpful especially when it comes to people who are constantly changing their name, and being able to sort by on-line status would be a really nice feature to have.

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 3:05pm

Since such games are bot controlled anyway, all that would be needed is a way for the bot to issue a sound command directly much as it can currently send console messages. If such sounds could be issued either to specific people or to all people within range of a given location, that would give added flexability.

TechnoZeus.

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May 19, 2003, 3:17pm

Not meaning to say whether I think it's good or bad, but simply an answer to your question... You asked "Why do people go to a chat system just in order to hide there?" The answer, at least in the case of Active Worlds, is that it's not a chat program. It's a program with chat features. The distinction is that there is more to do in Active Worlds than just chat, and more options for socialization available than simply talking with anyone about anything.

Yes, I agree that there should be additional options such as to only hide your online status from people who's on-line status it already hidden from you, or to only hide your on-line status from people who are not on your contact list, but there will always be people who will use such features in a way that fails to make sense to some other people. In fact, it's interesting to note that when the hide online status feature was added, a lot of the same people who had asked for it, begged for it, or even demanded it, ended up complaining that it was over-used.

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 5:15pm

Perhaps each person should be listed in their own contact list by default, thereby allowing them to see their own default status setting. Probably not all that good of a solution, but I though mentioning it may give a little food for thought anyway. :)

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 3:36pm

In October of 2002, I made a simple suggestion in the beta newsgroup which would have covered this and much more. I should have posted it to the Wishlist newsgroup to start with, so I will re-post it as a new thread entitled "Default Action [repost]".

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 3:49pm

Actually, even if the world owner simply wanted no welcome message at all (as opposed to having a bot create a replacement message)... it would be nice for them to have the option of turning it off.

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 3:58pm

A long time ago, I suggested adding the ability to set a date and time before which any cached items would be considered out-dated, forcing the Active Worlds browser to check for newer versions of them. Would this serve the purpose you're talking about?

For example, if you upload a new file that you want everyone to have, you could simply click a button in the World Features dialog to set the current time and date as the earliest time and date any cached file can have been last checked for updates on without having to be checked again. This would augment the Object Refresh Rate, as it would allow a way to make sure that all objects in the cache are up to date for all visitors to a world, without having to force all cached files to be re-checked every time the person re-enters the wolrd as setting the Object Refresh Rate to 0 does.

TechnoZeus


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May 19, 2003, 5:26pm

Not all newsreaders lack the ability to auto-wrap text when it is displayed. I leave it unwrapped intentionally, because otherwise it tends to get wrapped and re-wrapped, and end up with every other line having only a word or two on it. It also avoids certain complications like having example text split places it shouldn't have been split.

Anyway, no it would not be the same. THere is a distinct difference between a button in the "build dialog" (where ever that is) to reload an object, and a setting which would all objects, textures, sounds, avatars, and avatar animation sequences which haven't been checked for updates since a certain time and date to be checked for new updates automatically as soon as they are needed.

TechnoZeus

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Jul 7, 2003, 10:49pm

Interesting way of looking at it. I thought it was more like building a bulldozer to dig a hole for a flower seed, but I suppose that depends on whether or not you can find a bot that someone else already designed for the task .

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 5:06pm

Actually, filmstrip images currently change frames at the same rate as your Active Worlds browser's framerate.

I thought I had posted a suggestion about this a while back, but I don't see the post anywhere so here's what I was thinking on the subject...

Commands such as animate, picture, and texture should have a shared set of filmstrip parameters added to allow optional control of the filmstrips maximum frame rate, and the number of frames both vertically and horizontally that the images should be divided up into.

Example...
create texture sample1 hframes=3 vframes=2 framerate=.25
would divide the texture named sample1 into 3 frames horizontally by 2 frames vertically, and then display them in order from left to right and top to bottom at 1 frame ever 4 seconds. (0.25 frames per second.)

There are a lot of things to be considered, but the ability to add such things was one of the big advantages gained durring the development of Active Worlds 3.0, so it really should be made use of in one way or another.

I know back in 1999 I sent a suggestion to Roland and Hamfon that they add a way to set a maximum filmstrip frame rate for each world, and I still think that's a good idea. I also suggested in 1998 that a command be added to allow filmstrips to be simultaneously set to their first frame or to set their frame according to the system clock, so that filmstrip synchronization would be possible.

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May 19, 2003, 5:28pm

Yep... it's been suggested before. So far, I haven't heard anything official on it, so... thanks for suggesting it again. :)

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 5:39pm

You know... before you accuse someone of ignoring you, perhaps you should consider the possibility that you may have been ignoring them. There are currently only 64 votes for that feature on the http://www.activeworlds.com/FeatureVote/ page. If you haven't already done so, perhaps add your vote. Personally, I'm hoping most for the scale command, of what's listed there, and there are several I would like to see even more... such as a tint command.

I don't mean to point you out personally, but there have been so many people making such comments when the exact thing they are claiming to have been ignored was far from actually being ignored, I just had to say something. I hope you don't take it personal.

TechnoZeus

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May 23, 2003, 5:02pm

Shamus had mentioned the possibility of filling the entire Active Worlds window with the 3D viewport, and then placing the other elements (frames, toolbars, etc.) over the viewport. In the context it was presented, it was intended to solve vertain issues... but it would also work very well with what you just mentioned, if I'm not mistaken.

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 5:51pm

Actually, I think it's a good idea too. Another possible solution would be to add support for the noise command's "overlap" argument to the sound command.

For a description of the overlap parameter, see http://host.activeworlds.com/TechnoZeus/aw34/noise_command.html

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 5:54pm

Actually, I think it would be more useful to have "Show non-tourist worlds" and "Show non-beta worlds" since the functionality of checkmarks in that list in inclusive, not exclusive.

TechnoZeus

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May 19, 2003, 5:58pm

This would open the door for object designers to create non-avatar objects with tagged joints. I like the idea, but I also wonder whether or not the hardware currently in use by Active Worlds citizens is up to the task of displaying large numbers of such objects at the same time.

TechnoZeus

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