Building Your First Home

Finding Somewhere to Build

First you must decide what world to build in. Here's a small list to get you started:

AWNewbie is a world designed for new users to learn to build. Building done here will be protected from other users; however it will also be very temporary and will be removed after a few days.

AlphaWorld is a permanent building world. It is the largest and oldest. Tourists can build here but without protection from others. AlphaMapper is a nice tool which can be of great assistance. I do all my building in AlphaWorld so my most of my building experience is with it and so most tutorials on this blog will be made for AlphaWorld.

AWTeen is a much smaller world. Tourists can build here but as the world is so small, there is a larger risk of being discovered and vandalized or deleted by others. There is also not as much empty space left, making finding a spot to build harder. Some advantages of building in AWTeen is the ability to edit the base terrain and having a larger selection of objects and textures available, and also having automatic access to some advanced building features which I won’t talk about on this blog until much later.

Mars and Yellowstone are themed worlds. They both allow tourist building and also have different objects to AlphaWorld. Yellow is very small, but Mars is larger.

I recommend using AWNewbie just for starting out, then moving to AlphaWorld.

If you are going to build in AWNewbie, you don’t need to go to much effort to find somewhere. As the world is very small, just walk along a path from the landing zone to find an empty field close by.

If you are going to build in AlphaWorld, you should use Alphamapper to find a large, empty area.

Other worlds may have a map, but if not, you can search random coordinates and see if there are any buildings nearby, eventually finding an empty place. If there are buildings, also try looking to see if there are empty areas near them.

Building the House

To build, you must first understand how building works in Active Worlds.

Structures are made out of lots of objects. These objects vary in complexity, from squares and rectangular prisms to chairs and computer monitors. They can all be manipulated by changing their size and shape, by changing their texture or color, or by several other ways which I will show you in later blog posts. Hundreds of objects are put together to create large buildings and almost everything in the world is made out of some objects. To create objects, other objects are duplicated and then the new object is changed into the desired object.

Now let’s start the tutorial. This will be for AWNewbie, however if you want to start building in AlphaWorld, you can. Just go down to the 'Moving to AlphaWorld' section of this post for more help.

First, go to the world through a teleport at AWGate or typing in AWNewbie in the teleport box. Then walk down a path until you find a small empty place to build at. There will be a tutorial in the form of several signs along each path, but I have my own tutorial here.

First you will need to get a password. Pressing F8 will toggle the whisper box below the chat. You need to whisper “password” to [GuardBot]. This is a bot who will assign you a password. You will need to remember the password unless you aren’t planning to continue editing your house after this tutorial.

Now you can start building. Make sure your Num Lock is turned off. To begin, find an object near your empty field and right click it, to select it. The fence or brick walls are suitable objects, but some of the signs aren’t suitable and the ground isn’t made of objects.

Selecting an object brings up the object properties box, which appears whenever you have an object selected. Using this box, you can manipulate the object. You will use this box more later but right now, press the insert button on your keyboard, or the duplicate object button on the box. Now, use your arrow keys to move the object away from the path. Move it with a distance of about 30 arrow key presses. Each arrow press moves the object half a metre, which is also known as a ‘click’.

Left click on something other than the selected object in the 3D view to deselect it. If the object disappears and you get a message saying “You are not allowed to encroach into another's property”, it means the object was in a space which was above or under an object that doesn’t below to you. Try duplicating an object again and moving it to a different location, farther away from the path

Once you have your object, make it snap to grid and reset its rotation with the appropriate buttons in the object properties box. Also delete anything in the ‘Description’ or ‘Action’ fields. In the ‘Model’ field, rename the object, “walk022.rwx”, then deselect it.

Congratulations! You now have the first floor piece of your house! If your object is way above the ground, press the minus key on your keyboard to lower it until its Y location is zero. Even though the object is at zero, it will still be slightly above the world terrain, which is good, so you can put your own ground around your buildings.

If the object goes back to what it was before and you also get an "not allowed to encroach" message, it means the object wasn't encroaching before, but when it became this larger object, it was. Just try moving the object further away.

