AW comparison (was Graphics suck)

LOL at the graphics!

What kind of graphics card ya running there? What are the specs on your system.

The fault may be within your system but if its not and your just flaming LL and the in world look, well to each thier own I like how SL looks

Cat Cotton

Well, I guess you won't be playing then.

Too bad really, you will be missing out on the FIRST, and still ONLY, world in which you can create what you want, and have an impact on the world.

You may not understand the opportunity you are passing up here. Remember all the times in <insert your favorite MMORPG here> that you said, "Shit, this sucks, even if I do <insert the action you were doing here> it doesn't matter! The damn thing will just spawn again. I wish we could actually impact the game, now that would be cool!" You see, here in Second Life, that's exactly what we get to do.

Feel like letting our a little aggression? Have fun in the Outlands, or head over to Gibson and get in a Tank and shoot your friends.

Do you have a creative side to you just wanting to be released? Were you once a feared and mighty Dungeon Master? Make up your own quests in Second Life, write your own story line, make people believe and watch the world change around you.

Have you ever thought, "I bet I could have modelled that house or building better?" In Second Life prove it. Show the world you are a marvelous builder by constructing your own structure. If it's as good as you say, the world of Second Life will say it too.

Ever wanted to build an interactive object? You can in Second Life. Drive your new car, fly your new plane, pass out exploding messages, do whatever you dream, because it's all possible in Second Life.

Bad Graphics? For a 3D World, where you can interact, build, create, and effect change on not only the world, but the populus as well, the graphics are amazing.

There is NO GAME out there that compares to Second Life. Eye-Candy alone doesn't make a game, it's just too bad "hardcore" gamers have been brainwashed to believe in the kill,kill,kill,level style of gaming. So, if you enjoy your <insert your favorite MMORPG here>, and you want to be <insert level/Character here> that's all good and well. Just remember, you are living in a Static world. No matter what you do, you won't be able to change it, you won't have any effect on it, and you will never be unique. Go ahead, blend into the world as everyone else will, as for me though, I think I'll just sit back and be unique. I'll just continue to build and effect my ever changing world. I sit here by my new outdoor fireplace (on-sale at the Cabin in Slate) and listen to the crickets chirp and the waves slowly lap the shore, and watch the sunset once again, and realize, I made all this happen, by my own two hands, in a world where I can do anything I dream.


Thanks!

Yes, it probably is the system. I know when I upgraded to an nVidia FX card I was amazed at how much better everything looked....

Bob, you just said it all.....Bravo

Bob do you even have a REAL life?!? I pity you. Go out and enjoy the real world. Believe me, it's a lot more fun. Still, the graphics suck.

Sorry, I have no life....just a second....ok sorry had to check on that little LAN Glitch..

Nope, no life for me, I just sit at home and play Second Life all day long....just a second...ok, sorry, had to recover some email items for a user...

Yes, I love to sit on my fat butt all day and...oh hold on again....oops gotta go, I have a meeting with a vendor to discuss the problems we've been having with our automated backup vault software

Don't feed the trolls

The graphics are all user-created. If you don't like the graphics, why don't you create better textures and distribute them for all of us to use?

What? But that would be work
Isn't there an I Win button somewhere?

WOW, Thanks Bill! I was just wondering when I'd see my very first flaming troll I'm-so-cool and you-suck, going-to-start-an-argument post here in SL.

Finally, the wait is over.

Bill, I think you picked the wrong game. Both in terms of graphics and the character of these boards. Neither will give you what you want.

I'll be here waiting for you to crawl back when SL looks like Half-Life 2.

Ya'll are the most witty sharp people I've ever had the pleasure of gaming with. All of your responses deserve a bravo!

Bill, is your bum feeling the burn of the flame turned against you yet? If you can't keep up with the big dogs, stay on the porch.

Definitely do not feed the trolls. One thing about a comment Bob made, though:



Sorry, Bob, but thanks for playing our game! It's nothing revolutionary or new at all, and it definitely wasn't the first of its kind. It wasn't even the second or third. Active Worlds, for example, has been doing it successfully (streaming 3D interactive on-the-fly building environment with chat and programming/gaming capabilities) since 1995. That's 8 years now.

Anyone who doesn't want to know anything about alternatives to SL should discontinue reading this post now.

