Lessons learned from ActiveWorlds?

I keep hearing about ActiveWorlds, and mistakes made there that are being repeated in SL.

I never played AW, so I have no frame of reference. Could someone explain on a high level some of the major mistakes made in that world - especially if there's still time to prevent some of them from being repeated in ours?

What went wrong with AW - what went right? Are there enough similarities between AW & SL to make a direct comparison?

Apparently none. I only recently discovered AW and it struck me as rather ingenious for something made in 1996.
Pity that it was never properly promoted or updated, it got a lot of things right.

I was a nice underaged fellow trying to go through a trial in AW a few years back.

It's main issue, if i remeber properly... Besides Tourists, heh...

Well, to put it bluntly, the joint was nothing but an over-decorated mall. :ahem:

It was years ago, among other things, so maybe I'm wrong.

Sorry. This wasnt high-level at all.

Lynn Lippmann tried to get me to try AW several times, and I did - and absolutely hated it. However, to its credit, it truly started this all - SL is its heir apparent. It was revolutionary at the time it came out - probably too far ahead of its time. It also languished for a long time with no development, and changed hands several times in the process. It has some things I wish SL had - it is my understanding that you can import 3d models, and servers can be colocated and privately hosted. It does not have a cohesive world like SL does, it is more akin to a 3d version of the web in a lot of ways. Maybe I just never gave it enough chance, but it just struck me as bizarre, clunky, and dated. People still use it, however - Oz Spade also was quite an AW proponent.

Mall? There is no currency in AW, and there's more places to explore than you will ever be reasonably able to.
A single world can be the size of california. It's insane. You can fly for an hour without seeing a single object, if you are so inclined. And nothing is ever deleted, so there's some really ancient stuff there.
A lot of SL players still have their AW builds up. I went there with Oz, Kex, Crystalshard... Lordfly still has some of his stuff up as well!
Hey, let's start a directory of pre-SL builds, post your AW coords! I'll put it up on the history wiki, on a "pre-history" section

From everything I understand of AW....

There was not enough simularities between it and SL to compare the two nor look for common faults. Its the same mistake I hear from alot of people when they compare issues in X-MMORPG to SL; wether you believe SL is a game or not, its is way to much of totally different animal to make meaniful comparisons between it and most MMORPGs.

Is Active Worlds still going?

Is it free?

Do you have a link to it?

coco

Actually I would disagree with this, having seen Active Worlds and spent some time in it. While it is true that there is no point of reference really when comparing SL to World of Warcraft, SL is very obviously built on some ideas that Active Worlds pioneered. Yes, SL is a very different environment in many ways - however, I do think that there are enough similarities that you can look to Active Worlds for guidance on mistakes to avoid, and also to see what they did really well that SL is lacking.

The same holds true of There as well - even though SL is far more sophisticated than There and they are very different, SL has adapted some concepts over time from There, and there are still some things that There does better than SL (more fluid avatar motion, vehicle physics, etc..).

Active Worlds is definitely the closest thing to SL, though SL has moved far beyond its capabilities. It is very much a fair comparison to make and quite meaningful.

The joy of Google (thanks Introverted Petunia for teaching me the magic of hyperlinks )

http://www.activeworlds.com/

Yes, there's a free lifetime basic account, and http://www.activeworlds.com/

AW's biggest mistake was somewhat of a combination.

The first was AW letting development slip; sacking developers are regular intervals. The second was raising prices. After development had ceased for several years; AW decided to raise it's pricing; a lot of users (including myself) left AW then.

(The irony is however; I'm paying far more for SL, but then again, SL is actively developed.)

-Adam

Hmmmm....
It certainly looks worth a visit, if only for the historic perspective it can provide. And the insight into how open hosting will look in the future.

Unfortunately - no Mac client. I suppose one day I may be forced to compromise with Mr Gates again. Or maybe next years Intel Macs will run Macos, Linux AND Windows, without needing emulation.

A Mac client?.. Well, guess not... but, just as trivia - some people may be shocked to hear that the first version of Active Worlds ran on Windows 3.11.

Active Worlds did alot of things Right - as far as system design went. Definetly ahead of its time.

The problems started not in the code, but in the managment:
At a certain point in time, the first company to produce Active Worlds began to sell away its products, among which Active Worlds. A group of dedicated users then came up and purchased it, naming the new company Circle of Fire (a.k.a COF).

On one hand, COF brought Active Worlds a new life and ensured it wouldnt get shut down by its mother company. The downside is, the new CEO was downright sucky when it got to business and managment decisions.

Programmers got laid off faster then most companies I am familiar with, development stalled, and COF got literaly addicted to the .com era buzzwords and promise of quick cash.

They invested in crap like portal sites. They renamed the software description to a "browser plug-in" (at the time, plug-ins for browsers were all the rage). They tried to push eCommerce trough it by setting up a "mall" world called @Mall. (that would be like opening a sim in SL where you order real world items trough items that represent real world products in SL), and finally, the worse decision of all (in my mind): The "3D Home Pages".

