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May 2, 2003, 10:47am

"sk8man2" <gzanone at optonline.net> wrote in
news:3eb019a4$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Wouldn't it have to download and than open up in one of their music
> programs? It would be a pain in the but to have to open up windows
> media player, mmjb, or winamp every time someone sent you a sound. It
> also isn't good for your computer to keep opening and closing them. I
> wonder if it's possible to get winamp so it picks up everyone
> seperately (live) and sends out sounds to certain IPs depending on
> what they're doing. I'm sure it would be easy to match the IPs..
> unless they're using a proxy inside AW. Maybe someone could try to
> build a winamp plugin that works with a bot hehe.

That might happen. But IE might also play it transparently. (WAV only, not
MP3)

KAH

May 9, 2003, 11:46am

"dlp anne" <anne at dreamlandpark.com> wrote in
news:3ebb92dd at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Lighting came out in 3.0 or 3.1 I'm pretty sure it was 3.0 cause I do
> remember doing the open beta testing for 3.0 and it had lighting.

It was 3.1 actually. It is true that light substraction worked during the
beta stages of 3.1, but that it was disabled as RW does not support it
properly. Yet another proof of RW's mediocrity.

KAH

May 19, 2003, 1:02pm

"john" <john at 3d-reality.com> wrote in
news:3ec11b3d at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Calhoun, there is one flaw:
>
> There would need to be a browser or something running at that
> location.... unless of course aw made a thing on world server to take
> pic.. lol!

You just move the camera there to render it...

KAH

May 20, 2003, 1:25pm

"dlp anne" <anne at dreamlandpark.com> wrote in news:3ec9b4f9
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> I would like to have a reflect command that would cause an object to act
> just like a mirror reflecting everything in it even avatars and not just
> your avatar but every avatar around you just like a real mirror would.
> 3D games have this effect for there 3D objects.

The only thing is that those games use precompiled geometry for all the
surroundings, and partially compiled avatars (most of the time). That gives
you a big performance gain, which then allows you to use more CPU on things
like mirrors. In AW, even with some of the most modern and most effective
techniques for these effects (like stencil buffers) it would mean a
*serious* performance hit. Considering I sometimes get quite mediocre
framerates even with top-of-the-line hardware, I don't think it would work
out very well.

KAH

May 21, 2003, 2:54pm

"ananas" <vha at oct31.de> wrote in news:3ECA6CD9.A515F2B9 at oct31.de:

> Afaik. Renderware has no raytracing capabilities

You don't really need it, and it can be slower than other techniques. But
the lack of raytracing would indicate that RW probably doesn't support
other techniques... I really don't get why they licensed RW3 instead of
something more advanced.

KAH

May 26, 2003, 3:37pm

"technozeus" <TechnoZeus at usa.net> wrote in
news:3ece7b7e$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> There are other rendering engines out there, with different licensing
> arrangements. I think it may be of some benefit to look into
> attempting to adapt one of the ones which allow a development team to
> work on it for free before their first public release. I do recall
> seeing wording to that effect in one of the ones I looked at. Of
> course, there is no easy solution, and much of Active Worlds is built
> around the way RenderWare works, so... it's not like they can just rip
> out one rendering engine and drop another in. (Someone in the
> development team, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this.)

I believe you can get ahold of the QIII engine freely if you intend to pay
for it (check iD Soft's page for this). It is true that AW is strongly
reliant on RW, and a convertion would take a lot of time, especially now
that there are so few programmers. The mistake was made when AW 3.0 went on
the drawing-board. Since they were going to upgrade to RW3, involving a lot
of changes and a long convertion process, this was the time to change their
mind about the engine. Granted, it would probably have taken even longer to
deliver 3.0, but using a more advanced and modern engine would definitely
have been in their interest. I checked the RW3 licensing (that was at least
a year ago, prices may well have changed since) and found it to be
extremely expensive. They also had to pay the fee for EACH VARIANT (D3D,
OGL and software). I think the total came up to something like $750k! That
the OGL engine is complete rubbish, the two other mediocre, doesn't really
justify it.

This said, engines like QIII or Unreal might not be the right thing for AW,
since they're aimed at games, and take a great deal of control over the
workings of the game. But there are other engines out there, and they
could've spent the money on programmers to code an engine tailored to AW's
needs... In which case they could've done the same clever thing as iD,
Valve, etc and licensed it out to boost future development.

