AW comparison (was Graphics suck)

Wait a sec, trial users can't post in the forums! This idiot subscribes to Second Life!

Allrighty, Chip, so we are both guided by our own experiences? Imagine that!

A fun little debate - thank you.

I'm definitely pro-SL, by the way. What I'd really like to see is both environments (AW and SL) learning from each other, taking the best of each and collectively creating a better all-around experience for every user. The end result can only benefit us world-travellers, you know?

Darwin - you're too much, man. I do know that trial users can or could at one time post to these forums. Is it possible this dude is really just a trial user? Who would stay if he hated the way it looks? Who would pay $15 bucks a month just to insult the game?

-J

I tried it and trial users cannot post to the forums. This may very well be the stupidest person alive. Shall we shoot him?

good post justice, I think alot of things from aw and sl should combine to make sl an even cooler expierience. Like in Active Worlds I like their lighting much better than here. Also their backdrops look much better. Only thing about aw i don't like is that you have flat land. You can't do nothing with the land and must use user created objects to change the way land looks in aw. Other than all that aw is better in every other way.

I am a trial user and i can post. Can i shoot you now?

It's always good manners to accuse people of being a troll and an idiot for posting their opinion. FYI i know what i am talking about. Having worked with various 3d engines based on OpenGL i know the graphics in SL suck. Ever checked Eve Online? Heck, Quake 1 looks better than SL.

I'v come to the conclusion i don't like SL. Mostly because now i know what kind of people play this game. You're screwed here when having a opinion which differs from the majority. Criticism = trollism = idiot here. I'll just play mohaa where you can have a laugh now and then.

I agree with most of what Justice says about AW from a technical point of view, but almost nothing he says otherwise.

True confession time: I was one of the very earliest users of AW. User number 1631 in fact (I think thats what it was). To use the program when it came out you HAD to establish an identity, and I was the 1631st person to do so. I used the program obsessively for the next several years. I still use my computer excessively, but one of the things I learned from AW was that spending all your time doing one thing is bad for your health, mentally and physically, but thats another topic.

I can tell that Justice was a pretty good practitioner of AW too based on what he has said about the technology. A lot of what I know about 3D programs was learned from making objects, textures, animations and scripts for AW. At the time I was using it I was fairly sure it was the "Next Big Thing" and so the time was not wasted.

AW is in fact, much more efficient than SL. The main world is hosted on a single server, is not divided up into sims, and as Justice says is also easier on the client side. In fact I first ran it on a 486, although it was barely usable there. It ran like the wind on my first Pentium though.

AW makes some trade-offs with respect to SL that allow it to do this. Most of what happens when you are in AW is happening on YOUR computer, not the server. Objects, textures, scripts, animations are all downloaded to you cache. In fact, (unless they have changed this) you can be in AW and drop your Internet connection and not know it. You can be in world, building away, unless you happen to notice the absence of chat nothing would be out of order at all. This is why AW works on Dial-up. Some disadvantage of this: You can build away, only to find that your activities are going to waste. Minor connection problems can lead to partially corrupt build that you only are aware of after you clear your cache or someone else point them out to you. There is nothing like physics in SL. You can't construct a game that doesn't allow users to cheat. I there is a wall you aren't supposed to be able to go through, just replace the wall in your cache with something small, or permeable and then walk on through. The client tells the server where your AV is, and the server has no veto over that. If you are in a shooting game with other players, replace their avatars in your cache with a cube 100 meters on each side and then shoot them from a mile away. They will be mystified at your accuracy . They are also constantly fighting issue with people using the program without registering and all sorts of other related abuse. There is no such thing as private objects because anything you create from scratch can be stolen from materials left in other users cache. They have done thing with encryption to deal with this, but it just slows the thieves down and makes it harder for you to prove who stole what from who.

Scripts in AW work on the client too. I can build a clock with a script, but if the clients computer clock is off he will see the wrong time. I can animate birds to fly or fish to swim, but each user will see the object at a different place at any instant. A user can turn a light object on, but it is only on for that user, the rest of the users see darkness until they turn the light on too. Of course they did all these things because thats the way Renderware works. It is a rendering engine, not a 3D world engine. The AW system, not much enhanced since the original fired programmers coded it, is mostly glue. Gluing Renderware with a cheap database engine on the back end, adding a primitive chat capability and gradually enhancing it with IM and things like that. To this day you get the impression that the developers are coding the thing by trial an error. I agree with Justice that the API was a good piece of work (they got rid of that coder too). However they could have done MUCH more with it. As it stands you HAVE to write in some compiled program such as C, Pascal or compiled Basic to work with it. The workings are at a fairly low level too. the API calls are not particularly powerful, requiring the BOT (as they erroneously called) to do a lot of polling activities. As efficient as the rest of the program can be, the Bots can drag the whole system to its knees, especially when they try to simulate something like the physics that are common in SL. I've seen people creating more sophisticated activities in the short existence of SL than in my whole 7 or so years in AW. I'm quite sure that there are things that can be done in SL that you could emulate, but never quite achieve with a bot in AW.