The 3D Homepages were part of the silly marketing attempt to make AW "hip" and ".com com Compatible": On subscribing, you could get a small world of your own for a small fee. This world would then be pre-loaded with one of several possible themes.

This may SOUND good... but the end result was: over 800 worlds, all looking practicly the same. Their owners were not intrested in building for the most part, leaving them unused and clugging the world list (like the Region list on the map in SL - but in AW, that was the only way to find worlds to teleport to. There wasnt a map per se, since it wasnt a single continues world).

Re: mistakes that SL repeats from AW... I suppose I could find afew, but the only one I can think of right now off-the-bat is the way estate sims are organised: Its a mess.

People seem to want their own private spaces, regardless of the mainland. Check out the map - the sheer amount of estate sims is starting to rival the mainland itself. The map is not a very good way to list those - and neither is the region list or world-list, AW style.

One good idea would be to do something AW actually ran as a beta for awhile, but take it further: Organize private estate sims as a "portal" site listing, similiar to the Open Directory Project architecture.

Add Google-like search functionality... and you got something pretty intresting, and definetly more practical then the map.

Personaly, the things I miss the most from AW in SL are:

- Bot support - Bots could log in and have complete control over the enviroment if you had permissions to do so. They could control everything from terrain to ambient light, sun position and fog, object placement, delete, etc'. The more recent versions of Active Worlds allow bots to even manipulate people's avatars and the text in their chat window directly.

- Easy property backup & restore - If you owned the world, you could dump a backup of its database to a file, and restore whenever you wished. You could also manipulate it in plain-text mode if you were crazy enough.

You could also backup your own piece of a parcel in a world that you did not own by using scanner bots that would chart your map and dump the object data you used, and later use restore bots to load that data and reconstruct your build. This was very useful for moving large constructions from place to place, or world to world.

- External image/sound support - If you needed to link to an image that was not on the world's asset server, you could just specify a URL - and the image would be downloaded on the client side from that location instead.

- Phantom - On worlds that allowed it, you could turn on "Phantom" and walk trough objects when you wanted or had to. The feature could be disabled by the world owner.

- Text on prims - We're gonna be able to do HTML on prims thanks to the mozilla integration, but AW still did this more elegently.

- Importing complete models - SL uses Prims for a varaity of good reasons, but you still cant beat being able to import a full model into the world from a professional editing tool.

- Big, big, BIG worlds - As in, big. Really big. Bigger-then-california big... on one server. SL cant do this because SL got one thing AW doesnt have... physics. That takes CPU people. Still, I miss it.

- Terrain with holes - In AW, you could select a small square on the land, and cut it off. That section would turn 100% alpha and phantom, allowing you to drop *under the terrain*. This was great for making caves and tunnels.

- Terrain with multiple textures - Little known fact, but in AW you can select a terrain block, and change its individual texture - without changing the rest of the textures on the world.

etc' etc'.

SecondLife has alot of things going for it though.. and the most important thing is: Its alive. Its evolving, its changing.

I just hope they're looking back at the VR pioneers and taking some lessons, because even today, there's still alot to be learned.

Phew.. that turned out to be one hell of a long post. But hey, Active Worlds is a subject dear and close to my heart. So sorry about the text flood. Carry on.

Sad to say. I'm not as hip to VWs as I should be.
I tried ActiveWorlds, found it.... pointless.
Cshard raises alot of good points. LindenLab would need to keep on top of alot of things in order not to plunge into obsolesence

Thanks, guys!

I had googled it before, but couldn't tell if it was still active.

coco

Crystalshard (or others) - could AW cope with larger gatherings of people ? Do other VW's in general do better or worse at this ?

Hanson

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newletter!

Yes. Worse than AW? Or worse than SL? Honestly right now I'd say SL is the most successfull VW currently, both in user base, media coverage, overall features (despite how much we whine about wanting others), and monetarily.

BTW, you can, and I have, compared AW - SL - There: http://oz.slinked.net/compare.html

Mostly featured based and as unbiased as I can, note I do need to update some things on it. Any suggestions are welcomed.

CrystalShard pretty much covered everything. AW in my opinion went down because of the company behind it, development wise, attitude wise, and just general overall bad ownership. The community was and still is certainly still there to an extent. They just didn't update the right features fast enough.

However it does have some features I'd love to have in SL, among of them many that CShard has listed. Also our lighting engine could use a good look at AW's, with the ability to have flickering lights and other lighting effects that you can't do in SL. I'd also love the "endless pallete" that AW has, I honestly hate this land crap we have in SL. And the ability to actualy build in all directions (below ground). And the world controls of AW have much more options.

AW doesn't have any real lag because of the technology its based on, which is 1995 tech that hasn't been updated much (it uses Renderware and text documents, Renderware being the same thing GTA uses/used), so there isn't going to be much lag on current systems, hardware or network wise.

So before I start going on a ramble of features, yes, SL could learn from AW both from mistakes and from feature aspects.

