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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 !