New Features in 5.0

5.0

Build **1050 - 1123**
Release date	December 1, 2009
Developers	AWI Chrispeg
New features
Unicode Support Presentation Redesigned interface
Chronology
Previous 4.2	Next 5.1

Added Features (excerpt)

Redesigned user interface.
International Language Support using Unicode character sets throughout the system.
Major improvements to VoIP, in particular when used for a bigger audience of 400 and more simultaneous participants.
Added capability to login using a unique email address. No other citizen can have the same email address in order to login with the supplied email address. The entered email address must confirm to RFC standards using standard ASCII characters only. Citizennames must not contain the at-sign @.
Improved Comic Style Chat Bubbles
New transfer (Xfer) server, handling slide shows and file transfer.
Embedded tools to preapre and present Slide Shows.
Added functionalty for prepared slide shows to the server and the browser-SDK, enabling display in world or presenation items like PowerPoint, Excel files and any files that are displayed on the host's computer.
Added rendering movies and web pages in the 3D viewport window.
Laser Beam for presentations.
Emoticons for voice chat.
Smooth transitions when light and fog properties are changed.
Cache Management.
Web favorites.
New ActiveX control.
Multi-Instance capable client browser.

Next Version

Version 5.1 Active Worlds Technology.

Build 1123

November 2011

Fixed Prof-UIS interfering with embedded IE 9 on Windows Vista and later.

Build 1122

October 2010

Customized build.

Build 1121

12 July 2010 beta
July 2010 release

Added more features to the built in presentations, including PPT processing and server stored presentations (will be available with upcoming 5.1 servers).
Fixed a crashing issue that occurred on GIF images from a particular free webhost, if the webspace expired.

New in Build 1120

June 2010 beta

Fix for a sproadically occurring crashing issue when leaving a world while voice chat has been going on - someone has been talking.

New in Build 1119

9 March 2010 beta
11 March 2010 release

Sorting of names in the whisper dropdown box was incorrect, only sorting by the first character.
If the property dialog was tabbed into other already docked window, the focus was not put back to the 3D viewport automatically, caused by deferred update/painting of docked and tabbed windows in combination.
Fixed an issue that occurred on WINE, a Windows emulation for Mac and Linux, when objects were not rendered. The Activeworlds Browser version 5.0 is running pretty fast and flawless on Mac and Linux, and can even use DirectX acceleration thanks WINE (special thanks to Aric)!

New in Build 1118

26 February 2010 beta

Added optional min/max definitions for shape values in CAV templates, what allows to limit the sliders' range per shape modifier.

New in Build 1117

24 February 2010 beta

Added individual template handling for CAV-per-citizen templates.
Added reloading CAVs to the avatar reload event from the SDK.

New in Build 1116

10 February 2010 beta
21 February 2010 release

Fixed url encoding, a Windows function, misbehaved against the function's description.
Fixed an issue, if the VoIP tab was disabled, it still tried to access the non existing user list.
Fixed an issue with the gesture bar when ampersand character was used in the avatar's definition file, causing the UI to crash.

New in Build 1115

9 February 2010 beta

Fixed an issue with the chatlog that user names shorter than 3 characters in length could not be right clicked.
Added an option to the web script command "aworld:?click" to show or hide an object in world.

New in Build 1114

3 February 2010 beta
4 February 2010 release

Fixed a potentional crashing issue during the login dialog at startup after a timeout of about 20 seconds, if the "Remember password for the next time" option was not chosen.
Fixed an issue that occurred sporadicly with global ambient sound, when jumping from one world to the next, both using global sounds.
Improved speed of terrain streaming from cache and calculation of collision planes for the current cell and terrain page.

New in Build 1113

1 February 2010 beta
2 February 2010 release

Fixed a crashing issue when right clicking on world name or icon in the world list.

New in Build 1112

25 January 2010 beta
28 January 2010 release

Added functioinality to expose the voip reset button in the toolbar.
Fixed a potential crashing Unicode related issue in the world features dialog.