Active World's graphics are not totally up to par with SL, of course, since it is based on the dated Renderware 3.0 engine, but you can build and chat and play games just as readily in it as you can in SL. It supports both Directx and OpenGL and doesn't require a high end 3D card (it has software 3D support which is actually pretty speedy if your processor is decent). But, truth be told, I've seen builds in Active Worlds that push the render engine to its limits, completely upstaging even the best builds I've seen in SL, and with much higher frame rates. Part of the reason for this is because graphic objects in AW are uploaded on the fly by the users, if they have permission to do so, and can be converted from practically any commercial or freeware 3D software package such as 3D Studio Max, Maya, Autocad, Truespace - just to name a few. Using 3D modeling programs like these gives the builder complete control over his objects, so that he may, for example, manipulate them on the vertex level, and remove the faces that aren't visible to the user - which is one of a few nasty side effects of using prims to build in-game (it's not efficient to render faces the user can't see). I can't build the way I want to in SL because the tools to manipulate vertices and faces just aren't there yet, and the inefficiency bothers me. What if you want to stretch one texture across half of an object face, and cover the other half with another texture? You have to build two objects or create a texture that includes both textures. Ridiculous! It's no wonder SL's sims have such a low maximum prim count. You're rendering a whole bunch of junk that need not be rendered. SL has some maturing yet to do in the graphics efficiency department. It looks great but crawls, even with fast 3D cards like my Radeon 9700.

Objects in Active Worlds can have scripts, and animations, and a host of other features that make them interactive - but more importantly, a user can bring BOTS into the world that can interact with the users and the objects and create any kind of game/simulation the mind can think of, with a vast development library. Active Worlds provides a complete SDK for in-world programming, which anyone with any programming ability can use to create interactive programs that work with the environment to do whatever desired. It is incredibly robust. Having taken a peek at SL's programming language, LSL, I can tell you from experience that SL has a lo
t of catching up to do. The Active Worlds SDK is a programmer's dream. You actually get to write in C or C++, and some people have even ported the SDK to Visual Basic, Delphi, and other programming environments. (http://www.activeworlds.com/tech/sdk.asp)

Using the Active Worlds SDK, members have created completely automated worlds and games - spectacular feats of imagination and ingenuity that SL has yet to touch. I've been watching the LSL feature requests on the forums here, and all I can say is, "Get in gear, Lindens!" Some of the programmers here have talents that are going to waste because they cannot yet do what they want with the language.

I watched Ama Omega here on the forums struggle with his games, and lose a ton of money, because of errors in the way LSL handles events. How fun is that?

The first avatar created for Active Worlds was (coincidentally) named "Protagonist." Sound familiar? Seeing the references to that book here in SL's forums makes me chuckle a bit. Been there, done that, 8 years ago.

Active Worlds is made up of over 1000 individual worlds. One of these worlds, the main world, is called AW and covers millions of square meters. If you were to walk your avatar from one end to the other, it would take you hours upon hours of real time - probably a couple days - to do it. Fortunately teleporting from spot to spot costs nothing. Many of the other worlds (which can be as small as, say, an SL sim, or as large as, say, California) are owned by MEMBERS, and not the company who makes the software. Thus in those worlds, the owners make the rules - not the company.

In Active Worlds you have a contacts list, and on this list you can have individual settings for every person on it. You can let them see you or not, let them see what world you're in, let them join you, let them see details about you...you can block them from joining you or seeing if you're online, block them from sending you telegrams (IMs), etc. AW also has a feature called "whisper," which lets you chat privately with someone near you, so that your conversation is not broadcasted aloud. It's easier than IMs. I long for features like these in SL.

It's cheaper, too. $6.95 a month for full and total access. Of course, to own a world costs more money, but it's YOURS. You can do with it as you wish. You can allow in whoever you wish, kick out whoever you wish. You can control what is built there, and who is allowed to build it. You can assign privs to others so that they may have special abilities in your world. You can program it however you like. You can even host it on your own computer. Total control.

So, to sum up:

SL is not the first, and it is not the only. It has the potential to be the best, but in order to succeed it will need to mature and learn from some of the more established venues.

I have lots of ideas on how to make SL the best, based upon my own experience in 3D chat/game/building worlds. In particular, I have some ideas about the economy. Too, I can share a bit about how to create a peacekeeping force who can take on the roles of mediation (incidentally, Bob, your volunteer mediation suggestion gives me a belly laugh every time I see you pop up offering your services. You can't be serious! Where's your enforcement powers?) and enforcement. Control like that can be given to users, provided they are put through the proper tests and checks/balances prior to being given the authority.