Those are just technical differences. As has been said, both programs could probably benefit from ideas explored by the other. On the other hand, the design decisions made for SL were not made in a closet. They designed physics and real-time interaction into the system at a cost, but not out of ignorance of the alternatives. SL is a much more ground-up system than AW ever was. To make AW more like SL you would have to throw out Renderware, and the owners of AW don't have the resources or the imagination to do anything like that.

AW has some fatal flaws that go way beyond technical differences with SL however, that will not be obvious to anyone who tries the program for the first time. To understand this I have to give a much abbreviated history:

AW was a spin-off of another 3D program called (I believe) Worlds Away. I had used that for a short time too and it was pretty mesmerizing. Also another story.

The owners of Worlds Away put a few technical people on developing an alternative program. As this happened they started having their own financial crunch, and before releasing it as a product they decided to put it up for sale. While some very talented people who had worked on it tried to come up with the funds to buy it, some other people of a non-technical nature borrowed money from their parents (no joke) to buy the thing for a bargain basement price. They hired the technical guys and kept them on long enough to learn how to run the thing and then found convenient excuses to fire them, one by one. To us loyal users, a little back room politics was not enough to leave the program. We figured it would succeed in spite of all this.

We were wrong. The new owners demonstrated time after time that not only did they not understand the technology, but they didn't understand business, nor did they understand how to build a community. They have been through 3 or more sets of developers now, at any point where a developer starts to voice too much of an opinion they find someone else. The company went public with an IPO hoping to strike it rich, but the IPO quickly collapsed with the stock price resting in the teens for a few months and then going below a dollar where it belonged. The stock stayed in the teens IMHO because the company engaged in stock pumping (or ticker painting as I think it is now called). Less than 100 people ver owned the stock, and yes a few hundred shares traded every day trying to keep the bid-ask prices up. Easy to spot, harder to prove. But you can only do that for so long, particulalry when to need to go back to the VCs for funding. They were going to merge with another Internet company until someone pointed out that the other company was heavily invested in the porn and spam business. Then they were going to merge with Aladin (the compression program for Apple computers) But I think better sense prevailed at Aladin, maybe after they had face to face meetings with the AW owners. Finally they took it private again, where it now resides as more than anything else the personal play-toy of the two owners. These guys are not evil so much as they are just stupid, and I can't think of any more accurate way to put it. One of them accidentally wiped out their news server recently. They have no backup. Users were trying to coach the guy through maintaining the news server properly, but obviously failed. (I still monitor the newsgroups on occasion hoping that eventually they will sell the program to someone with a few brain cells, unfortunately this doesn't seem to be in the offing). At first he tried to deny he had wiped it out, then he claimed he did it on purpose! When a few users asked where they could go for 7 years worth of technical information that had been in that newsgroup, they are met with silence.

The greatest failing of AW management however has been their total inability to appreciate their own user community. ( I say "own" here, but should point out that no company "owns" their user community, a distinction I think the LL people understand). I don't know these guys personally, nor have I ever met them, I can only describe what I saw. What I saw was two guys who probably didn't get along with people too well in real life, trying to do better on-line. They were shy, reluctant to participate in community activities, but not because they were not users. They actually were talented builders and quite creative people from an artistic point of view. They often seemed to be easily talked into things by people they knew and unable to perceive that those things were bad for the user base as a whole.



I cringe when I read that. Such a statement was in my opinion the beginning of the long road downhill for AW. I hope SL avoids all the mistakes AW made (and is still making) in that regard. AW had established a groups of people, volunteer users in fact who helped new users get started and performed a few enforcement activities, such as cleaning up vandalism. That group had only been in operation for a short time however when another users convinced the owners that there needed to be a more powerful "police force" style operation at work. His rational was the ever increasing incidence of vandalism (essentially people building on other people unprotected land) and other examples of what we call "griefing" today. When they put off implementing his ideas the vandalism went up, and when they put it off again even larger incidents took place. The individual involved seemed to be someone obsessed with tracking down all the evil doers. When it was documented that he had engaged in vandalism and programs cheats himself, he claimed that it was all his own private undercover investigation. Right.

Whether to buy him off, or because they actually believed his nonsense the Peacekeepers were born in AW. It has never recovered in my opinion. The PKs (as we called them) were a mostly unmonitored group of users in AW who were given pretty much absolute control over the program. While there were theoretically means to challenge a PKs decision with regard to another user, such things rarely happened. PK's who made too many careless mistakes in exercising their power were eventually retired, but others abused their powers regularly without question from the company. Of course vandalism and other forms of "crime" went down drastically when the PKs were formed, but there is a good chance that this was because at least a few of the primary vandals were PKs themselves. As co-owner of one of the many privately owned worlds in AW we could hear and see things that normal users couldn't (while in our world). On a few occasions I observed people who I knew to be PKs engaging in unethical, if not downright illegal activities in our world (in which they were supposed to have no authority). There were come good and honest PKs too, and in fact the majority of them may have been, but what AW lacked, and refused to implement was a system to routinely distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones. This was one of the largest blows to the AW community, that felt it could no longer trust either the company, or its designees to do the right thing in almost any situation.

