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Jul 13, 2003, 6:51pm

Hi all,

Until I move at the end of August, I plan to spend a great deal of time
making some sort of contribution to the AW community. My original idea was
to program a new weather simulator that would update a world in real-time
(unlike the original Thor, which was limited by static backdrops). But
several other ideas have been requested. I don't want to waste a lot of
time working on something that nobody would use or attend, so I'm interested
in opinions of the community that would support these projects.

Here are the three suggestions:

1. Continue to improve the stability of Ultimate Paintball and Demeter,
adding new features and game modes as well as making them more crash-proof

2. Go ahead with the weather simulator idea proposed above, adding features
that would make it configurable enough to be usable in all worlds

3. Organize a huge community-building event like the failed AW Community
Retreat originally scheduled for January 12, 2002 (that event was canceled
because the price increase occurred several days before) where everyone
would have fun, make new friends, and discuss important AW issues. For
those who were unaware of the original plans, the half-finished document is
located at http://www.shoemakervillage.org/retreat.html.

I have to put in a disclaimer, though:

-BEGIN DISCLAIMER-

This message is NOT a promise that I will accomplish the most popular
suggestion finished by a certain date, because circumstances can change (and
bugs can crop up) that make a set date hard to put out. I make no promises
that things will be accomplished in a timely fashion, or even that they will
get done at all. In other words, no whining please.

-END DISCLAIMER-

That said, thanks for the input,

-Brant

Jul 13, 2003, 10:15pm

Why dont you just start a web vote, or a poll about it and see the results
:)

Jul 13, 2003, 11:52pm

Well, becuase those votes can be easily rigged by people like M a t t who
live to do nothing but ruin others' lives :)

It's easy enough to post here, and polls can't take into consideration
verbal suggestions.

[View Quote]

Jul 14, 2003, 12:43pm

I vote for numero uno. :)

Builderz
http://www.3dhost.net

Jul 14, 2003, 1:02pm

A true weather bot would be kool.

--
------------------------------------
Scuz
Awscape.com/.net/.org Webmaster
Visual Basic Programer
[View Quote]

Jul 14, 2003, 2:24pm

Chazbot has a full set of weather config's. Allowing to link any set of
lighting settings to any set of skyboxes/backdrops, dependant on either VRT
or RealTime.

"scuz" <webmaster at awscape.com> wrote in news:3f12c61a$1
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> A true weather bot would be kool.
>

Jul 14, 2003, 3:01pm

Thats not what i mean. I mean one that takes advantige of 3.4 features. Like
moving the sun and changing the sky colors to make it look natural.

--
------------------------------------
Scuz
Awscape.com/.net/.org Webmaster
Visual Basic Programer
[View Quote]

Jul 14, 2003, 3:12pm

i would liek the natural sinrise effect , so the different skycolors are
changed every few mins . with a moving sun , and maybe someone can make a
nice set of edited colored clouds , like orange ones for sunrise , and red
ones for sunset , and grey ones for the night.....

Jul 14, 2003, 3:16pm

Yes that would be nice, I think Mutation got one.

-Weizer
"scuz" <webmaster at awscape.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
3f12e1f0$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com...
> Thats not what i mean. I mean one that takes advantige of 3.4 features.
Like
> moving the sun and changing the sky colors to make it look natural.
>
> --
> ------------------------------------
> Scuz
> Awscape.com/.net/.org Webmaster
> Visual Basic Programer
[View Quote]

Jul 14, 2003, 5:26pm

Well, but even if Mutation has one, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't make
one, since Mutation's isn't publicly available. I wouldn't consider myself
a champion of the open source movement, but I do think that the AW community
benefits most when everyone has the opportunity to use a bot.

But then again, I respect the decision of the owners of Mutation - money
speaks, after all :)

[View Quote]

Jul 14, 2003, 6:41pm

Oh I know thats not what I meant, I stated Mutation because I wanted to make
sure we were talking about the same wheater bot :-)

-Weizer

"brant" <awteen at shoemakervillage.org> a écrit dans le message de news:
3f1303f9$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com...
> Well, but even if Mutation has one, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't
make
> one, since Mutation's isn't publicly available. I wouldn't consider
myself
> a champion of the open source movement, but I do think that the AW
community
> benefits most when everyone has the opportunity to use a bot.
>
> But then again, I respect the decision of the owners of Mutation - money
> speaks, after all :)
>
[View Quote]

Jul 15, 2003, 6:38am

"scuz" <webmaster at awscape.com> wrote in
news:3f12e1f0$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> Thats not what i mean. I mean one that takes advantige of 3.4
> features. Like moving the sun and changing the sky colors to make it
> look natural.
>

as soon as demand comes i can add it without any real problem. Till now i
have not heard of a single person using this feature so.......

Jul 15, 2003, 1:19pm

Muti's system is not a 24 hour cycle.

[View Quote]

Jul 15, 2003, 2:27pm

Moving the sun only takes to change the light source settings (which a
proper weather bot should have done in 3.3 already).

Using the 3.4 features will not make the sky looking more natural, btw.
For example, the 3.4 clouds do not reach the horizont (but in a skybox,
they would), the most important thing is, however, the inability of
color changes near the sun itself or the different lighting conditions
for clouds (which will not allow for real impressive sunrises/sunsets) -
so, apart from the moving clouds feature, which can be added to a
regular skybox sky as well, for the most natural looking skies, I
recommend rather a skybox set (eg. with 20-30 frames for a complete
day/night change (hint: use at least a 512*512 resolution for each
skybox side).


