I've Been a Bad User

Hey, I don't recognize that world?

That must have taken *ages* to align correctly...

I never want to say AW is in dire straits, but, well, it's been pretty quiet lately.  We've had a hard year in AW -- Tom left and two of our prominent citizens have passed away -- and I think its taken its toll on people.  Even stalwart users have been showing up less often, and I personally have begun looking to expand my horizons...

Here's hoping AW 5.3 will have some strong offerings.  I don't know about you guys, but I look at my long past with AW and when I see all the content and effort I've put into a reputation, it's a bit disheartening.  As I become a better programmer I imagine I'll have more open doors, but I do still enjoy building and the screencaps above are some of my first forays into building within Second Life.  If you've ever used Google SketchUp, I find the building operations and manipulations to be very similar, with the exception that the surfaces and lines are replaced by primitive, solid objects.  The building system there was very intuitive to me as I've used 3D modelers before, and I was building in under an hour.

If you've spent time here developing skills, I think you'll find that many of them can easily translate into projects beyond AW.  Perhaps not the building interface itself, but certainly the design sense you pick up in a community like this, and the intuitive geometric relations that you can recognize while working with modular objects.


Anyway, that's it for now.  I'm probably going to continue laying low, until AW 5.3 comes out.  Later guys.

Happy April Fools Day!

Hey everyone, happy April Fools!  Hopefully you haven't been trolled too hard... it seems that Activeworlds has managed to dodge a bullet as far as that's concerned!  Well, unless you could the AlphaMopper. :)

I came across an interesting post today while combing through some Second Life blogs about someone who visited AW very briefly, but was immediately turned off by the camera controls and never made it out of AWGate because of that.  If you use any other 3D programs besides Activeworlds you have probably noted the frustration of AW's camera control system, as compared with 3d modeling programs, games, or even other virtual worlds like Second Life.

Anyway, you can read that post here.  I'm interested in doing a write-up on this soon, but I don't have the time for it tonight.  In it's stead, I'll leave you all with a question: What do you think about AW's camera controls?