My pet theory in trying to come up with a rationale for why the owners of AW would behave so boneheadedly was the introduction of user owned worlds. The group I was associated with, and we were not alone, primarily wanted to own a world so that we would not be subject to the outrageous way that the company worlds in AW were run. I always wondered whether AW was run poorly on purpose just to force people to spend the extra money to run their own world. No matter though, the company always retained the right to come into even private worlds and make trouble. The program is full of holes that allow them to do so and they were caught at it many times. For the owners, the program was a personal play-toy first, and a business only secondarily.

While I'm sure there will eventually be some form of self government in SL, I hope they proceed with caution down that path. There must always be a way for a user to appeal to the company as the ultimate authority. The system must be open to inspection and not run like the Gestapo. The assumption of innocence in one thing that need to be carried over from the real world as well as the need to prove guilt beyond the level of hearsay.

I like the way all the people at Linden labs participate as users. They come in world as users too, not as gods, and I have seen evidence of that multiple times. I hope it stays that way, and I hope that at no point the program is turned over to vigilantes or people who long to leave their real jobs as welders and become a secret agents on-line. There is a place for fantasizing and role playing on-line, but running a business or a community isn't that place.

I wonder if I have broken my record for post length?

OK, I need to address only two things here:

First, Justice, I seeminly mis-spoke when I said SL was the ONLY world like it is.

Although, being an active member of the testing community, as I'm sure you are as well, it's strange why AW has never crossed the Radar Screen. Could it be because it began in '95 and was thought of poorly then? That's not a slam mind you, that's a true question. I just find it strange that I've not heard of AW, and I've been involved in testing MMORPG games for over 7 years.

None the less sir, I do apologize for this over-sight. Let me correct what I'm saying. Second Life is by far the best of the FEW Dynamic world games out there.

Second, Bill, If I have offended you, I apologize. It was not my intention at all, what was my intention was to show you the wonderful game you are missing.

Of course, when you told me I had no life, I'm sure you meant it in the best way possible, so I took no offense to that as well.

The point I was making is, a game is more then eye-candy. If you can't look past a SLIGHT (and it so so so slight) flaw of slightly less graphical look of the game then say EQ, then I pity you. You will miss some very fun games out there. My very first gaming experience was ZORK (The original). (This is PC Games guys, not console) Zork was/is a text based game that kept me spell-bound for days. No graphics, no pictures, just green phosphurous text telling me what was there, and I believed it. I let my mind take over and fill in the blanks, and I had fun. Eye-Candy isn't all there is to a game, there's people, there's the ability to create and be creative, there's the ability to effect the world, there's so much more, and when you add it all together, SL is a game you should be playing, but because you believe that just because the Graphics don't sparkle, then the game isn't a Diamond. YOu are so wrong my friend. Second Life is game waiting to be shined. Waiting for the master's hand to cut into it, and polish it, and make it the true beautiful thing that it is, and the problem is you can't see past the mud surrounding it.



Thanks!

hmm....I have a geforce3 ti500. Do you guys think a new (better) card would improve my graphics (alot I mean)?

....how to get the dev's coffee? Getting low frames per second is an artform. Take a good look at medal of honor. There are no vast open areas like in second life. The maps are designed so as few objects as possible are visible at any given time. The "map" if you will in secondlife is not being created by level designers, its a free for all. IF you worked game engines this fact would not have to be pointed out to you Bill.



Funny, thats why I left twitchy first person shooters....

Thanks Mac That was a very interesting read. Any thoughts on user-friendliness/ease of building? I've only been in AW a couple of times and not for long but everyghing I saw looked like it came straight out of the doom1 engine circa 1993 and the interface was like a giant chat room with a small VRML window (I know it's not VRML but that's what it looks like). Renderware is a BSP engine right? So builds have go be compiled to create the BSP tree?

Last night I logged into AW to try and get some questions answered. In the welcome area there was a sign that said to click it if you wanted to learn to build. It teleported me to a school area and a web page opened in the interface. There was a link offering a building tutorial. Clicking it took me to a web "search" page that tried to install "precision time" spyware on my system. LOL. Nice.

Ok, as you all know i gots to put in MY 2 cents here..and its totally off the track of the original thread ..oh well =]..............
I used AW when it first came out as well.....and i recently went back to AW before i heard of SL.....nothing much has change...you still<you being average builder....not a C+ programmer>can only manipulate objects premade in the world.....AW is more of an internet puzzle...you find the pieces and put them together.....Once i heard, and experienced SL...i cancelled my subscription to AW and i havent been back since.....whats the sense of putting someone elses puzzle together....SL is by far the BEST virtual world ive been the pleasure of playing.......=]

I think an important definition is in order for this conversation.

Second Life, AW, and There (I suppose), are Dynamic Virtual worlds. This means they can be effected and changed, not just by the development team, but by the players themselves.

Worlds like UO, EQ, AC1, AC2, WOW3, et al., are Static Virtual Worlds. This means a player cannot effect the world. The development team runs the storyline, the development team introduces new items to be used, the development team runs the show. The average player watches as the story folds out, but cannot do anything to the world itself.

Now, I have played almost all Online Static Virtual World Games. The only one that came close to allowing me to effect my world, was UO. We had a player run city, we held our own events, we did our own thing. Unfortunately, we couldn't run our own quests, or have our own economy, or have our own town rules. As for the other Static worlds, you will find them to be even LESS friendly to the player that wants to effect changes.