Whew, there are lots of things that could make SL the best. For right now, it is merely the newest. It may not even be that. Don't get me wrong, I love it and I see a lot of potential. I've paid my 15 bucks a month twice now, and I'll be staying (albeit infrequently) to see what happens.

First and foremost, SL needs to stop stifling creativity with huge taxations. Oh, resources are limited? Build more sims. Update your building tools to allow for the creation of more render-efficient objects. Instigate a system of resource limitation based on grid coordinates, not on overall sim object usage. Set a maximum number of prims per meter, not per sim. Goodbye, lag! Goodbye object hoarders! Problem solved. Jeez.

-J

http://www.activeworlds.com
http://www.awcommunity.org
http://mauz.info/

Guys, you're preaching to the converted. Let him quit. He's an idiot IMHO but let him be one

Have you read about the upcoming changes? No sense in beating a dead horse.

What if the voices tell you to beat the dead horse?

*blink*

Board Troll - Please guys just leave thread its not worth it.

Sure, sure. Thanks for missing the point though!

-J

Guys really it's not worth it...

Good grief! I hope they're paying you a commission. Here's a blurb about what it's like to let your creativity be released in Active Worlds from a site dedicated to it...

"AW allows one to "build" with (manipulate) premade 3D objects/models that are made outside of AW. Until AW3 (released in April, 2001), AW had little object manipulation abilities: keyboard used for up/down/left/right/back/foward movement (x-/z-axis movement) and y-axis rotation, but a complicated, crude "scripting" language for changing textures, overall object color (by use of textures on non-texture mapped objects), movement animation, and attaching sounds (WAVs/MIDIs) to objects (activated by either clicking—"activating"—or "bumping" into them), still exists. Prior to AW3 there was also no light control whatsoever within AW directly (only per-object surface reflectivity could be changed). opacity and scaling still can't be accomplished without learning another complicated scripting language, RenderWare scripting (RWX), which was integrated into the rendering engine, Criterion RenderWare 2.1, (but had to be rewritten from scratch for AW3 because of Criterion's lack of backwards compatibility for RWX in RW3) to get any real control over objects, or attempt to convert an object made from even more complicated 3D modellers (3D Studio, trueSpace, Lightwave, etc.). The whole process just reeks of user-unfriendliness and unintuitivity.

If AW's current developers, Activeworlds, Corp. (AWC), ever hope to make AW more popular, they must make it more user-friendly, intuitive, and easier to use. For example, requiring world owners to edit a text file just to add avatars is not something the majority of computer users would want to do (user-unfriendly). Not everyone is a programmer and there are more end-users than programmers yet most programmers seem to continue to write programs only programmers can adequately use. I just don't get it..."

Sounds like fun, and very accessible!

The other HUGE difference is that in SL you can build in real time, while other people watch you. AW is nothing like that. It's also why SL uses parametric primitives for building blocks because they require a lot less data to be streamed than with standard mesh objects where the engine needs to be told the location of every vertex.

SL is light years beyond AW because it's accessible. You don't have to already have a computer science degree or own a seperate (and very expensive) 3d modeling app to be able to create in it.

Different strokes for different folks I guess... but it seems to me you're sorta missing the point on what makes SL so unique. *shrug*

Nah, the point was to demonstrate to folks like Bob how there are other things out there similar to SL, and they might be worth a look. Choose to have a look or not, but bashing on it so quickly seems a bit knee-jerk, Chip.



You didn't provide a link. If it was written by who I think it was, however, you can bet he'd not have anything at all nice to say about SL. Interestingly enough, if it *is* the guy I think you're referring to, he's spent years in AW and, as you implied, wrote an entire site stating his *opinion* of a program he obviously otherwise loves enough to base the site on in the first place. Guess it can't be all that bad if he's keeping the "dedicated" site up after all these years, yanno?

*shrug* Go figger.



Ain't sarcasm sweet! Things have changed since this fellow wrote this little blurb. If you'd taken a objective look at AW thing you might've noticed that. Since you haven't really looked, and prefer to judge via someone else's opinion, what do you expect?

Weren't we just scolding a troll for telling us SL sucks? Heck, that guy at least LOOKED at it before he said that.