New in Build 1111

22 January 2010 beta

An option setting was added to aworld.ini to omit rendering of names and chat balloons, in particular useful for making screenshots. This setting goes into section [chat], omit_render=1. A value of 1 will omit rendering of user names and chat balloons, any other value will render them.
Urls and file names of cached files are now stored using encrypted names, instead of using their real names.

New in Build 1110

7 January 2010 beta
8 January 2010 release

Fixed an issue on 64bit Windows systems, were the total amount of physical memory was reported incorrectly.
Fixed an issues with zones, eventually lead to crashes when teleporting to another world.
Fixed, voice chat emoticons remained in 3D viewport, even after leaving a voice chat channel.
Fixed that the voice chat's hands free button became unavailable, greyed out, after leaving and rejoining a voice channel.
Fixed an unicode related issue when receiving telegrams.
Modified the voice chat's reset button to appear yellow insteed of light green on a customer's request.

New in Build 1109

4 January 2010 beta
5 January 2010 release

Improved time and CPU load needed to build up custom avatars to up to half the time it needed before.
Improved overall performance for (very)low-end machines, by decreasing the processed sizes texture. PCs with less or equal to 768MB RAM, or with less or equal to 128MB VRAM are subject for this optimization.
Fixed an issue with the animate command, that consumned memory, when animate/astop/adone was triggered every frame in insane speed.
Fixed an issue when teleporting from a zone in a world into another world.
Fixed an issue with media stopping, that lead to sporadic crashes.
Fixed an issue with the cached universe download datafile writing version/target indices incorrectly.

New in Build 1108

30 December 2009 beta
31 December 2009 release

Fixed an issue with in-world teleports, when the closest cell at the teleport destination was not loaded completely, if the visibility at the previous location had not yet reached the selected range or the maximum of 200m visibility and if it was about to load any cell partially (nifty to figure out under these specific circumstances).
Fixed issues that kept the browser from running on Windows 2000.

New in Build 1107

25 December 2009 beta
26 December 2009 release

Fixed an issue when Windows errors occurred "A required resource is not available".
Removed dependecies to external Microsoft libraries, such as msfc90u, msvcr90, and msvcp90. These libraries and the according manifest can be safely deleted from the Activeworlds browser folder.

New in Build 1105 and 1106

23 December 2009

Fixed and reset(!) parental control password, in order to get rating settings and consequently adding contacts working again.

New in Build 1104

22 December 2009

Fixed a crashing issue related to special avatars defined in the avatars.dat.
Fixed a crashing issue when invalid data was read from the help index file.
Names, link names, sound files and bump names were displayed truncated in the object property dialog for movers.
French language file update.

New in Build 1103 beta only

22 December 2009 beta

Fixed freezing issue that occurred sporadically, when many signs are created (really many, hundrets) and images were processed at the same time.

New in Build 1102

21 December 2009

Fixed a crashing issue that occurred sproadically while deleting objects, in particular when the visal range is just that moment about to change.
Increased length of whisper field.
Added Suomi message file.
Mipmap images are now saved including all mipmap levels in the local cache. Mipmap levels are no longer recalculated each time loaded from cache. This reduces the time for loading mipmaped images to half of time it took before.
Allow loading of partial cell content. This improves overall experience, smoother movement and highly improved overall perception of the 3D environment, in particular when walking through high densite and high resolution area.

If you have not experienced 5.0 yet, grab the chance today! Happy Holidays!

New in Build 1101

18 December 2009 beta

Added feature allowing right cliking into the chat log even if the chat was managed through global bots and the avatar is nearby.
Added feature for users with CT or eject right, allowing right click into the chat log even if the avatar is not nearby (this will require an update of the world server, all AW hosted worlds are updated already), to display the avatar's location and to teleport to that place.
Fixed, common controls were not obeying the system's theme settings. The according manifest entry were missing.
Fixed, right cliking into chat text written by a bot using console messages, eventually crashed the browser. This issue was undetected since a longer time, as it also was the reason for the popup not getting displayed sometimes.
Fixed issue, when right clicking into the chat log did not bring up the popupmenu sometimes.
Fixed, that several language specific message files caused the browser to crash. All message files are now stored with Unicode encoding, even the specific language would need 7 bit ASCII characters only.
Fixed some more unicode text related crashing issues.
Fixed, detecting links in the chat failed sometimes, when unicode characters were involved. Applied better methods for detecting links in the chat text in general.
Increased count of circular playback buffers used by voice chat.

