Southern Highlands Progress for Week of July 19, 2015

Building continues in the Southern Highlands!  Sorry, I've missed a few weeks worth of updates.  Here's a general overview: facades, facades, and more facades.  I have a few blog posts to catch up on as well, detailing new facade ideas for different types of buildings.

In the meantime, here's what I've been working on:

For the past several weeks I had been mostly concerned with filling in facades around the beachfront, but as of yesterday I've been moving back towards Cactus Jack's railroad station in an attempt to fill in all of that land.  I'd like to at least close off the river back there, I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish filling that whole area with facade work.

The row houses in the first few images are my current project.  I'd like to do a blog specifically about that facade work... I'm very happy with how it has turned out as a filler build.  It gives a lot of character to the area of town it is in, and it'll be easy for me to stylize it with posters and 'scenes' of avatars/vehicles to really give it a personality.

The curved brick building in the images above was a lot of fun.  I intended for it to just be a facade, but after playing with shear for a little bit decided to bring it's beam further out to act as an awning for the adjacent building.  I think it worked out really well... I'd like to put a theater or something there, but for now it is just hollow.

The final shot shows some buildings I haven't featured here yet -- they're not quite done!  Soon. :)

Facades - Transparent Windows in a Solid Wall

Today I'd like to share a very old trick -- likely a bug, honestly -- in a particular texture mask that has been used in AlphaWorld for over a decade to create windows. 

Stone1m is a very useful mask that leaves the texture unchanged except when a transparent surface is placed in front of the masked object -- the rendered area of the masked object then itself is rendered as transparent. Here's a screenshot from another angle that shows this clearly:

 As I said, this is very useful to create windows on facades that are very inexpensive users of cell space.  To demonstrate, I'll share another facade for a building I completed in Elkins Beach this week.

We start with the base selection of objects:

For this facade, we want a simple wall panel to cover the entire span of the wall. This piece will contain the stone1m masked texture, and  the windows will be placed on it.  We also want a transparent object -- winb2.rwx is a rectangular window that supports the optional texture "tag" parameter:

Texture the frame:
create texture topgrey tag=1 

Texture the pane:
create texture topgrey tag=200

Finally, we'll use p1rec0005g.rwx to add some depth and break the different levels of the facade apart. So we can arrange the facade objects in the location we want:

And then add textures, masks, and scale:

For a final result of 9 objects:

# Object          Purpose        Action

1 w1pan_1000j.rwx masked surface create texture tv4 mask=stone1m
4 winb2.rwx       windows        create texture topgrey tag=1,scale 3 1 0.1

4 p1rec0005g.rwx  depth/detail   create texture topgrey,scale 1 1 5

With this base facade completed, I replicated it out into a larger rectangular building and added some additional detailing as wall dormers and some street-level shops. The street-level shops are currently complete, but the overall structure is done:

And that's that! Feel free to share your own examples of this technique in the comments! This is a very common technique in AlphaWorld and I enjoy seeing new and creative implementations of it.

Southern Highlands Progress for Week of June 8, 2015

Working on a new low-rise construction across the road from the last building I featured on the blog.  It is still a work in progress

I like the folding wood structure, as well as the glass. I'm not happy with how the roofing has ended up or with how bulky some of the brick sections of the building are, so I may revamp those later.

The folding wood structure was created with primitives -- p1rec0200b.rwx for the flat horizontal sections, and p1rec0100g.rwx for the vertical sections.  These were scaled to make them look thicker and deeper.

I'm particularly unhappy with the middle open space that you can see very well in the fourth screenshot.  I wanted to make some apartment sorts of areas here, but it's really just coming out bulky and nasty. I'm also hitting a lot of cell space issues trying to accomodate it. That's probably going to be changed -- maybe extending the glass and just having three "floors". 

More later.

Edit: Color helped! Recolored the black windows as cyan. Also removed one of the parts of the middle floor.  May still remove the other...

Southern Highlands Progress for Week of April 20, 2015

So I don't have a creative name for these photo blogs/progress reports of Elkins Beach and the Southern Highlands, but the least I can do is group them by date.