As for *currently* comparing SL to AW's faults... I don't see that as all. The biggest fault AW did was not listen to its community. And while sometimes it may appear LL is doing that, they aren't, they listen to us even if they don't respond (yes all of us, not just a selected few).

AW could cope with a higher mass of people then SL, but this was not because AW was better - its actually because AW lacks many things SL have.

Physics engine, complex avatars who have a real ability to interact with the enviroment, attachments, more then 3 high-resolution 1024x1024 avatar textures on a mesh...

Like Oz said, Active Worlds is based on 1995 technology. The avatars are restricted to single, simple Renderware RWX files that were pretty crude, and could only use a set of (rather clumsy by modern standards) "Sequence" files for animating them. Other then these animations, the models would be pretty static, unable to attach objects, sit on items, or move specific parts of their body that was not controlled by a strict prefab animation (for example, the dynamic head-following-mouse-cursor and point-at-the-thing-we-edit poses we take for granted in SL).

So, could Active Worlds handle large amounts of people - the answer is yes. When Active Worlds was still the biggest thing around, I used to go to events and conventions that housed more then 150 people on the same server.

Seeing more then 40 people in my visibility range made my graphics rendering and network lag like hell...

... on the Pentium 166MHz with a 36.6k modem I had - with no 3D accelerator. Imagine how fast that will zoom on a modern 3+ Gigahertz level computer with broadband.

But yea.. 1995 technology. SL has a good reason for why it lags with more then 20 people around, and its a reason i'm willing to live with.

(For now)

Here's a comparison of SL and AW:
SL - too cluttered, land is way too expensive and scarce
AW - too empty, land is insanely abundant and free

SL - you can build anything with highly flexible primitive shapes
AW - you can sorta build stuff with existing meshes, but the UI is horrible, though if you own your own world you can upload new meshes with highly optimized custom geometry and textures.

SL - has streaming audio, video, no midi, text or off-site textures
AW - midi is sadly everywhere, you can set sounds and textures and even video to an external URL, and the best thing is that you can instantly make signs without having to make a custom texture but i dont think there is a real streaming audio feature, is there?

SL - tries to be a semi-coherent world, often against the wishes of its users, its more or less secure and under centralized control by LL
AW - it's very open and hackable, there is no ownership of anything, you can download the entire asset server if you so desire, make your own client, the works!

SL - has no builtin browser yet, but one is planned and being actively worked on
AW - has had a browser from the beginning, but i think its IE, and I dont think you can set a page as a texture

SL - avatars are beautiful, animated, and easily customizable, but they lag like hell, making it impossible to have very large gatherings
AW - avatars are a very primitive mesh, more or less customizable but there is no easy builtin UI for that and no custom animations. OTOH, you may be able to have much larger gatherings of people.

SL - has fancy (as in laggy and sim-crashing) physics
AW - no real physics, so you cant have decent vehicles, but at least there's no lag and sim crashes

SL - more or less powerful and secure scripting language allowing you to do anything (that LL allows)
AW - Well, you have some primitive scripting and since its all open and hackable you can make bots and shit, but you need to do it in a real programming language, basically by building (and hosting) your own automated client program

AW has an SDK that you can write bots with, and an "action" tag type thing, very very limited 'scripting'.

Question I forget... do the avatars have a restricted Poly count? If not, you could make some pretty detailed avatars. Although I think textures get cut down to heavily compressed JPEGs.

Yup, there is streaming video. Both video and audio using Media Player rather then quicktime. AW isnt really trying to be cross platform.


Almost true... AW is very open and hackable, but the company doesnt really like or approve of the situation. AWCom is willing to let people mess with the client and server code - for a pretty high license fee. Doing anything from making your own compatible client/server to just plain modding without a license can "get you sued", as they put it.

At Thu, Mar 7. 2002 they dropped this huge "DO NOT USE PIRATED UNIVERSE SERVERS" sign in the middle of AlphaWorld's welcome area because many people got their hands on the universe software and pirated it around like crazy, making their own illegal... well, "shards", so to speak.

The sign was moved out of sight since, but you can still see it under the ground by flying under the terrain while phantoming (hold Shift and fly down).


True, however - by creating an avatar, you can attach custom animations to its model file. So your avatar has its own set of unique gestures. Still, to add/edit/remove animations to the list, you have to mess with the model file description.


AW has NO vehicles, period.

The only vehicles it has are whatever you glue into the avatar itself inside its model file, and even then its not a vehicle, just a shape of one. A real pitty.

Hell, if you stand on a mobile platform, you dont get carried off - you just stand on it like a dolt until it eventualy move away from your feet and you fall down... sometimes. >.>

And Oz - i'm told some people used some pretty heavy poly meshs without a hitch. AW doesnt limit you as much as the Renderware format.. but its working kind of ok on a 3D accelerated computer like we have today.

Well as you know I have only recently discovered AW so I bow to your superior wisdom. Though I think you're over-reacting about the "open and hackable" bit, I mean, IIRC Adam Zaius was downloading all of AW... god knows why... and so did the map people.

Sorry if that sounded abit pretentious, didnt mean it that way.