New in Build 1100 beta only

14 December 2009

Switched compiler to Visual Studio 2008, C/C++ 9.0.

New in Build 1099

<not specified> December 2009

Fixed an issue when updating the client browser through a proxy server, if it the proxy address and port is not read from Internet Explorer.
Added text display for the 'Preview' button on the prepare presentation dialog, read from the language specific message file.

New in Build 1098

7 December 2009

Fixed an issue that the talk handsfree button would not turn green sometimes. If you were the only avatar inworld and a second avatar joined, the talk button sometimes did not turn from grey to green.
Fixed, when disconnecting / leaving voice chat, not all previous settings were reset.
The connection icon on the voice chat tab will be greyed out while entering another worlds, or if the world is not enabled for voice chat at all.

Note, in order for all Windows hosted worlds to enable the join/leave voice chat feature, download the latest voip server plugin 4.0.0.21 from the download page.

New in Build 1097

7 December 2009 beta only

Fixed crashing issues related with particle emitters. This, quite interesting, was related with the amount of presets that were stored in the presets folder. Everyone with less than about 30 particle emitter presets stored was fine.
Fixed, during teleport it would first render an incorrect location for a moments when entering a world at his default entry point. The attributes of the entered world were not read from the local cache correctly sometimes.
The default entry point of a world is now considered always, when teleporting to the default entry point, no matter if the world has been cached or not, or if the world entry point has changed since the last visit.
Fixed, gravity was on too early when entering a world with an group object for the ground (falling through the ground issue, i.e. new gate). It will now wait until all models and textures of the ground object are loaded, or a timeout of 3 minutes elapsed, before gravity is applied to the avatar.
Fixed, tiny borders would eventually appear around text sign images as a result of anti-aliasing.
Reenabled building outside the visible view. This was disabled in 4.3 builds.
Added functionality for joining and leaving voice chat with a simple button click. This also requires voip server plugin build 21.

New in Build 1096

3 December 2009

Fixed: Teleporting to the default entry a world did not work as expected, e.g. if no coords are given in the Teleport To dialog. Was related to Unicode.
Fixed: Object presets did not load and save character strings correctly. This also caused the browser crashing when loading presets eventually. Related to Unicode.
Fixed: Tourist login dialog could be opened more than once. Related to the feature offering updated before login.
Fixed: Menu items appeared twice. Related to loading language specific message sets.
Fixed: Transparent or masked textures appeared in incorrect rendering z-depth. 5.0 was not upgraded to raster version 8, we used to have in the last couple of 4.3 builds, which considered mask color depth. Consequently the rendering order per texture failed, as some image types were not identified as transparent or masked.
Fixed/removed: Opening multiple telegram-send dialogs would crash the browser. Related to sharing resources. It was the reason for undetected crashes in the past. Openining multiple telegram-send dialogs at once will be disabled for this reason.
Added: Gravity was enabled before ground group (awg) was loaded. i.e. at the gate avatars may got stuck in the ground when entering, or may have fell through the ground when entering while downloading.
Added: Allow inworld/local teleport by bots, even if AW_TELEPORT_WORLD is not set. On request of game world creators. Previous versions required the world name set by the bot for inworld teleportation. This was a problem in particular if local teleports were disabled. i.e. good ol' X1 does not send the world name by default, when teleporting inworld.
Enabling VRT display as the default timezone shown in the status bar.

New in Build 1095 - Initial Release

1 December 2009

Redesigned the entire UI, all icons in a new style.
Redesigned GUI for slideshow presentation and prepare.
Redesigned GUI for voice chat tab.
Added more functionality to slideshows.

Improved voice chat, using AGC to ensure all speakers have about the same volume. Ensure voice chat runs seamless as possible on systems with low CPU capabilities, even when minimized or in background.

Fixed an issue with the voip reset button, resetting to the default device if the selected audio device name contained other than English characters;
Fixed disk cleanup would eventually crash, if canceling during login and download folders where not yet specified.
Fixed that links in the chat log eventually failed, caused by unicode conversion.
Fixed an issue with the renderer displaying the voip-talking icon above avatars.