Here's an update on what I've been working on this week:

• Created a transitional badlands area in the narrow, empty stretch following gutz highway (named for a user that built the highway in 2000, gutz).  This area was previously flat and empty except for groundcover and the highway.  
• On the side closest to the Southern Highlands raised terrain features, I've added some towering, rocky terrain reminiscent of the work I did at Razorspine Bluff.
• On the side closest to Elkins Beach, I've added low forests with smaller rocky features and SWI archaeology nodes.
• In Elkins Beach itself, I've added some rocky terrain features in empty lots to give the impression that the rocky terrain doesn't just abruptly and cleanly end as you enter the town.
• Capped off some incomplete areas in Rising Glen Retreat. In particular, a house I started in 2008.  It isn't completed inside, but the outside at least doesn't have any floating panels anymore.

Photos:

Facades - Designing Facades with a Minimal Number of Objects

I've been working to fill in some of the geometry placeholders for skyscrapers in Elkins Beach and would like to share a technique I've been using to quickly place believable facades.  I do it because I'm lazy and would like to get these buildings done ASAP, but it may also be useful for conserving cell space.

Designing facades with a minimal number of objects generally follows this pattern:

• Find an orthogonal object with some depth to it. If you want your facade to have windows, make sure it also has some empty space in the middle.  Door frames, windows frames, primitives, and some furniture sets are good candidates.  
• Scale this piece so that it is very wide and very tall, but also very thin.  
• Layer other pieces into or onto your largest piece to give the image of building forms: Beams, posts, frames, etc.

For an example, we can start with a building I completed yesterday in Elkins Beach.  I started by selecting some objects I would like to play with.

 
For my main building frame piece, I selected Unit04.rwx as it is a cube with some depth.  For some thinner detailing that could make a believable 'wall' and window ceil, I chose wframe01.rwx.  For further detailing, I chose p1rec0100g.rwx for some simple beams in my facade. 

With these objects selected, we can begin scaling them to be very wide, very tall, and very thin, and then attempt to assemble them into a believable facade.  I scaled the Unit04.rwx to match a 10x10 meter space and scaled the wframe01.rwx to fit within that space.  Once I had this scale set, we can begin to see the facade take form:

Done! With these final objects:

# Object         Purpose           Action

2 unit04.rwx     large frames      create scale 5 5 1

2 wframe01.rwx   detail frames     create scale 4.39 3.53 4

3 p1rec0100g.rwx horizontal beams  create scale 0.5 1.85 1

All it needs is some texturing and a window panel... and we can slap it onto a building! I chose a texture theme of topgrey for the panel and ctable2 for the window frames.  There is a building near SW City Town Square Park that features these textures and I really like the colors that come out of it.

Here's an example of it in action.  Not counting windows and other detailing, this is only 7 objects for a 20x10 meter frame! 

 And the completed tower:

Designing facades with a minimal number of objects is all about experimentation.  Some things may work well, others won't. I've found that as long as the object sets I'm attempting to use have some depth, I can usually exploit them by means of scale or shear to look like believable buildings.

For example, I'm not a huge fan of the tan-colored building next to this skyscraper. The tan building uses quite a few flat pieces, which robs it of depth in some critical areas and really makes it look unsatisfying.  In this project I'm going for completion, so I don't mind these imperfections in some filler buildings -- the more important thing is the process and the learning gained for some of the more prominent buildings in the area I would like to work on.

Sculpture, landscaping, and working around pre-existing content in Elkins Beach

Work in Elkins Beach continues with a lot of landscaping and detailing.  I left this project unfinished years ago, and that was very visible before I started again a few weeks ago.  For example, ground panels were incomplete and floating in the air at various points, there were empty fields alongside busy 4-lane highways, and artificial canals butted up against thin air.

I've spent much of this week 'capping off' the landcover by connecting varying planes, by filling in fields that I didn't intend to build on with trees and rocks, and by placing geometries for buildings that I do intend to complete.

There was one build that I did manage to at least complete initially: a sculpture that I've named "Monolith Rise".  It consists of a grouping of glossy monoliths that increase in height and alternate in texture. The base of the sculpture is lit with a flickering gold light to better distinguish the sculpture from the ambient lighting of the surrounding world. The entire sculpture is surrounded by sheared sidewalk in a park scene:

Note that Monolith Rise is immediately next to the sheared truss bridge that was featured in my last blog about Elkins Beach.  You can find it in-world at "aw" 2680.24S 4071.27E 0.22a 314.

