A Retrospective Look at the Public Building Worlds - COFMeta

It recently came to my attention that many of the dozens of articles I submitted to AWNews still exist thanks to Gmail, and I've been thumbing through them because I'd like to find some of the good ones and repost them here. The first of these articles is a topical series -- A Retrospective Look at the Public Building Worlds -- where I visited and built in several of the big public building worlds towards the end of 2005.

To give this some context, my interest in writing this series was because every public building world except for Alphaworld and AWTeen had become derelict and neglected.  Community interaction with AWI was practically non-existent (Flagg was still away during this period) and the biggest developments on the public building front were happening in AWTeen.  AWTeen had been experiencing a cities boom, and I wanted to open the door to other worlds and see what sort of potential they had for builders.

I will post an article from the series each day in their entirety (including original images), with minor corrections for grammar.  After the article I will write an addendum paragraph that compares the worlds then to the worlds now! 

Today we will begin the series in COFMeta world.  Enjoy!

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COFMeta article written on November 19, 2005 and published to AWNews.org on November 20, 2005.

COFMeta GZ, circa. 2005.  Or 2011, for what it's worth.

COFMeta
Size:P-1000 (1000 coordinates in the four cardinal directions from gz)

Tourist-Enabled: Yes

Tourist-Building: No

Based off of Snow Crash, the popular cyberpunk novel by Neil Stephenson, COFMeta world is a themed, public building world that is set as a metropolis. In fact, it had been nicknamed 'metatropolis' by the people who once built there.  Compared to Alphaworld, COFMeta operates on a very limited object set that features modular building pieces.

One of the more recent and innovative communities of COFMeta is Cyberville (61n 301e) which was built by Cybernome in 2001.  A vast town for a world of the size, Cyberville is a fully industrialized city that takes advantage of object innovation, the color command, and a flowing imagination to compensate for the lack of objects and textures in the world.  One of the common themes around this city is the snocrash.rwx object, which is used in conjuntion with textures to form a variety of 'avatars' wandering around the city.

An intersection in Cyberville, COFMeta

Feeling the need to examine the objects here further and see why I've heard so many bad comments about the worlds object path, I found some empty land and built a ground zero area for a new town.  This new ground zero included two buildings made completely out of objects that were as similar to Alphaworld objects as I could find (flat tiles, panes and various columns) and a third building that used a modular javacade design.  At first, the world indeed seemed like a horrible place to build.  A foreign object path with few textures and low world lights?  Who would want that?!

Me, apparently.  Soon after I threw out the hopes of using textures to my advantage, I switched over to colors.  The building process took off after that, and by using colors in conjunction with windows... a stylish information building was built.  A similar style was used for a monorail station across the street, but the real (hidden) gem was working with the modular object.

Colony Zeta Ground Zero (950s 200e) Javacade is on the left.

If you have never worked with a premade building object before, it completely changes the dynamics of making detailed builds.  Instead of making an exterior that the interior can be based off of, the exterior of a modular building exclusively compliments the details of the interior.  Anyone can spam javacade objects, but to make the building truly unique, it has to be detailed.  With this in mind, an empty javacade building was transformed into a thriving arcade/club in about 15 minutes!  In other public worlds we don't have many modular buildings to use, and it was very enjoyable to have the opportunity in such a difficult building environment!

COFMeta Today

So that was then, and this is now; welcome to 2011!  What has changed in COFMeta? Truthfully... not much.  This article from 2005 is very much applicable today; builders in COFMeta will face the shame challenges I did all those years ago.

An effort towards renewal was spearheaded by Ferruccio and Tauntaun a couple of years ago to build a new ground zero on the edge of the world, but the project was never completed.  The bounds of the world were expanded a bit for this, though, so if you're looking to build in COFMeta the best place for new land would be near the old boundary at the 1000th coordinate in any direction!