New in Build 1094 beta

16 November 2009 beta

Added an option to remember last world and location on browser exit. On next browser launch the avatar will appear at the previously stored world and location.
Added reporting an avatar's current zone to SDK clients. Sending the attribute AW_AVATAR_ZONE representing the zone's object ID, within AW_EVENT_AVATAR_ADD, AW_EVENT_AVATAR_CHANGE and AW_CALLBACK_AVATAR_LOCATION events. Requires world server build 105 or later and SDK build 84 or later.
Increased TCP send- and receive buffer sizes (affects all clients and all servers), and an issue with the voip user list on server side, in order to reduce the possibility of disconnections on slower or unreliable connections.
Added support for MySQL 5.1 and later, considering new reserved world of MySQL, to the servers.
Fixed world directional light changes not obeying zones blocking world light and transitions were still active when jumping worlds.
Fixed crashing issues that could occur before login and at startup.
Removed a warning popup which eventually appeared if the 3D window size was zero, occurring e.g. when docking windows covered the entire 3D rendering window.

New in Build 1093 beta

12 November 2009 beta

Added Cache Management, found in the Menu/Settings property sheet.
Added transition for fog color and distance, world sky colors, as well as for world light color, direction, and light source texture size, and added transition for opacity and speed for cloud layers.
Increased browser data throughput for connections to the servers, in regards to data traffic peaks and low framerates.
Fixed skybox rendering for 'dirty' geometries (like in Alphaworld), providing proper z-depth rendering.
Fixed web-url display when url field was edited, yet the refresh button was pressed.
Fixed AWG-file validation for object groups loaded from the OP.

New in Build 1092 beta

21 October 2009 beta

Determine the reason of rendering failures on system events, like desktop color-depth changes, or screen savers using login-locking. In other cases than desktop color-depth changes, rendering will be paused until the system event ends and will resume normal render processing without user notification.

New in Build 1090 and 1091 beta

13 October 2009 beta

Added more JPEG subformat to the supported list of image formats.
Added a 3 state toggle switch for drawing the cell grid z-enabled or z-disabled.
Disallowed group (AWG) files using a relative url-path and checking the downloaded content.
Displaying the embedded web-browser's url as reported by the IE API insteed the initial requested url.

New in Build 1089 beta

18 September 2009 beta

Added another JPEG subformat to the supported list of image formats.
Drawing cell grid on top of all objects and increasing its area of 400 by 400 meters.
Fixed a crashing issue that could occur while duplicating objects out of visible range or beyond world boundaries.
Fixed an issue that occurred when saving mover presets.
Fixed, when pictures were animated images (gif or filmstrips), they eventually were not rendered in correct alpha render order.
Solved an issue when changing citizen attributes (menu/options/citizen) lead to disconnection from the universe after a timeout.
Solved an issue that could have led to sporadic crashes, when mirrors were located at the avatar's world entry location, in particular during launching the browser.
Added an ini-setting to disable screensavers on XP (in aworld.ini section [special] disable_screensaver=1), as well for Vista and later as long the user that started the application has high enough privileges (UIPI - User Interface Privilege Isolation [1], a part of Vista's UAC - User Account Control).

