Chat Settings

The Chat Settings tab in the Settings control lets you change a variety of settings that increase the functionality of Active Worlds.

The first set of settings relate to how chat appears:

• Display chat text above avatars: This enables chat to be shown in 'both' the chat window and in a chat box above each avatar. This can be useful when you want to have the chat window minimized but still want to see what people are saying. In crowded areas, this may also cause avatar chat to become difficult read. This is up to personal preference.
• Use "Comic style" chat balloons: This adds a comic style chat balloon and is more aesthetic than functional.
• Render chat balloons on top: This ensures that chat balloons always appear.

• Identify new messages after scrollback: This inserts a line showing where new messages begin and serve as a placeholder. When scrolling chat up, this marks your place.
• Show timestamp with chat text: This places a timestamp to the left side of each persons name in the chat window. It will display your local time unless the "VRT" time option is checked.

Chat Log

The chat log records all chat within the chat window to a text file stored in your Active Worlds main folder. There are many instances where this can be useful, such as during meetings or other times when you may want to refer back to something that was said previously.

If you would like a record of all of your conversations saved to disk automatically, simply check the Log chat to file box. Each new Active Worlds chat session will be appended to the previous sessions in the log. If you clear the Log File field, chat logging will not begin right away but will instead begin the next time you start your Active Worlds browser if you have selected to log chat, at which time the Log File field will be set to chat.txt by default. If you decide to use the Chat Log field to specify a filename to save the chat log to, be very careful in choosing a filename so as not to damage an existing file.

• Log Chat to File: Select this to begin logging your chat to the chat file.
• Log File: This lets you specify which file you want to use as a chat log. Click "Browse" to locate the directory where you put your chat file. This can be named anything, however, the file has to be created before enabling the custom chat log file.

Avatars

In Active Worlds you can see and hear up to the 50 nearest people at once.

Being able to see 50 avatars at once can be both a blessing and a curse. Avatars are typically complex objects, and having 50 of them moving around you at once can cause a noticeable reduction in performance. To help you tune Active Worlds for best performance on your computer, there exists the concept of near and far avatars.

Near avatars are rendered in their normal, full complexity. Far avatars, however, all appear as the same model. Typically, the model used for the far avatar is much simpler than a standard avatar and is thus much faster to render. By adjusting how many near and far avatars you can see, you should be able to achieve an optimum balance between performance and avatar realism.

• Fully render the X nearest avatars: Here you can choose how many avatars are "fully rendered." This value can be anywhere from 0 to 50. These are your near avatars. The remaining number (the total number of avatars minus the number of fully rendered avatars) will be your far avatars. Whether a particular avatar appears to as you as a near or far avatar has no effect on your chat messages to and from that user. Note that special avatars are always fully rendered, regardless of whether or not they are within the near avatar limit.

• Automatically adjust count of fully rendered avatars: This adjusts the system count of rendered avatars. It is reccomended to leave this option checked.

World Owners: Choosing the Far Avatar If you are a world owner, you will need to pick a model to represent far avatars in your world. The browser automatically looks for and downloads the avatar called "far.rwx" from the avatars folder on your world's object path (the actual file will be called "far.zip" since all .rwx files are stored compressed on the web.) Simply choose whatever model you would like to use to represent far avatars in your world and save it as "far.zip" in your avatars directory. This model can be anything, even a fully polygonal avatar, although obviously that is not recommended since it would defeat the purpose. A simple facer model with an image of an avatar works very well as the far avatar (as with all other objects, if the far avatar model has textures, they are pulled from the textures folder.)

The far avatar cannot be animated with .seq files.

Voice Chat

This section allows you to define devices used for voice chat.

• Playback Audio Device: Most users use the system default, however, for those who have upgraded sound cards they may want to use the upgraded device instead. Select your device from the list.

• Capture Audio Device: Most users use the system default, however, for those who have upgraded sound cards they may want to use the upgraded device instead. Select your device from the list.