Figure 1. A bot-generated, all-COB underground maze world, as seen in 3.0.
The Active Worlds 3.0 effort has seen some more exciting progress over the last couple of weeks. Among other things, building, collision detection, gravity, the "animate" and "color" commands, and the avatar "fade-out" effect are all now working well under 3.0. Also, builders will be glad to know that copying of multiply-selected objects will be supported in 3.0.
Porting collision detection to RenderWare 3.0 has raised some interesting new possibilities. We now have the opportunity to support avatar-to-avatar collisions and collision with oversized objects with no significant performance impact. "Oversized" objects are objects greater than 10 meters in diameter. In the current version of Active Worlds, collision detection with oversized objects is eratic because the origin of the object can sometimes be located in a cell too far away from your avatar to be considered by the browser in the collision detection algorithm. In 3.0 collision with these objects will be handled correctly regardless of where they are located. Also, there will be no more "vertex limit" in 3.0...bounding-box-level collision will no longer be used regardless of how many vertices there are on an object.
Avatar-to-avatar collision is a possibility we are still considering. While relatively easy to detect, it has some problems because at certain locations, such as GZ, it is fairly easy for two avatars to get stuck "inside" each other if they both teleport in to the same spot. Obviously, cases like this will have to be properly handled if we are to support avatar collision.
Meanwhile, support for COB, the new object format introduced in Active Worlds 2.2, is progressing nicely in 3.0. The screenshot below shows a world comprised only of COB objects as seen from the Active Worlds 3.0 browser.
Figure 1. A bot-generated, all-COB underground maze world, as seen in 3.0.