New in Build 1088 beta

9 September 2009 beta

Fixed an issue when filmstrip-images came from the same domain, that the 2nd loaded animation rendered the previously loaded file (objects.activeworlds.com/path/filmstrip1.jpg looked the same as objects.activeworlds.com/path/another_filmstrip.jpg). This issues was related to Unicode file names.
Tiny images smaller than 32 by 32 pixels, in particular when filmstripped, were resized when loaded and may have produced gradiant colors after rescaling.
Filmstrips stopped animating when they were downloaded the first time and short after revisted.
Fixed arrow of the comic style chat bubbles.
Fixed an issue when shadows caused certain surfaces disappearing, if one or more materials without texture (texture NULL) had been assigned to geometry's surfaces within the model's file. Fixed by changing rendering order of shadows. (i.e. gfence1.rwx in AWTeen - issue occurred since avatar shadows were added).
Fixed an issue when shadows caused certain objects or surfaces disappearing, if matfx was used and the only material used had no texture applied (texture NULL) within the model. Fixed by moving model clumps with matfx applied, into alpha rendering order. (i.e. pictwall2.rwx - note, this issue is not directly related to the similar issue from above, it is a special case of it).
Fixed bouncing to the world entry point, when the connection to the world server was lost and reestablished.
Fixed avatar movements not working right at high coordinates in a world (coordinates higher than 10000 cells or 10, 000 meters and higher) when forcing the browser to high framerates above 60fps.
The Close Button (X) for closing 3D overlayed webpages no longer disappears when toggling fullscreen mode (Alt+Return).
Added videos (media command) on 3D overlay, similar to slide shows, using name=aw_3d.

New in Build 1087 beta

1 September 2009 beta

Picture updates appeared to be broken, in particular when mipmapped and non-mipmapped versions of the same image source were invloved.
Fixed rendering order for transparent models against the water surface.

New in Build 1086 beta

24 August 2009 beta

Fixed more issues that eventually lead to sporadic crashes on download failures from the web, for pictures and sound/noise.
Fixed possible buffer overflow when loading misformated object groups from AWG-files.
Fixed issue when teleporting from an external web-link to an area where native matfx using the default glossy textures were used. When the browser was started through DDE/MIME, the working folder was not yet set at the time the first objects were loaded, what caused to fail loading the default matfx textures.
Fixed an issue that eventually crashed the application, when matfx was applied on filmstrip textures. Note, rendering matfx on animated filmstrips is still not supported. Animated GIFs also count as filmstrips, where movies (media command) will take the matfx command and continue to animate.
Fixed an issue where images got filmstripped, even they were not in JPG or BMP format (Build 1049).
Fixed an issue that lead to a crash after about 5 minutes, if pictures (picture action command)failed to download.
Fixes issues with the tex-dictionary occurring, when name-collisions happened from images downloaded from the world op, the universe op and external web servers. In worst case such name-collisions lead to crashes.

New in Build 1085 beta

3 August 2009 private build, not published

Fixed all 'skewed' text issues on signs.
Fixed an issue that caused crashes when switching to another world.
Fixed D3D7 not retrieving the correct texture rendering capabilities from the graphic driver.
Forced n^2 texture sizes in OpenGL rendering mode.
Improved text-rendering for HUD.
Added web-trigger for "aworld:?click <name>" to the embedded web-browser. It looks for the first object with the given name within visible range and triggers its activate command.

New in Builds 1082 to 1084 beta

30 July 2009 beta

Functionality has been added to query the graphic card driver for texture capabilities. The most significant capabilities of interest are:

a) does the underlaying hardware require textures in a size of power of 2.
b) does the underlaying hardware require textures in square dimensions.
c) are there restrictions when using odd sizes of texture in width and height or the aspect ration.

If for whatever reason the capabilities cannot be retrieven, the browser assumes the worst case.

Whenever the application encounters a change in color depth, or any other reason that keeps it from successfully continuing to render, the application will restart itsself without user notification. If the login name and password was stored, the avatar will reappear at exactly the same spot as before after restart. If the user name and password was not stored, the user will find the application after restart at the login prompt.
Fixed crashing issues which are related to hardware incompatibility.
Fixed an image processing issue with palette indexed JPG files (rare format).
Fixed screenshots could crash the application.

New in Build 1081 beta

28 July 2009 beta

Using squared ballon chat boxes for all render modes, as some poor graphic cards won't render it correctly otherwise.
All supported image formats are now detected by their magic number, rather than by extension. An unsupported magic number within an image file, is the first criteria to drop these images.
Added proper error messages for pictures failing (the picture action command).
If a picture action command failed, the previously applied textures was removed. Now the previous texture on the picture tag will remain.
Fixed a few minor glitches with image processing.
Fixed a potential crashing issue that occurred on some ATI cards with HUD Text (not pictures shown), in affect of the latest changes of image processing.
Fixed a possible buffer overflow that might have occurred from web-triggers.
Fixed an issue with the render bounding box, when builds were in an altitude of below or above of 500 meters.