My hope is that SL can give us an even more powerful scripting language, so we can work to create areas for people who have interests in Sci-Fi, or Mideval Fantasy, or Westerns. While I would say my SL experience FAR surpasses any online game experience I've ever had, SL can do better.




Thanks!

LMAO at this thread.....I'm gonna have to agree tho...Graphics on this game do SUCK! But I like the whole idea of the game, maybe that's why I'm still here.......

But I think the crappy graphics have alot to do with the way this game is set up....having it be based in Cali..and all we have to do is load as we fly....

I do think thats why, cause if the graphics were really good...game might be very very hard to play. I don't know squat about computers, but I'm sure someone out there understands what I mean

Could you be more specific? I am not an avid game player, but I've watched other people play games like Doom, Quake and several that I've forgotten the names of. Graphics on THOSE programs suck in my opinion. Textures are very low res and much of what you see looks like its just painted onto the background. Please be specific about what you don't like about the graphics and what other program has graphics you like, otherwise we will assume you are a troll.

I hope you fellas don't mind if I debate with you some more.

Mac, outstanding post. Definitely long. I do have some responses, and I think by necessity they will be long as well...



It's a good thing almost everything I stated was technical.



I think a lot of people in SL could make confessions about having used/abused/loved AW in the past.



An AW power user for sure!



Things have changed, but the picture you paint isn't completely accurate anyway. Everything is dynamic and on-the-fly. A cache is necessary (SL has one, too) because of the sheer amount of data involved. Servers have to feed information to several users at once. So with AW's system, the server polls the client and vice versa to determine what data has changed at any given time. If nothing has changed, the client uses the local data. But if anything has, the client loads the changes immediately and processes them. In the old days (and on dialup, which is to be expected), this was not exactly immediate. It sometimes took a few seconds. These days, on a decent connection, it's pretty fast.

Like SL, AW doesn't work very well on dialup. How could it? There's too much data to stream.



I have not encountered any of these problems in the last couple years. The software used to be buggy, though, I admit. Some of the things you've stated are not accurate, though. The server can veto the client in regards to the avatar's location. Replacing objects in the cache results in an immediate reloading of the object off the object path (the servers poll much fast these days) to replace the "intruder" with a fresh, accurate copy.

Cracking the program and using it without registering? That happens anywhere/everywhere.

Theivery of objects based on cache has yet to actually occur. Textures, yes, but models, no. The problem of object theft was related to stealing the files off of the OP. For several years now, the solution was to secure each file on the OP with a password. It actually works very well, and the end result is that it is harder to steal or copy an object in AW than it is in SL.



For instances where it is necessary for everyone to see everything everyone else is seeing at exactly the same time and place, it is better to use bots than object commands. Object commands don't work in every instance. Bots do, though, and they are very versatile. However, your assessment of lights and clocks is inaccurate. Lights are rendered exactly the same for everyone, at the exact moment they are "rezzed" or turned on, and no matter who by. Music and sound are immediate as well.

Some of my best moments in AW were spent listening to synchronized, full MP3 songs with friends who were thousands of miles away.



Interestingly enough, I get this exact same impression of SL - that it was designed around a rendering engine, and that things like IM/chat/building were kind of added in as the design process went along. In fact, I think anything like AW or SL has to follow this process.

What's the difference between SL and AW in this regard? Is it that SL's cheap database engine on the back end allows two databases (sims) to talk to each other? I think that's about it.

By the by, Renderware isn't bad at all. Lots of big names use it: http://www.renderware.com/customers.htm



It's true - physics have a long ways to go in AW. Renderware does not allow for much in the way of physics. However, AW was never intended to have particularly realistic physics, because it was never intended to be a game. Just an artistic medium. That people have taken the API and created something more virtual-community based is merely coincidental. The creators of the software 8 years ago could never have predicted the way the future was going to shape up as far as realism is concerned. I still think they've done an admirable job, all things considered, and things *have* improved and I reckon they will continue to do so.

Bot is the correct term, by the way. It's not a misnomer. Any application that is to interface with AW must log into the universe with an instance number, and pass its data back and forth in a client-server relationship, just like IRC bots do. The bots log in, poll environment variables, perform functions, and so on - not to mention many of them behave like "bots," as if they were avatars themselves. Point is, the term is correct. Bots are separate processes completely unrelated to the server's threads and other activities.

The API is amazing, however, and open-ended. I've personally watched it expand over the years.



I hope you have some kind of proof to back this all up. If so, could you offer it? Because I think you're in error. I think the development process was the same for SL as it was for AW. Neither one has/had a particular end-goal in mind. Both are experiments, and both are open-ended enough to allow for future changes. The fact that AW continues to improve upon technology that is fundamentally dated does not prove they didn't start from the ground up with this idea. It suggests that they did.

Will SL be using the same engine in 8 years? Will it even be around in 8 years? I hope so!



It was an excellent history. I get the impression through your obviously vindictive and slanted approach that you've been more involved politically with AW than you're admitting to.