The sculpture sits on a lot that formerly held plans for a cathedral.  I felt that this lot was too narrow so I've scrapped that idea.  Behind the lot was also originally a curved extension of a river that cuts out to the sea.  I've expanded this into a small harbor and removed the curved concrete panels to increase the surface area of the water:

The rest of the work I did was primarily detailing.  A lot of geometries for planned building and some landscaping.  You can see that below:

There was one final area of interest -- I did some detailing around an older build (circa 2005) that was in the area before I was -- a military base built by Jaguar Hahn.  Fun trivia fact: Jaguar Hahn was building a city with me in AWTeen around this time called New Arklay City, but I don't recall him ever sharing many builds in Alphaworld.  Not this one, at least.

I've tried to help integrate into this cityscape that was built up around it by making sure it kept good road access and by trying to respect the airspace near a very short airstrip on the property.  There's an unfortunate concrete fence that may be doing more harm than I am, though. 

 

Some points about detailing around pre-existing builds:

• Respect how this build fit into the existing area.  For example, this base connected to an existing road in the area.  When I took the road over, I made sure the base still connected to it well and made sense in the overall scene.

• Contextual additions make it feel like it fits in better.  One helpful addition I made was to add metal towers with reflectors leading into the airstrip. There are also no trees leading up to the airstrip.  I think this complements the build by demonstrating that it has effects on the surrounding content.

• Don't be afraid to hide parts of a build when necessary.  The backside of the base is closed off by a fence, so I can't add a road to it or really complement it in any way.  I think the best thing to do here was to add some flora and rocks to obstruct its view from a nearby road that doesn't access it.

I'll probably post another update about Elkins Beach again next week.

Touring Fort Masen with SW Chris and Syntax

While we're on the topic of not completing builds...

SW Chris visited ActiveWorlds last month to tour sites in SW City as part of a video series called "Before There Was Minecraft." This video series celebrates Chris hitting 1,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel by revisiting his roots in ActiveWorlds. Syntax and I joined him for a couple of hours to explore various sites in the city, including one that I spent a lot of time working on: Fort Masen and an incomplete dungeon underneath that was designed for SW City Interactive.

Some background:  Fort Masen was initially built by SW Comit and is built in the style of a historical fort, complete with an old wooden ship and cannons.  Some time after I became involved with SW City Interactive, I set my attention on Fort Masen as a potential site for a series of archaeology quests and digsites.  Over the years, I've added a number of quests there and began an undertaking to build a cave/dungeon adventure under the fort.  It is partially completed: there is a lengthy quest chain available to SWI players that actually gives you access to the dungeon, but after another sidequest it abruptly ends and doesn't let you progress further.

That would be the end of the story... except for SW Chris' video series.  Chris, Syn, and I explored on past the end of the current game, and we did a complete video commentary on incomplete areas (including a partially-complete interactive boss!) and some puzzles further in the dungeon.

The commentary is split over two videos, #6 and #7 in the series. Fair warning for SWI players, there are tons and tons of spoilers in these videos:

So there you have it, some insight into one of my many unfinished projects!  I might actually finish this one day, I'm a sucker for coming back to work on SWI stuff. :)

If you're interested in more video commentary, visit SW Chris's Youtube Channel! He's done a couple of series now on ActiveWorlds that you guys might find interesting.

Capping Off Content in Elkins Beach

Since I've come back, I've been slowly working to cap off old builds that I left incomplete.  It is really jarring just how much I left unfinished. This weekend, I've been working on the oceanside area of Elkins Beach, a medium-density town area in the Southern Highlands.

The bridge in the image above was fun to slap together. It is reminiscent of another project (that I actually completed!), Legacy Bridge in Cypress Hollow, AWTeen.  That bridge was quite a lot better, this is just a small bridge over an outlet.  

This entire bridge is sheared by z2 = -0.5 because the road in this area is sheared to connect two areas of the town that are offset by a few coordinates. Since I've gotten comfortable with the shear command, I much prefer it to manually rotating long-pathing object groups like roads because there is a lot of power in being able to maintain the length along one axis while manipulating another.  This can especially be seen in the beach-side road in the images below, where shear helped me to cleanly extend this weird, windy road down the length of my beach.

My priority has been on getting the roads and landwork capped off first, and I've started to set placeholders for the geometries in the area.  There's an area set aside for a cathedral I had planned... but will probably scrap because the landwork around it would make it pretty stumpy in length.

Another embarrassing build that is unfinished in this area is where my Cy Award for the ActiveWiki rests:

I intended for this to be a skyscraper that featured ActiveWiki content, but never got around to completing or even really starting it.  Whoops!

Hopefully I'll get some of this capped off before I leave again.