KAH

May 27, 2003, 1:11pm

"bowen" <Bowen at andras.net> wrote in
news:3ed258c9 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> I disagree, I believe they can be optomized to perform better than
> RW's engine for realtime rendering. Much better at that.

They probably can, but they're still aimed at games and might not really do
well for AW's use. For example, the Unreal engine takes care of everything
from the menus to the multiplayer engine, and will not cater very well if
there's no guns involved.

KAH

May 29, 2003, 7:58am

"john" <john at 3d-reality.com> wrote in
news:3ed4f2d4 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Crazy, r u dumb or summit?
>
> You cant stop people flying and shifting, how could you!?
>
> Read my reply a lil way up (replied to SWE), that makes much more
> sense and would also take a highly-requested wish into account :-)

Forcing them down to the ground using aw_teleport(). To do this accurately
you'd need to implement 3D collision detection, which means a lot of work
and high resource-use at runtime.

KAH

May 28, 2003, 2:39pm

"agent1" <agent1 at shatteredplatters.com.nospam> wrote in
news:3ed3f83c at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> This isn't a problem with the news server - it's with your news
> client.

There's still a lot of server-side problems unrelated to newsreader bugs
that cause random disconnects. They don't seem interested in fixing it.

KAH

May 29, 2003, 7:54am

"pc hamster" <pchamster at attbi.com> wrote in news:3ed5b7eb$1
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> This can often be caused by normal net lag too.

But in this case it's not, rest assured, I know.

KAH

Jun 5, 2003, 2:15pm

"bowen" <Bowen at andras.net> wrote in
news:3ede7b18$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Quite a bite of them. Forte Agent. And XNews, the one that KAH uses
> (it's a piece of crap though -- hard as hell to use). Search
> http://www.sourceforget.net for NNTP clients for windows.

Surely you jest? XNews is dead easy to use.

KAH

May 29, 2003, 8:00am

"dlp anne" <anne at dreamlandpark.com> wrote in
news:3ed58cf3$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> I agree
> But rather then just RGB let us enter a hex value so we can make it
> any color we want.

The hex value is just a compressed version of the RGB value :-))

#FF = 255, so #FFFFFF becomes 255 255 255 = white.

KAH

Jul 20, 2003, 4:49pm

"sw comit" <swcomit at swcity.net> wrote in
news:3f00da84 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> What's better than jpg in compress to quality ratio? I didn't think
> there were any. Call me ignorant =P I'd like to know though for
> future reference.

I know this post is 20 days old, but what the heck:

PNG is *far* superior to JPEG. It provides lossless compression that works
well (there is hardly any loss in image quality and the filesize is tiny),
in addition to a bunch of other format features. I think it's the US Army's
format of choice when dealing with images that have to be losslessly
compressed, and if you ask me, that's a serious vote of confidence.

KAH

Jul 21, 2003, 9:00am

"ferruccio" <startrek3 at earthlink.net> wrote in
news:3f1bb2d4 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> I wouldn't really call that a reflection, it works *like* a
> reflection, but a more real reflection (what you want) would be the
> car reflections from racing games, or the reflection off of the
> plastic curtains in splinter cell. The type of reflection you showed
> in the picture simply re-created the environment on the other side of
> the surface. If we were to make reflections in AW, it would have to
> be a certain texture to reflect. like "create texture stone4, reflect
> texture=silvmetal" which would make the object have the texture
> stone4, but have it reflect the texture silvmetal.

The reflections in racing games are really fake. Uses a technique called
environment mapping, which applies a special shader texture over the
texture of a car, rotating/panning it as the camera changes the angle. Not
real mirroring at all, just an illusion.

The modern way of doing mirrors is with stencil buffers (would probably
work best in AW as using the two scenes technique would lag and create
problems in AW's non-compiled worlds), but not all cards support it.

They could add environment mapping, though, as that creates no problems.

KAH

Jul 21, 2003, 8:17pm

"dlp anne" <anne at dreamlandpark.com> wrote in
news:3f1c451d at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> I actually like the environment mapping better though, but as long as
> AW makes it look good and real looking I will be happy lol

It'll be useless for mirrors, though.

KAH

Jul 24, 2003, 10:09am

"darksville" <craigrood at btopenworld.com> wrote in
news:3f1fc261 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Is it true that the link below is a virus? im no trying if it is !

If you read the post and checked who it was from, you'd see it was a
removal utility from AWI.

