AlphaMapper Progress Continues

Hey everyone!  I'm still on break through the end of this week, but I'd like to share a couple of things so it's not totally dead around here...

AlphaMapper Progress Continues


Byte has returned to work on the AlphaMapper and it's gettin ever-closer to being able to produce maps.  I understand the long wait-time may be frustrating to some Alphaworld builders, but I've been keeping up with Byte through the whole process and I can vouch that he's really taking the long, arduous road -- making all of the components himself -- so that when the product is finally done, the new AlphaMapper can be much more versatile than a simple mapper.  I think a lot of his recent promo videos and screenshots can attest to that.  One such video is below, where we see that he's got avatars and masks up and running.



Byte keeps a blog about AlphaMapper progress, which you can find in our 'What's new in AW?' sidebar links.  If anything new hits, you'll be sure to find it there!

Town Hall Meeting


This week's Town Hall Meeting will be today in AWSchool (Click to Teleport) at 6pm VRT.  From the looks of things there are a lot of big ideas floating around that need some dedicated volunteers.  If you've got the time and are up to it, feel free to step out and lend a hand.  :)


Annnnd that's it for me.  I'll try to get a new poll up this week, but I'm heading into finals so there's no guarantee.  Later!

BTW I'm on Break

In case you hadn't figured it out from the lack of activity here. ;)  School is very busy and there looks to be a whole heap of drama in AW at the moment, so I don't expect that I'm missing out on a whole lot.

While I've been away, Byte has released the latest version of the ActiveWorlds SDK .NET Wrapper on the forums. I'd like to dabble with this a bit once my summer classes have come to an end in early August, and if I make any progress I'll be sure to post it up here on the blog. :)

Another note... v4s were enabled for everyone in Alphaworld a couple of weeks ago.  Good news, right? :D

Noticeboard: AlphaMapper Facebook Contest!

Clear out your schedule for this upcoming Saturday, because you'll need the free time for a new contest coming to the AlphaMapper Facebook Page!

Sometime after 12:01 VRT on Saturday, an image will be posted on that Facebook page.  The image will be a screen capture from AlphaMapper itself... and once it is up, the game is on!  It will be up to fans of the page to scramble to find exactly what part of Alphaworld that the image came from!  If you're unfamiliar with AlphaMapper, it is a great utility that you can use to see 'satellite images' of Alphaworld.  The utility allows you to find coordinates in the world and save a web link that you can use to visit the location again on the map!  These web links will be used in the contest -- when you find the correct coordinates, just navigate to the top of AlphaMapper and click 'Link to Location.'  A link will appear, and you can submit that link to win the contest!

The winner of this contest will recieve a one month citizenship.

You have to be a fan of the AlphaMapper Facebook Page to participate in the contest, so get to it!  Byte keeps the page updated often, and he's made some really exciting progress towards the next update of the AlphaMapper!  So as I said, get to it, and good luck everyone! :)

UPDATE: You no longer have to be a fan of the Facebook page to participate, and Byte has added Twitter to the mix as well!  This forum thread has all of the details -- submission will be handled by e-mail now, and the content will only be posted to the Facebook or Twitter pages.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/AlphaMapper/159877450713342
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AlphaMapper

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!

Building - Byte's Interactive Building Class, detailing the At trigger and Timer command

For anyone who missed it, Byte taught an excellent class detailing AT trigger and Timer command today.  This topic was of particular interest to me, because I love building games and characters you can interact with.  Virtual buildings and cities are great, but what's the point if they're lifeless?

Both of these new features exist to make interactive building a bit easier, and they expand upon what we could do originally with astart scripting.  For those of you who are lost, here's a rundown:

AT trigger - The at trigger will activate commands after a set amount of time, or at a scheduled time in VRT.

Byte:    The at trigger has two uses.  It is used to either trigger a set of commands at a certain point during a timer, or to trigger a set of commands in sync with the VRT clock.

TIMER command - The timer command creates a timer in memory that allows a user to activate events after a set amount of time.

Byte:    First off the timer command can be used with any trigger, even the at trigger, to create, reset, or stop a timer with a given name.
Byte:    Every timer has a duration, which is the number of milliseconds the timer will last for.
Byte:    An example of a timer called ABC with a duration of 1 second would be:  create timer ABC 1000
Byte:    Timers have multiple parameters, though.  They take the form: <trigger> timer tmName duration [loop=1] [stop | reset] [global]