New in Build 1080 beta

24 July 2009 beta

Added image-only-debug log by setting image=1 in the [debug] section of aworld.ini.
Added failing picture images to report errors in the chat, if 'Print Object Errors' is selected in the Options/Settings/Advanced tab.
Consider all mask-textures used by models in late-render queue.
Some GIF images came up with a border around the transparency mask, caused by palette color used for transpaerncy within the GIF.
The file extension is now only a secondary identicator for image formats. As the primary image format identicator magic numbers are used, thus allowing pictures downloaded from urls without needing an extension.
Fixed coronas disappeared behind "visible no" objects.
Fixed crashing issue when debug log was on and the last image in the queue failed.

New in Build 1079 beta

21 July 2009 beta

The built-in JPEG library reported warning and error messages verbosly in a popup window. Such warning messages are not displayedanymore.
Particle emitters using filmstrips (either a vertical chain of images from an jpg file or a gif animation) lead to 'Access Violation' errors, if the same filmstrip was used by another object nearby.
Some CAV textures did not appear as transparent. I.e. some (not all) Body-Art textures applied the selected color to the whole body. This was, because some images provided for CAV seem use indexed color palettes, which was not taken into account correctly.
Resampling, when shrinking or stretching an image in size, caused a one pixel wide white stripe on the right hand of image, if the image had transparent borders. This was caused by the pixel color averaging method that was applied when shrinking or stretching an image. Changing the method considering alpha of all neighbor pixels (not only alpha of the current pixel), fixed it.

New in Build 1078 beta

20 July 2009 beta

Microsoft's GDIPlus image processing library was removed and replaced, as it caused problems and lead to crashes over time.
The X-button was disappearing sometimes when web was open in the 3D viewport window - was related with other toolbuttons, like the basic mode, the register-now or renewal buttons. Changing avatar or switching the gesture bar off triggered it also.
Pictures using the mipmap option no longer fail loading when the same picture was used without mipmap nearby.
Semi-transparent textures (PNG) render in correct order now. Looking through semi-transparent textures clipped objects behind.
The world sector-border-issue that occurred on zones and particles when changing to another world secter is fixed.
Z-buffering artefacts could be reduced by setting a smaller world box size of 710 meters (71 cells) insteed of 1200 meters (120 cells). This allows the renderer to calculate z-depth more accurate (see annotation).
When mover objects got deleted, but the linked objects remained, the linked object got invisible and could not be clicked anymore. Such 'missing links' are rendered visible and are clickable in build mode now.

Annotation

A world box is a cube defining the renderer's current scene. World sectors are smaller as the world box, to allow correct rendering and geometry collisions across world sector borders. For example, if a world sector covers an area of 1000 meters squared (100 cells), the according world box should cover at least the same area adding the maximal visible view distance, so it would be 1200 meters (120 cells) squared. Reducing the world box to 710 square meters (71 cells, note a prime was used) and consequently setting the world sector size to 500 square meters (50 cells) bei keeping the maximal visible view distance at 200 meters (20 cells), has the effect that distances between objects within the world box can be calculated more precice as the relative distance between the geometry, in aspect of the considering world sector coordinate system, is higher.

New in Build 1077 beta

30 June 2009 beta

DEP and UAC compliant - compatible with Vista's and Windows 7 security measurements.
Fixing issue with media, if the WM-API detected invalid data, causing the media to stop playing.
Fixing voip quality slider setting was not working as supposed.
Fixing show-menu get double entries after switching message files.
GrabFrame Addon is disabled in software rendering mode, cause the desired frame image conversion method is not available by the software engine.
Application instance locking on folder base, denying to start the application from the same folder twice.
Adjusting the emoticon to the left of the name above the avatar in all cases.
Ensure that chat bubble are rendered right above the avatar always, by moving the rendered area within the image to the buttom always, as previously only done for comic style chat with text only.

New in Build 1076 beta

25 June 2009 beta

Applied one pixel more in padding of the bubble name, when chat is also displayed below the name.
Fixed an issue when the browser was started from the ActiveX but not embedded, that it created files on the desktop sometimes, cause the currect directory was not set yet.