I was never involved politically with the management or "greater society" of AW folks, so I can't really comment on the politics. I can say that my own personal dealings with the company regarding world ownership and other administrative topics were generally without flaw and timely. I did not see the kinds of strife you seem to be suggesting. I had heard about some of the problems second hand, though, but I don't know - it seems silly to get involved in those kinds of things.

I do know that a great number of people did not like the two main owners, and that they lost programmers due to bad business decisions and immaturity. The marketing of AW was pretty bad and the management did seem to lead the company in the wrong directions pretty frequently. However, as I understand it the company is owned privately again by the two gentlemen in question, and they have somewhat "cleaned up their acts" as far as business practices go. Remember, the program HAS survived intact for over 8 years now, and for quite some time in its early days it was FREE of charge to be a member. So amazingly enough, the ship didn't sink.

You're right, though. The management did not realize what it was holding in its hands, and due to a lot of bad decisions they lost a few very talented developers and visionaries. It's sad, but it's still going strong and now that XelaG (responsible for the amazing Xelagot bots, http://www.imatowns.com/xelagot/) is the lead developer, things can only improve.



Actually, depending on who you ask, people have varying opnions on how this worked out. I personally feel the PeaceKeepers (PKs) kept AW alive. Before the "law" came around, there was chaos and disruption, harrassment, destruction, abuse, and all sorts of other things that made the place unruly. As you pointed out, the management could care less about the state of the in-world societies. The PKs cleaned up a lot. Yet the PKs only had jurisdiction in SOME places, not all. There were still places where lawlessness was ok.

You see, while AW has a TOS just like SL does, it wasn't enforced until the PKs came around. Disputes were settled, garbage cleaned up, and overall the attitude of the place changed. Sure, there were some PKs who would take it upon themselves to play God. I don't think you can ever get away from such a thing. You just have to put a system of checks and balances in place, and eventually AW did that. These days the PKs are an invisible entity. They need do very little. Just knowing there are powers of enforcement keeps most people from disturbing or disrupting others.

And there are indeed liasons, similar to Lindens, who help to keep that peace. It *does* work.

The Lindens have announced plans to let SL self-govern. Along with such a system comes a need for enforcement. Like it or not, the issue will be on our plate one day, and I see no harm in discussing it.



I agree. We'll leave that whole issue for some other thread, at some later time. I do have ideas, and it's not fair to shoot them down just because I like the system that has evolved in AW. Listen to them first.



The Lindens are great. They seem to listen. However, we're at a low user count right now. A few hundred users can be easy for a small handful of shift-taking Lindens to handle - but a few thousand? What about several thousand? In that case, the Lindens will not be able to afford to staff hired hands to keep the peace. They will need to appeal to members.

It's a worthy discussion no matter how you slice it.



I enjoyed every word of it - especially the history review. Good stuff!

-J

I myself don't care for games very much. I occasionally play games, but, most of the time I was on the computer, I was online searching for software exactly like this. I found AW, I found CyberTown, I found The Sims, I found The Sims Online. I hated them all. Finally, I found Second Life. I wouldn't care if this 'game' was 2D, I would still have bought a lifetime subscription. It was only a few years ago that we were playing games that only had text, as Bob said.

You play this game because you like it, not because it takes advantage of the $500 video card you just bought. If you can't accept that, find a new game and leave us alone.

Howdy, Bob!



Seemingly? Who are you kidding?



So let me get this straight. If you haven't heard of it, then it either doesn't exist or must not be worth a hill of beans? C'mon, Bob, don't be so full of yourself. Lots of things likely escape your radar screen. No need to be stuffy.



Amend that with "...that I know of" and you've got an accurate statement, there.

Cheers!

-J

P.S. Forget about Bill already.

Apearances can vary widely depending on your system and more importantly, your video card. As Ive mentioned on several occasions I went from a GF4MX to a GF4 4600Ti and there was a really big difference in quality of the graphics.

Nope, it's not a BSP engine. Renderware is its own entity. The files it reads are not compiled. They can't be - it's streamed and rendered on the fly. They are plain text files that users can modify if they like. Very simple stuff.

AW's basic world premise is that you have a large open area, like SL. In that area you place objects in any manner you wish. Those objects come from a vast database of already-uploaded objects, or the users can upload their own. It's very much like building with linked prims. You can upload a set of walls - or, if you like, a complete house. Some people like to upload already-modeled 3D scenes and insert them into the world. Others prefer to build structures using premade prims, changing the textures and even the sizes as they go.



I just tried it myself. The web page you are referring to looks like the kind of default page you get when a domain has expired and been taken over by some hosting company. Terrible.

-J

I was going to address that (believe it or not) in my previous post until I realized how huge it was getting. hehe

Well, I can say this.... when I first started using the program it wasn't at all obvious that you could build AT ALL. Many users don't know you can build until they either see other people building or hear them talking about it. I was for a while one of the people that greeted new users and they would often ask me to get them started. Since I had a "property" in a remote location I would take them to my "neighborhood" and get them started. I think about one out of 10 got good at it (maybe less than that). It is a totally different process than SL, better in a couple of ways, worse in most....