It is a good idea to record the coordinates of your house so you can find it later on if you forget where it is. Remember that an easy way to record your house’s location is to use the ‘Remember’ option under the ‘Teleport’ menu.

Now duplicate your floor and place it next to the first one so that they touch. Then duplicate it again and place it in a different direction from the last one so that the floors form an ‘L’ shape. This will be the base of your house. I recommend flying up in the air a bit to be better able to build.

The next task is to make the walls. Duplicate a piece of floor and rename it “pp21.rwx”. This wall object is half the length of a piece of floor. Move it to the end of the edge of a floor. Now duplicate it and move it next to the first wall so that the two walls go along the edge of one floor piece. To continue placing walls along the floors, you will need to rotate them. Duplicate and existing wall and press ‘Page Up’ exactly six times. It should now be 90 degrees to the other walls. Move it to connect with the floor and existing walls. You can use ‘Page Down’ to rotate the other way.

As you move your walls, you will find that pressing the arrow keys in groups of four or eight times to get them in the right position. This is because they are four metres long, which measures as eight button presses. As you duplicate objects, the duplicates are one button press forwards, so be aware of this when moving objects in groups of eight presses.

Using your knowledge, you should now be able to finish making the walls. Do this now. To speed things up, you can select more than one object at a time by holding ‘Shift’ when selecting objects. These objects will move together and rotate around their centre. If duplicating it, it will produce the same objects as were selected in the same position. This can really speed up building the walls by selecting and duplicating two at a time.

If you ever find your objects at some weird rotation or misaligned with the rest of the objects, just try snapping them back to the grid and resetting their rotation. It is normal to see tiny cracks between these kinds of walls, though.

Now to make a doorway and windows. Select one of your wall objects and rename it “pd21.rwx”, changing the second ‘p’ into a ‘d’. Your wall is now a doorway. Select a different wall object and turn the second ‘p’ into a ‘w’ this time, so that the name is “pw21.rwx”. This will be a window. Feel free to make as many windows or doorways as you want. You could also make internal walls.

To put in a ceiling, select each floor piece (at the same time, if you want). Duplicate them, move them back half a metre and then press plus on your numpad eight times. They are now on top of your walls.

Now you will be using some more complex objects to make your roof. Duplicate a ceiling piece and rename it “roofc35.rwx”. This is a corner piece. Rotate it and move it into an appropriate position. Then duplicate it and put it on all your external corners.

Now duplicate another corner and take the ‘c’ out of the name so that it is “roof35.rwx”. This new object is a straight roof object. Put this object along the walls between the corner roof objects.

How are we going to make the internal roof corner? We don’t need a new object for this; we can place two straight roof objects intersecting each other. Make this corner now.

You have now built a nice house and have completed your first structure in Active Worlds! Good work.

Object Yards

Object Yards are places with categories of objects on display so that builders can come along and find out the name of objects they want, so then they can go back to their place and insert the new objects.

The object yard at AWNewbie will be very useful to you. It is found at 36s 40w. The walk, pp and roof objects had numbers in them, which determined their texture. At the object yard you will find other objects of the same type but with different textures, so feel free to change the numbers in the objects at your house to make them have the textures you prefer.

In different worlds you will be able to find different object yards, so visiting them is a good idea.

Furnishing your house

When you are at the AWNewbie object yard teleport circle, click the teleport to go to “Furniture and TVs/Stereos”. Then find some objects you like. Right click them to find their names, and write them down or put their names in a text document. If you want, you could just say them in the chat and you will be able to see them when you go back to your house.

For this tutorial I will be putting in a bed, a couch and a TV. Once you have found the objects you want, click the back button until are at your house again, or can fly there. The objects I have chosen are “gbed3d.rwx”, “couch5a.rwx” and “tva2.rwx”

Duplicate an object of your house and rename it as one of the objects you have chosen. Rotate and move it to where you want in your house. Then do the same for the other objects. You now have a furnished house and you also know how to find objects and put them in your house, good work.

Moving to AlphaWorld

Once you are happy with your ability to build in AWNewbie, you should consider starting to build in AlphaWorld. This is because your buildings will be removed after a few days in AWNewbie.