KAH

Aug 7, 2003, 9:40am

"codewarrior" <pete at accelr8r.com> wrote in news:3f310dfa$1
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Some programmer once said... geez.. two digits is plenty to use
> for the date.
>
> Another programmer once said if I use the number of seconds since
> Jan. 1 1970 as the time, it will be good forever. In 2038 we will find
> out how long forever is.

It will be good forever. It just isn't forever with 32 bit integers, that's
all. There's a bunch of 64 bit systems out there now, mainly servers. Won't
be that long until most people are going to get them too. With 64 bit I
believe the UNIX timestamps will have a range beyond the remaining lifetime
of the sun. So don't worry :-))

KAH

Aug 9, 2003, 10:17am

"codewarrior" <pete at accelr8r.com> wrote in news:3f32b0db$1
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> You're assuming that the little computer in the gas pump will be
> replaced with a new one by then and that somone will actually
> remember that it uses a 32 bit processor, or that it even has a
> processor in it.

Remember y2k? Everyone got quite aware of that date problem... Anyway, I
think it's *very* likely that the little computer in the gas pump is going
to get replaced (several times most likely) over a period of 35 years...

> Servers are only one little tiny application for computers, and
> embedded computers.. well.. they are *embedded* in things.
> They don't get routinely swapped out, and they are not designed
> to go obsolete in a year either.

I just gave the servers as an example, to show that the 64-bit platforms
are actually ready for mass-deployment.
Embedded systems aren't designed to go obsolete in a year, more like five
or ten years. 35 - 10 = 20. Whoops, looks like they'll go obsolete long
before y2k38.

> It's likely that most embedded systems will have been replaced
> by then, but who knows.

Yes, it is. Those that aren't replaced probably aren't that important.

KAH

Aug 12, 2003, 9:41am

"bowen" <Bowen at andras.net> wrote in
news:3f38ab7e$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> AW only spends a quarter of a million on sub par technology. I mean
> come on fett, you should know that.

Isn't it actually 3/4 of a million? I thought each version (D3D, OGL and
software) of RW3 cost $250k.

KAH

Aug 13, 2003, 8:56am

"calhoun" <coen at charter.net> wrote in
news:3f396e46$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> where did I say "Half-Life" I said Physics Engine, there are many
> Physics Engines why is Half-Life (the game which made physics engine
> bad) what these people say I am whining about which I never said
> "Half-Life" only Physics Engine, and BTW Half-Life's Physic Engine
> sucks so stop whining for it I just said AW's Current Physic Engine
> (nothing) sucks and that anything would be better than nothing ffs

Karma physics would be neat. Although AW doesn't have much use for some of
the Karma system (ragdoll physics, used in FPS games when actors die).

And you're being unreasonable critisizing him for the H-L engine, he never
mentioned it in his original post. Brock does sometimes act pretty
imaturely, you should know better than to take him litterally.

KAH

Aug 14, 2003, 10:45am

"chris cat" <masada11 at hotmail.com> wrote in news:3f3b21db$1
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> This feature should be added
>
> the abillity to add avi and mpeg onto a picture object (not swf, swfs and
> cause auto spawn pop ups X_X)
>
> such as:
>
> apply movie ___.avi/.mpeg
>
> and as for other pic formats...
>
> we should have Bitmaps! heh, just kidding :P
> the formats im thinking of are Compuserve GIFs(.gif), Portable Network
> Graphics (.png), Truevision Targas (.tga), and Raster Image Files (.ras)
> just a few suggestions

We have bitmaps. You just have to zip them.

The only formats worth adding would be PNG, MNG (animated PNG) and DDS
(it's a special texture format for use with 3D rendering, very versatile).

GIF is old and crappy, even the patent has expired now.
What are we going to do with targa? Not any advantages I can see.
And as Joeman said, where are all the SUN boxes you want to export textures
from?

Instead of using old, obsolete formats, lets use the formats of the future.

KAH

Aug 14, 2003, 10:48am

"chris cat" <masada11 at hotmail.com> wrote in news:3f3b23a7$1
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> i think this could fix a lot of admin problems, and possibly have the
> abillity to use the rcon system (Remote Console), just an idea

Uh... No. We really don't need a console. Consoles are good for games,
where you might have tons of hidden commands and settings that you want to
make available to mod developers, etc, but in AW we get full control of
everything from the browser and world admin tools.

We already have the equivalent of rcon, the admin tool. Maybe you don't
know that it's designed to connect to remote servers?