[View Quote]

Jul 15, 2003, 3:13pm

"brant" <awteen at shoemakervillage.org> a écrit dans le message de news:
3f1303f9$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com...
> Well, but even if Mutation has one, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't
make
> one, since Mutation's isn't publicly available. I wouldn't consider
myself
> a champion of the open source movement, but I do think that the AW
community
> benefits most when everyone has the opportunity to use a bot.
>
> But then again, I respect the decision of the owners of Mutation - money
> speaks, after all :)
>

Hi Brant,
sure you are more than welcome to make a weather bot.
the weather handling in Mutation is made by a very small part of the bot so
there's no point to post a few lines of java code that would be meanless
without the whole framework.
the bot in Mutation is definitively not like an usual bot, it has no GUI, no
help, nothing that a user would expect from a bot. I programmed it to make
Mutation a game world, it was never designed to be a general purpose bot nor
to be available for other users. There are already very good general purpose
bots and sooner or later they will handle a 3.4 day night cycle. i m pretty
sure someone could already make a xelag script to do that :)

I you face a problem while making your bot, well, i will be glad to help you
if I can. But as you probably guessed, i don 't use VB but Java to make bots
;)
I can already give you a tip: even if you change only one attribute of the
world, ALL the attributes will be send to ALL the users inside the world and
in response, ALL the users will generate an AW_EVENT_AVATAR_CHANGE , that
can generate quite a big network traffic.


Regards,
MilesTeg

Jul 15, 2003, 3:17pm

Welcome in the virtual worlds ;)
In Mutation the day night cycle last 2 hours : 80 minutes for day 40 minutes
for night.
in my opinion, that would be boring to have the same timeframe than in
reality, that would mean if you use to go in aw in your evening time, you
would alway see evening, nothing very exciting.

Regards,
MilesTeg

"starfleet" <Starfleet at Command.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
3f141b7c$2 at server1.Activeworlds.com...
> Muti's system is not a 24 hour cycle.
>
[View Quote]

Jul 15, 2003, 3:27pm

Amen. Anyroad, the botlag/awlag/worldlag will prevent any sky looking
from 'natural' like slowly moving clouds for example.At best you can
reach a kind of jerky 'dynamic sky' on most worlds.

Chazbot has the full set of attributes (inlcuding the 3.4 ones), and
allows linking them to a particular skybox. So i believe best is just to
set attributes once every so often on a fixed time either to VRT or
RealTime.

This was my premise, to link the skybox to a set of attributes and let
the bot revolve them based on their time settings. This way (by for
example setting the same skybox but every few minutes with different
attributes) you can set the weather according to your world's speed.



"kf" <none at junk.mail> wrote in news:3F142A4F.B93 at junk.mail:

> Moving the sun only takes to change the light source settings (which a
> proper weather bot should have done in 3.3 already).
>
> Using the 3.4 features will not make the sky looking more natural,
> btw. For example, the 3.4 clouds do not reach the horizont (but in a
> skybox, they would), the most important thing is, however, the
> inability of color changes near the sun itself or the different
> lighting conditions for clouds (which will not allow for real
> impressive sunrises/sunsets) - so, apart from the moving clouds
> feature, which can be added to a regular skybox sky as well, for the
> most natural looking skies, I recommend rather a skybox set (eg. with
> 20-30 frames for a complete day/night change (hint: use at least a
> 512*512 resolution for each skybox side).
>

Jul 15, 2003, 10:09pm

Well, that problem with the attributes has bugged me ever since I modified
XelaG's WorldSchedule script in 1999. The original Thor got around the
problem by setting every single attribute every minute, and I think that's
how an updated version could work.

The difference between the original Thor and Thor 2 would be that the
original Thor was limited by the number of backdrops it had. Even though
Beardo made 30 backdrops, it's not enough to make a realistic weather cycle.
Thor 1 changed the sky colors every minute but could only change the
backdrops every 40 in order to create its 26-hour cycle.

The idea here would be to change the sky colors and the sun position every
minute in addition to the directional and ambient lights and fog. The
terrain ambient and diffuse settings can also be changed. If the
AWSdkOcx6.ocx control is released soon, then it should be relatively simple
to upgrade the original Thor to the new version.

But AW's weather system is still far from complete. It's still not possible
to create dynamic clouds, because now instead of 30 backdrops, we need 30
cloud layers. And we need 10 sun and 10 or so moon textures.

Maybe this is best left until 3.5, hoping that ENZO will program some
automatic-cloud generation code in, add dynamic rain and snow, and allow the
light source to be tinted or shrunk regarldless of the size of the texture -
unless someone else has a better idea to get around the huge numbers of
textures problem?

-Brant

[View Quote]

Jul 16, 2003, 9:53am

The skybox model is very small compared to the textures is it not..
less than 1K typically?

Change the skybox once a minute so the textures move a little, then
change the textures less frequently and reuse the same skybox cycle
with the new textures.

24 sets of textures (one per hour) 24KB * 5 * 24 == about 3 MB total
60 skyboxes (one per minute) 1 KB * 60 == 60 KB total

[View Quote]

Jul 16, 2003, 11:24am

A!!CT too.

[View Quote]

Jul 17, 2003, 10:36am

ya but, if you go in the evening, at about 7, you would also see nothing but
evening in mutation (for about 20 more minutes that is :) )

-SWE

[View Quote]

Jul 18, 2003, 10:22am

no need to change the cloud texture really, just change the cloud texture
mask, that way you get diffrent looking clouds :) well, 2 cloud textures
might be needed, like 1 for rain, other for normal :)

-SWE

[View Quote]

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