New in Build 1075 beta

24 June 2009 beta

New ActiveX control, supporting Win7, Vista, XP, Win2000 for IE7 and IE8.
Added better ActiveX support to the brower.
Added multi-instance capability to the browser.
Modified the upgrade tool, allowiing to upgrade the browser while controlled by the ActiveX.
Fixed the auto-resize feature ensuring the 3D viewport is visible always.

New in Build 1074 beta

19 June 2009 beta

Added layout #11: force to chase-cam insteed of locked-cam.
Modified rendering the laser Beam target pointer (default/textures/lasterpoint.png) in normal mode, insteed of glow mode.
Added padding pixels to description-pop.
Balloon name and chat rendering: partly reverted to build 1072, but removed wordbreak for the rendered name.

New in Build 1073 beta

11 June 2009 beta

Fixed the shadow offset for name and chat above avatars.
Fixed box-sizes for comic style name and chat display above avatars.
Added Laser Beam, in particular useful for presentations. (affecs browser, SDK and world server).

New in Build 1072 beta

3 June 2009 beta

Default threshold can be set in aworld.ini, in a range from 1 (min) to 100 (max). Each time the browser is started or the "Reset" button is clicked, the threshold will be set to the given value.
The VoIP-"Reset" button is now drawn with yellow background.
Formatting and calculating the text chat bubble width and height now uses an alternative method also used by Windows edit controls.
Fixed isseue when Comic Style Chat bubbles caused crashes in software render mode.

New in Build 1071 beta

15 May 2009 beta

Fixed VoIP Quality settings in the browser were not recognized by the server correctly.
Use 44.1 kHz as default internal samplingrate for VoIP.
Fixed forced compression also adjusts the internal samplingrate for VoIP.
Modified VoIP sending userlists in multiple packets.

New in Build 1065 to 1070 beta

February to April 2009 beta

Various Unicode related fixes encounted during beta testing.
Improved Comic Style Chat Bubbles in all render modes.

New in Build 1064 beta

5 February 2009 beta

Added prepare slide show.
Added preview slide shows.
Added presentation tool for prepared shows;
Added web favsite$3 to the embedded web browser.
Added emitocons for voice chat to display the speaking state during a voice conversation next to the avatar name in 3D.

New in Build 1063 beta

29 January 2009 beta

Presentations are now organized by citizen number. Other citizens do not have access to others presentations through the browser.
It is still possible to copy a citizen's presentation from one PC to another by copying the according folder. The Slides folder is in the cache subfolder, where the browser creates folders for each citizen individually containing subfolder again with their private presentations. For example a presentaion of citizen 17 can be still found if harddisk access is granted in a path .\cache\Slides\00000017\<slide show name>.
Presentations can be deleted entirely now. A button to delete a presentation has been added to the Prepare Slide Show dialog.
A name can be gived for each slide. These names may consist of Unicode (including Japanese) characters and are limited to a length of 50 characters.
The slide's number is displayed in the slide list in front of the given name.
Slides can be reordered within a presentation by dragging and dropping them within the list of slides.
An issue with the slide show dialog has been fixed, where dialog items where enabled but non functional even the citizen did not have presentaion rights assigned. Within having presentation rights the dialog are always disabled in first hand now.
An emoticon is rendered at the left hand to the avatar's name when the avatar is talking on voice chat. If the user has not yet talked, no emoticon and no name is shown.

New in Build 1062 beta

19 January 2009 beta

Modified preview diloag window for prepared shows, now running as sibling window to the main browser window to prevent keeping the main thread from receiving window messages.
Added image preview and controls to step back and forth during presenting a slide show.
Changed "Update Now!" to "Show Now!".

New in Build 1061 beta

17 January 2009 beta

Added feature to Prepare Presentation accessible via Menu/Tools. Presentations are prepared locally, saved in .\cache\Slides\<Show Name>\*.jpg.
Added Preview window for slides after capturing image to confirm and save them.
Added feature to present prepared slide shows accessible via Menu/Tools. After show name and slide name is chosen, the presentation can be shown automatically slide by slide in the giver update interval, or can be shown manually by hitting the Update Now! button at any time.
Added functionalty for prepared slide shows to the server and the browser-SDK.

