OMG I've just been to AW!

OMFG that place is so HORRIBLE!!
Eh, who wants to start a raiding party to recruit new SLers in AW?
Those people need to be saved from that horrible interface.
And... it has chat baloons! OMG its so "There"
And, and.. it has these EVIL CHEESY MIDIs playing ALL OVER THE PLACE!!!!
Do these people even KNOW about SL?
I'd say SL is pretty much "AW done right"... so what keeps them trapped inside that horrible mess?
I thought AW supported meshes? But the graphics look even more primmy than most stuff in SL!
I think I need a shrink, I feel traumatized by the AW experience! oO

I sympathies with you.

And with all those 3D-VR addicts who are "stuck" with AW.

I let my account there expire about a year BDSL (Before Discovery of SecondLife). Not for technical reasons though. I just thought the management of the service sucked. That hasn't changed.

Here is the thing (and as far as I know its the only thing) that AW still has going for it: You don't need broadband. In fact when I first started using it you didn't even need a 3D video card (I don't even think there WERE such things) but I'm not sure that's true any more. They use the Renderware engine as a basis for everything and at one point Renderware seemed like it was about to go out of business when Canon came along and bought them up. At the time I think Canon was trying to build a graphics empire of some kind and Renderware was just a piece of the pie. Since then there has sprung forth far too many players for any one company to rule.

But while it's tempting to think that a BIG company such a Microsoft, or even Sony could for all practical purposes own the 3D-VR and gaming space neither company has gone all-out to do so. Microsoft's strategy of wearing their competitors down with slightly lower prices and then raking in the dough when the competitor goes under just doesn't work so well against Sony who actually MAKES money on each Playstation system sold while the Xboxen are sold at a loss. Add to that, the next generation Playstation may not only compete with game consoles but may run circles around ordinary PCs (massively parallel processing built-in).

Um... I seem to have digressed here. Anyway, like the Wright Brothers plane, AW has it's place in history as the first (as far as I know) 3D-VR that allowed users to "build" their own space. The current owners had no part in the development of the program by the way. In fact they drove the original development team away when they bought the rights to the software. At that point in time it lost it's chance to become a truly visionary system. Most of my stay there was accompanied by the hope that someone else would buy the program and let it flourish as it deserved to do. I finally gave up waiting. The current owners run it not so much as a business but as a hobby I think. It being a hobby for them makes it not such a good hobby for anyone else. As with the Wright Brothers plane, AW belongs in a museum, not something you'd want to take for a serious ride these days.

3D-VR is almost an inevitable "next big thing" though. It's WAY WAY behind schedule for reasons that I don't fully understand. Microsoft HAD a 3D-VR built in-house and canned the thing. Demonstrating once again their philosophy "we will sell no product before it's time." (Translation: "before some other company proves it to be profitable".

Have I alienated everyone yet?

---

Mac Beach - Presumptive winner of the 2004 Heartless Jaded Old-Timer Award

"It's good to finally be recognized for my accomplishments..."

paging illume Skallagrimson to thread #14571

AHEM!! ::: taps foot :::

You know what?

...

No. Wait. Never mind. I'll just DO it.

Now see what you've gone and made me do?

Who's that?

Heh, I think There is quite a bit better than AW. When I first tried AW, probably around 2000, I thought "Wow, someone MUST have done better than this!". I hated it. It looks even worse now, after trying places like SL, There, and even TSO.

I agree with everything Mac Beach said. Yes, everything. Yes, even that.

I used to be addicted to AW, it was the first virtual world I had found, and it was nice and cool to build in, and better than VRML even, which always looks like crap to me.

This was back in oh... 99? I think. So places like There and SL were still in early alpha's or beta's.

Once I found There and SL though, ouch, AW sucks so badly.

And yeah SL is basicly AW done right, plus some extra nice stuff. AW could be closer to SL if the management weren't complete morons.

I was so surprised that everything users have been asking for in AW, custom avatars, better in-world scripting, better interface, etc. had been done in SL.

Why anyone would still want to stay in AW is beyond me. Everything looks so dated, they're just *now* starting to get around to changing their interface, and the avatars you could make out of prims.

There are some things that are nice though, like free building on a first-come-first-serve basis, no economy to worry about, having a private world can be fun, and you can actualy make NPC's via the SDK, theres actualy an RPG game that is one of the more popular worlds there. I also always thought the fact that each world can be completely different was cool, we're just now starting to see some of that in SL with 1.4's sun and land textures for sim owners.

Text over a persons head was always part of AW, long before There, but they later added baloons with them and even an option to make them more cartoon kinda copying There's exactly, which was probably intentional.

The thing about recruiting people is, they will kick you out for doing it if you do it in any of the main areas. I once posted a link that was perfectly normal like www.google.com or some sort I forget which link it was exactly, but someone asked something like "where do i find", and I was told by a "GateKeeper" (GK, kinda like Liasions but volunteer) that posting links isn't allowed because they could contain viruses.

But if you do try, good luck, you could always build a huge SL memorial with a bunch of signs pointing to the website, hehe.

Can someone post a link to the AW website please? Or at least the full name so I can search for it?

Azelda

Oh great, it uses the local system language to display stuff, which in my case is Chinese

I so dont understand what button does what

Azelda

I'm guessing people stay in AW because the system requirements are lower, the cost is cheaper, and they are attached to their friends / communities / worlds they've built up there.