That's incorrect. Objects you create have to be uploaded, but once they are they can be "rezzed" on the fly just like in SL. You can indeed build in real time, while others watch you - that's half the fun. Friends and I have had tons of fun building in real time together. Typically folks trade or sell objects which are used as the basic building blocks for the projects they create. There are thousands of pre-made objects in several free libraries as well. You might upload a set of walls, for example, and build using those walls. Most of the public building worlds have a huge collection of objects for folks to build with already available - no uploading or 3D modeling necessary. It is very simple to "rez" them and then place them however you want, add textures, animation, and commands (scripts) that change how they behave.

Some folks here were asking for the ability to build up high, perhaps so that they could have a "sim in space" or something similar. AW allows you to change gravity, or even eliminate it. Create your own night and day cycles. Remove the ground plane and have a REAL sim in space.

All those impossible things here are possible there.

Building, changing textures, and adding animation/commands in AW is 10 times easier to do in AW than in SL. In 10 minutes a newbie can be on his way to making some pretty awesome builds. 10 minutes into SL barely even gets you off the island.

Should the newbie want to dabble into deeper things, like object creation, he can do so at his own pace. He will never run out of things to learn. At least he will be able to make something more than a woody block after his first few minutes of signing in.

I don't expect you to know these things, Chip, because again your response was a knee-jerk negative.



Whether you use "parametric primitives" or not, the engine has to somehow be told where each and every point (vertex) is on the grid before it can render the object. Then faces are added. Then textures are applied. No matter how you render an object the same process is followed. Simply stated, 3D objects begin life as points in space. Points in space need skin. You can't have the skin until you have the points. The engine has to know where the points are for ANY object to be rendered. Is this rocket science?

AW doesn't use "meshes," by the way. When you convert an object to Renderware it becomes a series of vertex clumps with the face declarations immediately following. Texture mapping is then assigned. It's the most efficient rendering technique streaming 3D can have, IMHO, and I wouldn't doubt it if SL's technology mimics it to some degree. Some of the other streaming 3D programs definitely do.



You want to know why this is a funny, naive, knee-jerk statement?

1. The average AW user knows less about computers and object creation than the average SL user BY FAR.

2. I don't have a computer science degree and I am not half bad at making some pretty nice objects. In fact I made a set of lights, some fancy beds, and a few other things, and I'm a total self-taught novice when it comes to 3D modeling.

3. You don't need to know how to model at all in order to create in AW. We have our own "prims" concept, which is basically a standard building library - actually, several sets of building libraries. The point is, you aren't limited to using *only* those. You can also flex your muscles if you're a serious modeler - something SL so far really cannot allow you to do. Hopefully that will change.

4. There are many freeware modelers out there. In fact the one AW folks like to use the most is actually called "Renderware Modeler" and it's completely free for all. It's also a blast to use. No computer science degree necessary.

Bottom line, Chip? Why throw tomatoes at something you spent 5 minutes or less looking at?

When SL allows you to place objects that play MP3 files, streaming audio and video, and voice capability, THEN you can tell me it is light years ahead of AW. When you can make a door open and close in SL with just 2 simple commands (as opposed to learning how to program in a fairly complex language like LSL), THEN you can tell me it's getting close to what AW can do.

Until then, admit what you know is based on very little actual research, no experience with AW at all, AND that you've reacted off the cuff with little or nothing to go on.

Cheers!

-J

Hehehe. Fair enough Justice You're not wrong. I have played around with AW, though I admit my knowledge of it is very limited. That said, I HAVE checked it out and there's a reason why I only used AW briefly and became an SL lifer. I don't think they're comparable. I don't think my post had any more of an anti-AW tone than yours was anti-SL. Perhaps someone else who's used both would care to add their objective 2 cents? My initial reaction to AW was that it looked very dated, and was not intuitive. By contrast I find SL to be highly accessible. People with no knowledge of how 3d works are able to create in SL without hitting many of the typical barriers that people encounter trying to learn a 3d modeler. I have a lot of experience in that area. I've taught classes in 3d modeling and animation at george washington university for going on eight years.

First of all, why the hell are we allowing trial users to post on the forums?!

I think what the guy means is the atmosphere is kinda plain looking, and I agree with that aspect but at the same time realize you can't make the game look that dynamically great with streaming data. I think with the use of nicely done textures you can make any graphic look great. Waiting for Havoc 2, when it comes out, look out, the environment will blow us all away