Recent Updates with AD&DRPG and an upcoming break

Hey everyone.  Married life is going well and I'll be starting summer classes here soon, so I'll be cutting back on the posts.  I have a few more in the pipes... but I've cut down on AW projects as well.  Most of my time the past few weeks has been in AD&DRPG world continuing my efforts at renewing some of the older builds.  The updated visuals have gotten a lot of good feedback and I've seen a positive upturn to the amount of people in the world, including a few new players.  My goal with all of this was to help AD&D continue to be a stable gaming destination for AW users, and as more people are playing (a lot of tourists especially!) I can feel comfortable that my goal has been achieved.

If AD&D isn't your thing, you may want to check out AWMyths world... they've seen an upswing in activity as well and there seems to be a lot of good things coming out of the world.

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.

Docked in Key West

Hey everyone!  If I've scheduled this post correctly, we should be arriving in Key West right about now and I'll be in range of communications again.  If I have some time I'll see if I can post some images from my phone, as I'll surely be itching to get back in touch with the world after getting off the cruise boat. :P

I've heard there are a lot of chickens in Key West, so I'll be on the lookout as I've been known in my time to be somewhat of a Chicken Chaser...

The plan afterward is to the return to the boat and head on to Nassau.  Hopefully it'll be a good time!

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!