Starting out in a much larger world is harder since you would need to duplicate an object and move it a lot farther if you want empty space all around. You can build closer to other people’s random buildings if can put up with only being able to expand in three directions.

Your first object in a new area is known as a seed object. To get your seed object at a remote location, you have three options.

First, if you are a citizen, you can use a bot such as Seedbot to place an object at any location under your name.

Second, you could duplicate an object from the closest building and just move it with the arrow keys, watching its location in the object properties box to help you direct it to your desired location.

Third, you could ask another user who is a citizen to create a seed object for you. Then after you made a copy, you would need that user to delete their copy.

When you get your seed object, make sure you snap it to grid and reset it’s rotation. This is so that your entire town won’t get built on an angle or weird position, which will be a lot better and easier to use.

Building a new house in AlphaWorld like in this tutorial should be fast and easy, so you can do it again in your new location.

That concludes this blog post/tutorial, so have fun building and experimenting with new things! Remember I have a place in Active Worlds you can find here, which has much of the things I talk about in this blog.

Welcome to Active Worlds!

Have you ever wanted to create your own virtual homestead, forest, city or social hangout? How about exploring places made by others? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could do those things with your friends? Or what about making new friends? In Active Worlds, you can do all of these and more.

Active Worlds is a virtual 3D world browser. It allows chatting to others, exploring huge worlds and the ability to construct your own place. There are hundreds of worlds and thousands of users. The largest world, AlphaWorld is 655 kilometers both long and wide and it contains somewhere around 222 million objects.

The types of locations or buildings you can create in Active Worlds are almost limitless. You can create stuff like waterfalls and landscapes, spaceships, fantasy castles and automated factories, which are only a small sample of what’s possible.

Apart from building just personal homes, you can build social areas that you can hang out at with your friends, educational places users can visit to learn things, places to give slideshow or media presentations, and shops designed to showcase products with links to websites where they can be bought in real life. Even other types of places, if you can think them up.

This blog will include a set of tutorials on using and building in Active Worlds, as well as ideas on things you could use in buildings or cities, and maybe some other things like building competitions.

Using Active Worlds is free. Talking, exploring and building are all free. However a subscription option is available. Free users are known as tourists while subscribing users are known as citizens. Citizens get more features than tourists, the most important of which is preventing other people from destroying your buildings.

As a free user, however, you are still able to feel safe about your buildings. AlphaWorld is so huge that you can pick a remote location and it is likely no one will ever find your place. There is only a danger if you invite untrustworthy users to visit your place. And if you are just inviting your friends you already know, you should be able to trust them not to ruin your construction efforts. You can also build very temporary buildings with protection if you build in the world ‘AWNewbie’.

Getting Active Worlds

In this first blog post I will be showing you how to move around and explore the worlds. But first, is downloading, installing and logging into Active Worlds.

The first thing you need to do is go to http://www.activeworlds.com/. Here you can download the Active Worlds browser by clicking on the “launch” button in the sidebar on the left. Then download and install by following the instructions. When you get to start, it will ask you who you want to be and your email address. Who you want to be, will be your username that other people will see you as in the world. I have never noticed any use for the email address you enter but you must enter one anyway. I don’t think it matters if it is real or not.

Once you’ve done that, the browser will open and you will be in the world ‘AWGate’.
 
The Active Worlds universe is divided up into lots of different worlds. The default world is AWGate, which is where people are usually chatting and with some information, help and teleports, but not much more. No building can be done here as AWGate’s purpose is to act as a gateway for new users.

Movement

Now you will learn how to move around. Keep in mind some of these movements require that Num Lock is turned off.

First, you can use the arrow keys to move forwards and backwards and to turn left and right, very simple. Holding ‘Ctrl’ will make you move and turn faster.

‘Shift’ is more complex. Holding ‘Shift’ will make you strafe left and right instead of turning left and right, and you will also move through solid objects if the particular world you are in allows it.

Flying can be achieved by pressing the plus and minus keys on the numpad. This is fun and also allows you to move around a lot faster.

Jumping is done by pressing ‘Insert’ on the numpad.