In case it isn't clear: basic objects are made outside world using 3DSMAX, Truespace, or several other programs. Ultimately you have to find a converter to get them into Renderware (RWX) format, and since Renderware isn't all that popular it is hard to find programs that produce it directly. It is a very SIMPLE format to understand however, and for many object you can just create them in notepad. This allows you ultimate control and allows for extremely efficient objects. Got a wall that can only be viewed from one side? then your wall can be just 4 vertices and a texture. The rest need not be a burden on the engine. The vast majority of AW users don't make objects at all though. Its sort of like scripting in SL right now, a specialty of the few.

AW has a static "object path" meaning a collection of pre-made objects pointed to by each world. World owners can point to the standard path, but most of them create their own by copying all the standard files (optionally) and then adding to that collection. There are thousands. You can create a single wall with a brick texture and then with a "script" command override it in world and make it a wood wall. It is much more efficient though to create two walls with the different textures rather than using the "script" approach. I put "script" in quotes because it is nothing like SL script. It is a VERY primitive language that was used to introduce features that (I think) ultimately would have had a more formal interface. Keep in mind with the changes in developers many of the design concepts were lost and had to be reverse engineered by subsequent programmers. We were in contact with the original programmer (one of them at least) and got a lot of insight about what was intended originally.

Here is how you "build" in AW. Select an object. Hit your "insert" key. Thats it. you have now created a new object. A new world comes "seeded" with a starter object at location 0,0,0 if you delete that you're screwed! hehe. Each object has the name of the underlying primitive in a dialog box. Change that to another primitive name and poof the object changes, on the fly. So, you have to keep a list of all your primitive names in your path (and hopefully have named them in such a way that you know what they are) Hours are spent in trial-and-error cataloging efforts. None of this is automated in any way by the interface. "Object yards" in AW are nothing more than huge areas covered with every object in the path rezed in some sort of order, wall over here, doors over there, windows over there. You spend a lot of time flying through these trying to find the right combination of shape, orientation, texture that you need. Then you teleport back to your build and duplicate an existing wall or something and type in the new object name that you need. Everything I have described is horribly tedious compared with SL of course. There are one or two shortcuts that are handy though. When you hit insert, the duplicated object is automatically created AWAY from you and perfectly lined up with the original object plus and additional "click" away. So to create a floor, start with the corner floor piece (remember you can re-size these) and hit INSERT followed by DOWN ARROW and you have a perfectly aligned floor of two elements. Alternating between INSERT and DOWN ARROW would create a row of these (out to "infinity" if you kept doing it). After a while I could build any X by Y collection of floor or wall segments with my eyes closed, just by counting the clicks. A nice squared office building could go up in a few minutes and I'm talking BIG buildings.

There are building limits in AW too, its just that you don't have any indicator of when things are full. If you fill an area (a 10x10 vertical column of space) you just can't create any more object there. Another funny thing, thanks to the back-end database, you can never create as many objects in a re-used column as you could the first time. For example if you put 100 in there before you ran out, then deleted one with the goal to change it slightly you probably won't be able to rez its replacement. As a results, AW is filled with half done buildings, or building where the textures of the walls don't match. Basically you have to (with experience) learn the limits of your back-end server and manually keep yourself from exceeding them.

Avatars: Each world has a selection of pre-made avatars. They are made of fairly complex multi-part RWX files, augmented by animation controls in another format that I can't remember the name of. None of this can be changed in-world. You can't pick up objects and carry them around with you.

As far as I know AW was the first such program to allow in-world building AT ALL, and considering when it was written, it was pretty spiffy at the time. The technology has been held back by the people who own it. At one point they had 3 programmers on staff, but there has never been more than one or two who seemed to understand the Renderware interfaces and its clear from listening to them that none of it is documented, so they each had to learn by studying the code and experimenting. The developers have always been fairly sensible people and it always becomes clear at some point that there are strained relations between them and the owners. As I said, the owners are "artists" more than anything else, and there seems to be a definite resentment that they have to depend on the mere technicians to make things work the way they want them to. The first one that was fired successfully sued the company for a lot of money, the other they just wore out I think. Their last release took something like 2 years to produce and it was the sort of thing that the SL people would consider to be a minor upgrade. Their biggest issue it Renderware upgrades. When those come out everything has to be looked at again. Before Conon bought Renderware there was fear that the product would disappear. They did some experiments trying to convert to other rendering engines, all of which failed. I actually thought it was great news for Renderware that it was used for some of the early Playstation games. I'm not sure that that is still the case though. Last time I looked at the Renderware web site there wasn't much new under their "News" heading.

Thanks so much for filling me in on all that Mac. It sounds a lot like modeling for POVray way back in the early 90's. Defining objects vertex by vertex in scripting language in notepad, except I imagine in AW you can see the result a lot faster than waiting 6-24 hours for the raytrace to finish ;P It doesn't sound very accessible and I guess that's why I feel SL deserves such big kudos. Some people pick up 3d concepts right away. Some really struggle to wrap their brains around it. Some people have an innate ability to visualize 3d space on a 2d plane, while others have to train themselves to do it. I never knew of that disparity until I started teaching 3ds max classes. SL really seems to break down that barrier for people because they don't need to understand the theory or nuts and bolts of it. In order to build something by scripting in notepad you first have to understand the polygonal structure of 3d objects and the components that make them up, and you need to understand cartesian coordinate systems to know how to place a vertex relative to others, and you need to know all that before you can even make a plane that only has 4 vertices. In SL people don't need to know any of that unless they want to. It won't prevent them from being able to build things. That's a pretty big deal if you ask me. Sure, having to build things out of primitives is a bit simplistic, but it opens it up to a wide audience of people who would never want to have to learn a tool like max or truespace or be limited to using things made by other people.

