Advanced Settings

The Advanced settings are accessed from the Settings dialog.

Message Sets

Message Sets determine the language that the program uses. The default message set is American English. To change your message set, select the drop down box that shows your language.

Enabling the Spelling Dictionary will check your spelling in the chat window. The default spelling dictionary is set to EN_US, or American English. Currently, it is the only available dictionary in the browser. Other language dictionaries can be added to the "\AppData\Local\ActiveWorlds 3D\Default\Hunspell_dict" folder.

Alternative Dictionaries can be added for use within the browser by creating a dictionary file in the "\AppData\Local\ActiveWorlds 3D\Default\Hunspell_dict" folder. These are useful for users who are bi-lingual.

When "Check Initial Capital Letters" is checked, the browser will check to see that capital letters are used at the start of sentences.

To add additional dictionaries, search "hunspell dictionaries" online. There are a wide variety of places where they can be downloaded from. Once downloaded, simply drop the dictionary into the folder mentioned above.

Toolbar

Active Worlds offers several different styles of toolbars to use from. You can easily change which toolbar you want to use by selecting the dropdown box and choosing one of the styles listed there.

Physics

To enable the physics engine, check "Enable Physics Engine". This allows the physics engine to run within the browser.

For those who have nVidia GPU, check "Enable physics hardware simulation" for better performance with the physics engine.

Local Path

This option is typically only used by artists working on Active Worlds art files.

The Local Path specifies a directory on your PC where Active Worlds should look for art files before attempting to download them from the Object Path. If a file is found in the Local Path, it will always be used instead of the equivalent file on the world's object path.

The structure of the Local Path directory mirrors that of the Object Path. The top level of the directory contains one or more folders that are named after the web site they are overriding. There are certain characters that may be present in URLs that are not valid in file names; these characters should be replaced with a hyphen ('-'). Under each top-level directory should be a folder hierarchy that mirrors the web directory hierarchy exactly. In fact, if the objects in your world are hosted on your PC, the Local Path can be set to the same directory as the one serving your objects.

Example: say the object path of your world is "www.myworld.com/myobjects" and you want to use a Local Path to override some of these files. You could set your Local Path to "C:\awart", and in the folder "awart" you would create a folder called "www.myworld.com", and under that a folder called "myobjects", and under that, one or more of the standard Active Worlds object path folders ("models", "textures", etc.). Finally, each of these files would contain copies of the files that you want to override (e.g. "tree.zip" in the models folder, or "brick.jpg" in the textures folder).

Object Errors

If you are creating your own objects for use in Active Worlds, you may want to enable this option in order to help with debugging your objects. If this option is enabled and the object loader encounters a problem in an object, it will print a message listing the object name, the line number (if relevant) and a description of the problem to the chat history window.

Also, if this option is enabled the browser will print a message if it is unable to download a file that it expected to find on the object path. This is helpful for example if you forget to upload a file to your object path that the browser needs in order to display your objects.

Note that object errors will only be displayed for those users who have either caretaker or build rights in the world.