As well as moving around, there is other important information to navigate Active Worlds. To change your view between first person and third person views, click the options on the toolbar, or press ‘End’ to cycle through them. You can also press ‘Home’ on your keyboard to get straight back to first person view.

When you are in a third person view, you can press the ‘/’ and ‘*’ buttons on your numpad to zoom in and out.

To look up and down in first person, press ‘Page Up’ and ‘Page Down’. Holding ‘Ctrl’ will also make you look up and down faster.

An important option for seeing is the visibility setting. Higher settings mean you can see farther but the view will be slower to render. The float option automatically changes your visibility setting depending on what your frames per second (fps) are, to keep your fps at about the same rate.

Exploration
 
Now it’s time for exploring.

There is a menu that you can access by pressing F9. The Worlds Tab in this menu provides a list of worlds in order of how many people are in each world. You can use this list to find other worlds. In the Teleports Tab is a list of teleports to locations inside worlds to which you can add more teleports. But you would only be adding to your personal list of teleports.

The oldest world is AlphaWorld, and it is the largest world with the most building having been done here. Some other fun building worlds are Mars, AWTeen and Yellowstone which are also great worlds to explore. AWTours is a world designed to give you a tour of the Active Worlds universe with lots of teleports. If you click the links in the teleports tab, you will be instantly teleported to the landing zone of that world. The landing zone is the default place users go when teleporting to a world.

There will usually be teleports or paths to other places around those worlds. You can use those teleports or just fly around to explore. Teleports are sometimes in the form of large signs or billboards advertising locations in worlds or other worlds. To use them, just click on them. But not all billboards or signs are teleports.
 

An important feature of Active Worlds is the teleport menu. In the toolbar at the top of the program next to ‘File’ is ‘Teleport’. The ‘Forward’ and ‘Back’ options take you forward and back through teleports you have done while in the Active Worlds universe, like the buttons in an internet browser as you click links. These options are also in the form of buttons in the toolbar of icons.

The ‘Remember’ option adds your current location to the list of teleports in the teleports tab, under a name you choose.

Clicking the ‘Home’ option will take you to your default spawn location, the place you go to when you enter Active Worlds. The ‘Make This My Home’ option makes your current location to be your new spawn location.

‘To…’ brings up a box where you can enter a world name and a set of coordinates, where you will be teleported to. To enter the coordinates, you enter a number of the North or South coordinate followed by an ‘n’ or an ‘s’, to represent North or South respectively. Then leave a space and do the same except entering an ‘e’ or a ‘w’, for East or West respectively.
 
If you want to the centre of a world, then it doesn’t matter if you enter ‘n’ or ‘s’, ‘e’ or ‘w’. If you want to go to the landing zone of a world, just leave the coordinates box blank.

Here is a list of the names of some popular worlds that can be used in the teleport box:
 
• AWGate
• AWNewbie
• AW (AlphaWorld)
• AWTeen
• AWSchool
• AWTours
• Mars
• Yellow (Yellowstone)
• Metatropolis
• Atlantis
• Colony

Keeping track of your location and direction that you are facing can be helpful. The Window bar of Active Worlds will tell you the world you’re in, the coordinates and the direction you are facing. Knowing this will let you know how to tell others where to find you, and can help you know which way to travel to get somewhere nearby.

If you are exploring AlphaWorld in particular, then a useful tool would be AlphaMapper. AlphaMapper is a map of AlphaWorld. It is still very useful, despite being out of date by a couple of years. It has the same interface as Google Maps and you can zoom in quite far. A useful feature is ‘Teleport to Location’ which takes you to the exact location you are looking at on the map.

Some websites have lists of places to see in Active Worlds. For example you can go the Awportals website for places in AlphaWorld here or AWTeen here. Active World’s own wiki has lists of communities that can be found here and the newsletter usually has a section on sights to see, a great resource for exploring. 

Lastly, talking to other users may help you find new places. They may have their own buildings or communities they would like to show you.

My blog has a place in AlphaWorld which will include much of the things I talk about on my blog, and you can find it here.

That concludes this blog post. Have fun!