In response to Justice. I'm skipping some things not worth arguing, such as the use of the term Bots....


Well, I've mainly not mentioned it because it wasn't germane. I'm not here to secretly promote some other program, I'm not sure about others. SL is the best of the dynamic building programs that I know about. AW has some features of interest, so does Adobe Atmosphere (which is in a completely different market segment). Atmosphere has no limit on texture resolution. You can do photo-realistic worlds there, but they are quite slow even on todays hardware if you are not careful.

When I was still there (2 years ago) avatars passed through each other. Animated objects passed through avatars and visa versa. If you animated anything without a bot, as I said, each person saw their own version of the animation. For some things this is actually FINE. But for most things not. For lights, if it was a fixed always on light object everyone saw it. But if you used a script (not a bot) to turn it on or off it became an individual experience (its on or off state). maybe they have made improvements in this area.


No, out of cache. If ENZO hadn't deleted the newsgroups you could even go back and read about it
Entire world contents were stolen. People used a combination of path data and cache (as convenient to their methods). Zip file passwords are crackable and people actually did that. The zip file password was the SAME for every object in your path, so once the password was obtained you had them all. I was not a thief, but my group was a victim of thievery on many occasions. We were not alone. AW POLICY was to not get involved in ownership disputes, even after the PKs came about.


Well, in AW you have (had) to use bots. It wasn't a choice of what was better. To use bots you had to own a world. You COULD run a bot on any users machine (in the background) but for most applications it made more sense to run it on a server. Go to your ISP and ask them if they will run an AW bot for you and see what they say. I agree that the API was a great thing. Roland was quite smart and a very nice guy as well. I have no problems with any of the technical people at AW in fact.



Yes, it was ahead of its time. All the more reason to be disappointed with its current state. Un-sunk is no reason for excitement in my book. I didn't know Xelag, but reading of him as you say he is apparently a pretty bright guy. My guess is that he doesn't have a stake in the company at all. If he oversteps his bounds with the dynamic duo he will be history too.

I have no proof that SL is less dependent on underlying tool-sets. It could hardly be MORE dependent than AW however. AW uses Renderware, the Windows API for web interface and other things, B-Trieve on the back end. There was a book that came out back before AW was "invented" (sorry I can't remember the title...but it was along the lines of: "Creating 3D Environments with Renderware" If you open up that book you will see screen-shots of something that looks remarkably like the original AW. My guess is that AW was cloned from the free code that came with that book. Nothing wrong with that. But thats different than having a design meeting BEFORE you code the interface, which is the way it seems to be happening at LL. Go ask Xelag how long it will take him to port AW to OS X and Linux. Get back to us on that

I was only involved in the politics of AW as I am here, as an interested user. I frequently gave them hell in the newsgroups making me not always the most popular person around. I was a "Gatekeeper" before the Peacekeepers were invented. The two groups mysteriously still co-exist. When the PKs were put in place, some people switched others remained as GKs, others quit. I was among those who quit.



The history that says that the PKs restored law and order is a revisionist history. The people who wanted there to be a PK type organization simply made trouble until they were given authority over others. Vandalism and other much worse (illegal) behavior was NEVER as low as it had been BEFORE the notion of PKs came up. If you were there at the time and still say otherwise then you were simply caught up in the frenzy of control freakism that pervaded ENZO's inner circle of pals. Now that most of the old-timers are gone the dynamic due can and has re-written the history to suit themselves. I'll say this though, the PK organization improved a bit when its original founder left. In my opinion he was a bit of a nut case. He was the sort of paranoid that people actually do talk about behind their backs I think its a pretty well known fact that in any organization you can achieve "peace and quiet" by putting the troublemakers in charge of everything. I was at a high school where this was actually tried, not as an experiment but for real. It has an immediate "peace and quiet" impact. It degrades after that. Thats another topic. It would take AW a long time to obtain the pre-PK condition again. Sort of like a medicine that once you take it you can't stop or really bad things happen. I'm not tempted to go back to AW for many many reasons, this is just one of them.

Self governance by the way was all talk and no action in AW. The first thing the dynamic duo did when they took over was to promise elections and a whole host of other things. None of it ever materialized. Most of the viable organizations in AW were run by personal friends of the owners. Whenever an election threated to unseat any of the chosen people the process would be scrapped. They sort of had the same style election process that the Soviet Union was known for.

And before we start a needless argument over that, I don't believe in the user community banding together and threatening the owners of public programs such as AW or SL. I simply called on the owners of AW to retract their promises and state what the new direction was for the program. They never did. In fact after the controversy over all of this they pretty much went into seclusion, where they have stayed. They have a very unflattering opinion of their user base from those infrequent expressions that came afterward. ENZO likes to build, and if the user base is large enough to support his dabbling he is happy. He stated on TV (CNN) that he likes to play god with the program. How much planer can it be? I have no idea what motivates the other one. People that have met him personally don't seem to like him (from what they told me). He rarely interacted with users at all. Maybe you have more info. I'm not sure if anyone else here would be interested though. Not sure I am either. I'm not vendictive. Just disapointed.

