About this blog and its purpose

There are many things to do in Activeworlds virtual reality environment. I've chosen my way. It is a way of a builder. There are also many ways to build. My way is to create a virtual town.

The town is Horizon City. It was established January 2000 and it quickly became one of the most popular cities back then, with hundreds of builders. Besides that the town serves as historic reminder of how things were at Activeworlds, it is still constantly developing virtual experience, displaying latest features and architectural possibilities.

In this blog I will keep track how the things are going in Horizon City and in Activeworlds community.

Friday, December 31, 2010

Snowy End of 2010


While there are another set of new features for AW users I haven't played with them much yet. Instead I made winter updates in the city ground zero. Eventually, the virtual snow will melt and I'll learn the new features. They integrated nVidia PhysX physics engine to AW Browser, allowing new object types such as Cloth.
Happy New Year!

Saturday, December 4, 2010

They're Coming

AWI announded that all expired Citizenships and Worlds will be renewed till January 4th 2011. I hope to see my old AW friends and that they get the message of their citizenship renewal. They should see that Active Worlds today is much more advanced as it was some years ago.
I have some expired citizenships in my pocket as well. Today I logged in with old AWTA citizenship and updated some textures of a building in Horizon City.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Belle Tower Painted


In virtual reality, everything is easier and faster. I painted a whole tower within minutes by using a bot. I also optimized some parts of the towers structure.

I'm also re-building some parts of the city GZ so that it will look more up to date. New 'shear' and 'color tint' features will be used on it. Virtual snow will be there soon and once the snow melts, we'll see how the entry area will look.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Shear Terraining

New shear command is one of the coolest new features. It allows yet another new method of landscaping. A builder can now use flat objects with shear command and make a smooth 'terrain' out of them. I made a small sample about how it works near Mini Fukuoka. I'm sure that someday, someone will make a bot that can build these smooth terrains easily. If you are, or if you know a bot maker, I can share my idea about how such bot would work.

With regard to the Mini Fukuoka area, I develop it different way than many other areas at Horizon City. I actually update the area and demolish or update old buildings there. As most of the city's areas are preserved for historic reasons, Mini Fukuoka is not. Recently I updated all roads there by using color tint command. The roads looks much better now imo.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Speedbuild 2010 Results


Remember the speedbuild contest that I was participating? Well, it went good! It was quite intense and we had actually fun with other contestants. The results came out last week and I won! My task was to Create a HISTORY MUSEUM detailing a theme from Active Worlds. So I made a building called "History Museum of One Specific Topic from AW". The building exhibits traditional tourist avatar fashion from years 1997-2010.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Cy Awards 2010 Achievements

The Cy Awards 2010 gala was held last weekend. There was over a hundred people following the event. I had to stay up to 4 am to follow the award ceremony!
Two of my creations were nominated for awards: Collapsing building for 2010 Cy Award in category of "Best Effect" and Cobra Wing for 2010 Cy Award in category of "Best Build". Neither of the builds qualified to top 3 on their category.

The winners are listed here at activeworlds forums.
AW Reunion seemed to rule at Cy's this year. I have to admit of voting some of the "AWReunion nominees" too...

Congrats to winners and nominees too!

Blog Layout & Other Updates


Hope you like the new layout. The background image is a screencapture from the city GZ.
I also updated the official Horizon City ad: horizoncity.cjb.net/hcad.jpg.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

A Way to Build - Casa Cubic



The cubic house is ready and open. I call it Casa Cubic. In a way there is something different at this building. I pushed limits of Activeworlds building with it and only used elements that exist at original Alphaworld environment. No third party textures were used. I'm quite satisfied about the result. It proves that Activeworlds building environment is unique compared to some other 3D platforms. In AW an user can choose to build extraordinary structures with smallest details or he can build with 'normal' 3D-way: using boxes and other simple elements with neat textures on them.

Everyone can visit there. All you need is Activeworlds browser, then you need go to world AW (Alphaworld) and teleport to coordinates 6748.6s 14220.5e 4a 275 or type ^jump casa cubic to chat screen inside the browser.
Welcome!

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Three Hours Bridge


Today I built a bridge near the "Casa Cubic" as a part of ongoing landscaping project. It took 3 hours to build the bridge. So I named it as "Three hours bridge".
Actually it was not the simplest thing to build, because in addition for using my own citizen rights, another end of the bridge was built with Horizon City -citizen privileges.

Friday, October 8, 2010

More 5.1 Features & More Building


The browser has got many updates recently. I'm most exited about ability to increase visibility up to 500 meters instead of previous 200 meters! It's a feature that I've waited for a long time. Another nice thing for great screenshots is wireframe rendering. Here's sample of using 500m visibility and wireframe mixed with Paint Shop Pro for pretty cool screenshot. Building on the picture is the same cubic house as in my previous post.

Tomorrow I'm going to participate a speedbuilding contest. I have no clue yet what I am building there. Will be fun for sure !

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Going Cubic


Another build is rising up. This time I'm building modern cubic mansion like residential house. The build is temporarily called as 'Mi Casa'. It is still at work in progress -state.
Oh, and there are no physics features on this one.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Real Time Physics In Our Fingertips

Significant milestone in Active Worlds history was reached today, as Physics simulation was implemented.
I've already learned some tricks how to build with physics objects, colliders.
Here is a sample pictures for couple of my latest builds: a building that is hit by a shock wave and a simple suspension bridge.

More about latest features here at ActiveWiki

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Building Outside The City



I haven't been building outside Horizon City for years. Since recently. My recent self-designed house located at Cobra Village and it is called Cobra Wing, because of its wing-like shape.

I've also contributed some Horizon City information to virtual encyclopedia dedicated to the Active Worlds: ActiveWiki. <- see the links.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Exokiasma Is Here


The house is ready. You can find it here: AW 6718.74S 14209.20E 1.22a 114
Welcome!

Friday, February 19, 2010

Virtual House of 2010 Video!

Here is a better preview of the house. It was made with Activeworlds browser Grab frame render plugin.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Building With New Style

Messing around with new way of building has resulted quite nice house. I've built the structure of it at January and some details are still under construction. The house locates near my first prototype for Usonia1 house, which I later built to The Extreme Builder Talent Show III. Location for the both houses will be revealed same time.



Here is a preview of the newest house.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

A Decade of Virtual Town Building

As Horizon City has its 10 years anniversary today I want to thank all those 391 individual builders who have contributed to the city during these years.

I also want to welcome citizen Roska to the Hall of Fame for his long term support and efforts for taking significant role of developing various places in the city area, specially at Mini Fukuoka!

Roska joins other Hall of Fame members, KraemerG, Bluebean, Q iamai, Partymaster, Dieter, Kenny McC, Brody.


One of the first objects is still at its original place. Timastamp showing the building moment, January 5:th 2000. The object is now visible for eveyone to see as I lowered the entry point to back to 0m level as it was when building was started.