Decided on a class topic for Saturday

I'll be teaching a class in AWSchool on Saturday as part of the new AWUniversity effort, and the topic will be Interactive Building.  This continues in the vein where Byte began last weekend while covering timers, but I think I'll be moving in a different direction with it.  My feel of it as of today is that I won't be going over a specific command, but rather showing some examples of how to use multiple commands in tandem and encouraging creative uses of commands to achieve an interactive scene.

So for example, picture a scene where a man greets you upon entering a room and tells you that the door to the room beyond is locked.  You can open it, but he's lost the key!  If you can find the key, you can use it on the door and open it to continue forward.  This is an easy interactive scene to set up, and in its simplest incarnation only requires the use of the say and visible commands to set up.  You would, of course, want to use other commands to enhance the quality of the scene, but in general the creative combination of commands can provide a vivid experience in the virtual environment.

Ideally I would get to teach the class after Byte's shear/skew class, with some time for intermission.  I'd like to set up some interactive examples perhaps half an hour before the class starts and let people play with them, and then we could get right into it.  If you have any examples of things you would like to see just let me know, and I'll try to have that set up as well.

If I have some time to get into Active Worlds this week, I'll take some video of some existing examples of cutscenes and interactive games that I've worked on and post them up here.  Stay tuned!