I tried it back in the day when it was the only option for this kind of thing.. and it was fun back then, but after playing SL there's no turning back.

One of the first 3D VR environments I found was AW, back in 1999. I remember how blown away I was at the time because there was NOTHING else like it... Low system requirements indeed! I remember running the thing on my 486-DX-80!! Unfortunately they built the thing off of circa 1993/1995 Renderware technology and basically never updated to a more current tech, plus the management of AW are a complete bunch of bozos and had more or less no interest in what the users wanted.

Unlimited building (except for the fact that you were stuck with the object and texture sets avaialable in the world you built in) was what most attracted me. The building interface was very easy to learn and very VERY fast. I have a hundred or so large builds in there now, including a small city - Nexxus City (AW 285s 5000w) which sports about 50 fellow citizen builders. AW did have some things that were pretty cool. They had special commands that allowed users to interact with the environment, rotate, move, or otherwise change attributes on objects with fairly simple syntax. They finally support MP3 (along with the crappy MIDI and WAV), some objects could accept jpg's from websites, including jpg's generated from webcams or "TV" feeds (and could be updated every second or so), and they have some pretty decent lighting/corona effects commands now (but still no shadows!). There IS grid-based land editing, but as far as I know it's not enabled on any of the public building worlds. Their chat / telegram interface still bites though, but you can turn off those silly little chat bubbles! One of the coolest things about AW was that you could create programmable 'bots' to do all kinds of things, from running games to building stuff for you, to simple chatbots. The SDK was a pretty useful extension to the software. I hade a huge number of friends in AW, and that by far was the best part of the experience.

My AW citizenship lapses this November, and as hard as it will be to leave my favorite builds behind, I definitely agree that SL is "AW done right", and will not be renewing. By the way, everything you build in AW (at least public building worlds, which is where most people build anyway) isn't really yours because it resides on their servers, and when you leave, your builds revert to what's called "Not A Citizen" builds. There's no way, aside from not deleting your cache, of backing up your work and keeping it to share later with your friends online once you leave the program behind.

I was one of the lucky ones to come in to There when it was in beta, which allowed me to get a lifetime membership for only $29.99. There was a completely different experience from AW, and much better in many ways. Vehicles, paintball, card tables, and voice chat are by far the best parts of There. Building, however, is a DISMALLY AWFUL experience! Their building interface is quirky at best, and the fact that you have to PAY for model submissions and that they have to be "approved" is ridiculous! All of the content created by the users, according to the EULA, becomes property of There, even though you may benefit from selling the items at auction. Come to think of it, you pretty much have to PAY for everything in There.... reloading your paintball gun, port-a-zones, house rent, etc etc. I also didn't particularly like the "it's a game" part either, with skill rating levels etc. I was in There primarily for the social aspect of the thing.

All I can say is.... BRAVO for Second Life!!! They succeeded in so many ways with what can be done in there that it makes those other programs look like a child's toys! I just wish I had found it sooner and not wasted all my time and money on (albiet revolutionary in their own right) technology that is run by poorly trained management who are only concerned with the bottom line! Here's to the future!

Peace & Happy Building,

Artillo

They say they have some sort of educational value to it which educators could use. I say SL could do it much better. It looks like (never played the game) the tools in SL are more advanced and so are the features. LONG LIFE SL!

I found ActiveWorlds in early 2000
I was also blown away by this and learnt to build easy...
I now own a city in AW called Ocean City,
my citizenship ends near the end of the year, I may not be renewing...

I looked at Activeworlds way back in 1997, when it was still "new". I remember being blown away by the ability to build things. Back then, it was just the Activeworlds Main server. They added the Mars area later (I was one of the first people on there), and then a few movie gimmick sites (THe Godzilla World? pfft) .

I remember loving it because it worked fine on a 28.8 modem, but then I got bored with it and let my membership expire.

I was actually considering joining up again last year before I found SL, but found out that they charge monthly... I avoided that.

I like the fact that my builds are still up, though, and people have expanded my original city out in the middle of nowhere.

But, SL is a lot better. Better company behind it too.

LF

http://www.activeworlds.com/products/worlds_pricing.asp

I'd be _very_ interested in hosting my own SL server.

It's coming eventually.

LF

Lordfly what was your city name? My city is still out there too, no ones built onto it though because its pretty remote.

SL is actualy built purposely to allowed servers in other locations of the world, in the paper written by Philip and Cory, they go over this a little bit. So they definitly plan to have something like this. However it may be more strict requirements, I remember Philip saying something like the bandwith needed to run a server is alot, LL's pipe being something like 3 gigs.

The paper can be found here: http://secondlife.com/news/whitepapers.php

Apparently AW is expanding into Europe for some reason, another poor business decision in my opinion, since their current software isn't even close to comparing with SL or There. (www.aw-europe.com)

While they do have some nice features, the overall technology and software is just too lacking, expanding kinda seems foolish.

Meh, I dont need an internet connection to run a server, I can use 127.0.0.1
Instant private sim! No visitors though... unless I set up a LAN party

Heh, i used to be a member of Palladium Township at 590N 590W. We even had a teleport kiosk at GZ