Very interesting topic this... As an AW user and world owner since '97 it's interesting to see the differences of oppinion...

However, whatever the downfall of AW, the fundamental difference between AW and SL is technology. AW was first released way back in '95 and at the time was cutting edge pushing the limits of available technology. Dial-up speeds were pittyfully slow, cable certainly didn't exist, Graphics cards used chalk and crayons to draw on the inside of your monitor glass... you get the idea. With this in mind, the ability to go into a virtual 3D environment, see and chat to other users, place your own constructions, modify them, delete them, and other people can watch you doing it, was totally amazing.
In order to make it useable there had to be limitations. As an example, veiwing distance was severly limited, textures were rendered at 128x128 pixels maximum, if an object was to be included in the collision detection algorythm then it had to have less than 64 vertices.... Fine for 99% of walls and floor and tables, but anything with the slightest complexity was 'phantom' by design. I must emphasize that in 1995 even the best PCs were not capable of running anything better than this... (kids these days seems to think that computers have had P4-2.8GHz processors since they were invented).

The problem now is that eight years down the line, there has been loads of 'eye candy' revisions. Yes you can use textures of 1024x1024 or higher if you wish, yes AW DOES have propper terrain like SL, also a water system where the wazes vary in height according to water depth.. Yes it has fancy lighting, including spotlights, but the entire system is still based on technology and concepts that are now eight years out of date. The program can produce fast frame rates even with software rendering on modern machines simply because the base structure is writen as if your using a 486...

By comparison SL is a fresh look at the same design goal.. an interactive 3D environment, (I refuse to call it or AW a game). It uses TODAYS technologies and todays concepts. As a result it produces a way better result. Arguments of graphics quality are irrelevant as the user base provides all the graphics... I could (and would) upload all my textures as 1024x1024 images if I thought it would not slow the frame rate. I would model the grain in a piece of wood instead of applying a texture... but we all know it's a trade between performance and 'eye candy'.

Bots in AW were created as a way of automating things. It is wrong to describe the commands you can place on the objects as any type of script... they are modifiers, no more. You can modify the default colour, the position, rotation, even make it appear to move, and if you add the 'sync' command all users will see it in the same place. But it's only modifying...

LSL, while still primative, is like having every single object as a bot.... I currently have a machine here in beta test that uses 12 individual scripts, all talking to each other, to produce one overall result. That would simply not be possible in AW with the "3 bots per user" limitation... and there are countless other exampleps of SL far outperforming AW as far as being a 3D Virtual reality...

The only advantage AW has is size... The streaming nature of SL effectively limits the number of objects and users in each sim by the huge amount of data being constantly transfered... (I measured 35k bps, standing still, alone, late at night...) compaired to the near zero for AW. AS a programmer I understand the reason for this and having a cable connection it is not a problem, but multiply that by the number of users in one sim at any time, then add the sim-sim comunication and so soon reach the limits of the internet as we currently know it...
Also, in AW the bots run on users machines so they get the processor overhead, in SL all scripts run on the sim so the more scripts you write, the slower it gets... (Question to Lindens, Is there a script limit?).

(Yes I'm going for longest post award...)

To summarise (Yayy I hear you shout)...

AW is 8 years old and neads a total re-write using modern technologies in order to stay afloat, let alone compete with the likes of SL. It has advance in those 8 years but is held back by out dated methods.

I pray that Liden Lab has the courage to embrace new technology when it arrives. In eight years time I don't want to be writing the same post in another forum about how out dated SL is...

Surina Skallagrimson (Ironwolfe)

I've seen way more change in SL in the 1 year + I've been here, than in the 3 years of AW. To me the biggest problem in AW is "old technology"
Just as you think you've seen it all, someone developes a new and improved item in SL and amazes me. I made a few Avatars and a bunch of objects in AW and liked the fact I could use a external modeller to create this. The Av's was the first thing that impressed me in SL and even they have improved considerably since, I no longer miss AW at all with the exception of a few friends I no longer see and work with. To me the best part of any 3d chat/build program is the ability to chat, build and collaborate with my friends ( a few came here from AW).


Paul Zeeman
formally Crazy Canuck

Ah Justice that whole responce to bob was way, way snottier than it needed to be.

I too love MMOG / Virtual Worlds etc and have been actively seeking them out, while not for the past 7 years, easily the past 4 or 5.

I do / did searches online for them, I would scoure fan sites and forums, including ones that list 'all virtual worlds'. And somehow, in that time I too never managed to hear about AW until recently on these forums.

It is suprising to me but it does make me wonder. If this software is as great as you make it seem, where are the articles about it? Where are the fan sites? What key words am I not using in my searches that are required to find an active worlds site?

That it has remained under the radar of people searching out the type of game it is says something. I don't know exactly what - bad marketing? Small user base?

But your tone and treatment of Bob's valid points is very dissapointing, especially after I had read some well thought out posts from you.