KAH

Aug 14, 2003, 10:48am

"chris cat" <masada11 at hotmail.com> wrote in
news:3f3b244f$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> just a thought to add, i love the gradual color change, and the
> weather change, its extremly life like, although i do realize this is
> a little too much to ask for, but just an idea

There's a ton of bots that have been doing this for years. With the new
gradient backgrounds it's even easier to create dynamic effects like this.

KAH

Aug 31, 2003, 8:40am

"alexthemartian" <alex at virtual-studios.net> wrote in
news:3f515534$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> how bout make an AW binocular? zoom the entire seen.. might be
> dificulat but how bout AW takes a temp snapshot and it zooms the
> snapshoot so it looks like you are looking thru binoculars?
>
> ..just expanding the idea

Very simple actually.

KAH

Sep 3, 2003, 2:20pm

"alexthemartian" <alex at virtual-studios.net> wrote in
news:3f5531b9 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> dont forget the teenagers.. who build, chat, and also complain in NGs

I think she included teens in "kids".

KAH

Sep 8, 2003, 2:54pm

"sw comit" <swcomit at swcity.net> wrote in
news:3f54fc67 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> If your in directX rendering mode, you may have noticed you can only
> render 8 lights at any given time. If you switch to OpenGL, you can
> see all the lights in the area. Anyway, if I recall, the 8 light
> limit wasn't always there (the earlier versions of AW). So what's up?
> Is it a directX problem? An AW problem? Is it supose to be like this
> for lag (in which case it should be a client setting)? All I know is
> that I hate it, because any area of town that's even slightly dense
> will run into this problem. If anything, it should at least only
> render the closest lights. I can be in a room with a light, and not
> see it, but then I lower my vis from 170 to 150 and I can see
> it...It's also a vandal problem, as some clown could pop in 20 lights
> so the area couldn't have anymore.

It's got to do with hardware T&L limitations and RW being a piece of crap.

Most 3D accelerators will only render 8 lights at a time. The normal thing
would be to use software ligthing for any additional lights in the scene.
RW doesn't. That simple heh. Not sure if this is anything the AWI
programmers can deal with (probably not).


KAH

Sep 25, 2003, 3:06pm

"r i c h a r d" <richard.lazenby1 at ntlworld.com> wrote in news:3f720702$1
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> 3.0 and 3.1 used direct 3d .. correct? they all had huge numbers of
> lights.. so did 3.2... i swear this support disappeared in 3.3 +

I don't think they used HW t&l, and didn't they upgrade their RW3 version
at some point? If Criterion decide to change something, they're stuck with
it that way.

KAH

Sep 18, 2003, 2:34pm

"binarybud" <leo at realPANTStourvision.com> wrote in
news:3f69ad0c$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> GIF does not suck, only your OPINION does Bowen....:) do your home
> work.
>
> "On Friday, 20th June 2003, the death knell sounds for US patent
> number 4,558,302. Having benefited its owner, the Unisys Corporation
> for 20 years, the contents of the patent are entered into the Public
> Domain and may be used absolutely freely by anyone. "

There's another patent, not expired yet. There are other issues as well.

Anyway, why use an inferior, outdated format like GIF? PNG, MNG, even JPEG
is better than GIF.

KAH

Sep 19, 2003, 1:10pm

"binarybud" <leo at realPANTStourvision.com> wrote in
news:3f69e14c$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Because its more compatable and it does what you need to do. GIF is
> far from "outdated". Not to mention much easier to use when writing
> code to support it.

In this case, it's not more compat*i*ble. Sure, it does what it's designed
to do, but if you use for example PNG or MNG they'll do what they're
designed to do, which is something much more advanced and clever than what
GIF does.

GIF is outdated, just for this reason. It doesn't matter much if it's
easier to implement GIF, one shouldn't be lazy when coding. (or you'll end
up writing something worthy of the MS-logo) There's a whole bunch of
libraries that support PNG/MNG anyway, so it's really no excuse.

KAH

Nov 8, 2003, 12:04pm

"rossyboy" <a> wrote in news:3fac3622$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Actually Commie, the GIF patent only expired in America. As you will
> find out if you try and downlod the GIMP, it's still illegal to install
> GIF support with it in many countries.
>
> So :(...

The worldwide patent expires sometime in 2004 I believe. Still, there's not
a lot of point in GIF support, but this was discussed a while back already.

KAH

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