AD&DRPG Visual Renovations - Photo Blog

I don't really want to go into another in-depth explanation of things while I'm away on honeymoon, so I've decided to post a photoblog of my progress so far. :)  The visual renovations span over several areas, and I'm trying to work in the order which places the player would generally experience.

A redesigned town fountain in the entry town of Meriel.  The benches surrounding the fountain are movers that allow the player to lay down and relax, or perhaps take a nice AFK. ;)

The Magic Users guild.  The area in the middle of the room is an anti-gravity zone that lifts players to the next floor, and the cloths in the doorway are cloth objects.  All avatars in the building have sequences applied.

Some new landscaping in the southern part of Merinel.  The knight in the foreground is actually an enemy NPC spawn-point, and I thought it fitting to position them in what seems like an ambush.

A dense scene in Turkel forest that leads players to an important location nearby.  Since players can't fly, the felled trees make a nice transitional barrier from one area to another.

Gro Lahr mansion.  The mansion is plagued by a dark fog, and surrounded by a dying forest.  There has been extensive work on increasing area of this atmosphere outside the immediate area of the mansion, and the trees from Turkel forest now continue into this area.  A sharp gradient occurs where the trees begin to die off.

Turkel forest has been graced with a new mist, low-gravity zones (for good jumping!) and numerous firefly particles.  The low gravity zone makes jumping from trees very enjoyable!

The new appearance of the entrance to Traloria.  Notice the lowered terrain from the original entry as well as the new procession into the city proper.  A lot of detail work has been done in Traloria, though I'm trying to keep with the original vision of the build as much as possible.

A handy newsboard at the ground zero area.  If you click on the postings, they are elaborated upon via the say command in the user's chat.

Interactive Building - Nougat Cave Hunt and the Key/Door Example

Last Thursday I spent a couple of hours overnight setting up a very simple (as far as game mechanics go) game in the SW City Airpark Pavilion.  The game, called Nougat Cave Hunt, is a simple seek-and-find where the player is prompted to collect and return 10 items (nougats, a creature of the SW City lore) within 120 seconds.

Pesky little critters them.

The mechanics for keeping count of the items and the time elapsed was done with SW City Interactive, but similar applications can developed in Active Worlds using only action commands.  There are certainly some limitations, but creative design can usually overcome them.


The Simple Hunt

When designing a game in AW, my experience has been that its best to think about the game mechanics first, and then work from there.  This is because there are a lot of things that object scripting leaves to be desired, and sometimes you have to tweak your concept a bit to get everything to line up.  In this example, we'll run with the concept of a hunt for an item, but since AW doesn't really do counting instances very well we will switch things up a bit.

CONCEPT: Player has find a hidden key, and click it to open a barred gate.

This is a simple game concept that has been executed in Activeworlds many times, but it is a good place to start because it gets builders thinking and creative and multiple uses of building commands.  With this in mind, lets introduce our objects.

KEY OBJECT ACTION LINE: activate visible no, solid no, move 0 4 0 time=3 wait=10 smooth name=gate

GATE OBJECT ACTION LINE: create name gate

So now we have our two objects.  See?  Simple.  Basically, what happens here is that the activate trigger applied to the key causes it to disappear from the scene (visible no, solid no) and it also causes the gate to rise 4 meters because the move command has a name parameter that is applied to the gate (name=gate, create name gate).

It isn't difficult to expand on the complexity of this interaction and make it into a challenging mini-game.  For example, you could set more keys and more doors, and require the player to pass through the gates before the wait parameter expires.  You could also set a hard time limit using a timer command.

There are many possibilities for hide-and-seek style gaming with object scripting, and if you'd like to share any examples... feel free to post them in the comment section!

AWG Download - Kingmaker Interactive Game

Kingmaker Interactive Game (4 AWGs)

• Kingmaker Interactive Game
• An interactive card game where the player must pick one of three cards; if the card is a king, the player wins.
• Timer sequence includes a card alternator so that the result isn't always the same
• Timer sequence includes a reset for players so they can play as many times as they'd like
• AWG includes a custom logo for Kingmaker
• AWG includes a 2-coordinate wide pavilion for the Kingmaker game

DOWNLOAD: Click here to download HA_kingmaker.zip

SEED OBJECT: Centered on AWG, facing North

COORDS: AW 7950.428s 1492.491e 2.0a 178

Just save the .zip file to your Activeworlds > Presets folder and you'll be good to use the AWG in Activeworlds.  Good luck!