New in Build 1060 beta

28 December 2008 beta

Translated ini files to be stored in Unicode.

Added IME controls:

IME is only enabled for input when the focus is on chat, whisper or telegrams.
If typing text when the input focus is on the 3D view, the focus is set to the chat input field.

Improved slide show feature:

Draw border around the capture window during window selection
Added support to paint slide on an object by name
If the object name is "aw_3d" the slide is displayed on the picture object as well as on the 3D overlay.
The countdown is in 1/10th of an second, minimum capture interval is one second.

Other modifications and fixes:

Added right management for Slide Show capabilities in world licence administration dialog.
Fixed VoIP not obeying forced compression (VoIP server plugin 4.0.0.18 required).
Fixed "Resource was unavailable" errors (Windows running out of UI resource handles with fonts on signs).
Faster application shutdown.
Fixed potentional issue with object property dialog causing crashes.
Fixed an issue with auto-login, if stored username/password was too long, too short or contained invalid characters, and login dialog was not displayed.
Fixed issue where SDK controlled avatar changes did not shown in the target avatar's browser.

VoIP Server Plugin 4.0.0.18:

Optimized performance, less CPU usage, when forcing a compression (disallow individual compression selected by client software), switching internal sampling rate to the sampling rate of the forced compression saves additional sampling rate conversions.

Universe Server:

Added capability to retrieve password by email address.
Allow Unicode text in email templates.
Added mailpw5 tool handling Unicode emails to be sent.
An upgrade dialog may appear before the client has logged on.

New in Build 1055 to Build 1059 beta

December 2008 beta

Added basic slide show tool.
Fixed gaps when moving objects at high coordinates.
Calculating object moves in double precision (64 bit) floating point numbers for more accuracy.
Accurate display of x-y-z- coordinates in the object property dialog.
Voice chat was reset when world attributes changed.
Fixed a transparency issue caused by the skybox, clearing z-buffer and do not clear image buffer each frame.
Treat PNG and GIF formatted textures and pictures the same way as masked textures in regards of transparency.
Shadows were rebuilt when world attributes changed.
Keep the size of scaled objects when selecting them and display an orange bounding box in order to mark them visibly as scaled object.
Various fixes for Unicode in all system components.

Xfer Server:

Added basic Xfer Server.
Added methods and the SDK and the Universe Server in order to get the Xfer Server included to the system.

New in Build 1054 beta

26 November 2008 beta

Allowing user names up to 20 characters length.
Allowing world names up to 16 characters length.
Fixed 3d-image buffer was not cleared in an empty world when not connected to a world (wfs).
Optional setting to disable 'remember login'.
Optional setting to disable 'remember privileges'.
Added migration methods, that is to check the database's table structures at startup and adjust column definitions if necessary, to the universe and world servers.

New in Build 1053 beta

24 November 2008 beta
All features of the Browser, the SDK, the Admin Tool and the Servers are ported to use Unicode by now.

Added support for avatars.dat, PAV and CAV definitions containing Unicode characters.
Fixed max length for email addresses entered in the login name field.
Fixed VoIP userlist not always been correct, in particular in VoIP zones (world server build 101 is required);
Fixed wireframe renderer was broken when the same textures were used with the same mesh;
Fixed mover lock-position entries in the property dialog box were not accepted;
Fixed particle emmitters could crash, when attempting to change a PE using a value 0(zero) for the minimum release time.
SDK Build 81:
- Fixed aw_wait returning an error if the current instance is set to NULL.
- Added feature to unify right-string appearance internally.
- Changed max length of passwords (see aw.h).
- Changed max length for universe welcome message and citizen comment fields to 1000 characters.
World Server Build 101:
- Fixed VoIP group handling and updated VoIP plugin to 4.0.0.17 fixing voip login procedure
- Added feature to unify right-string appearance internally.

New in Build 1052 beta

20 November 2008 beta

Fixed password length issues: some password fields were limited to 12 characters still.
Fixed configuration for keybord control keys failed with the 'Move forward' key.
Fixed reconnection issues with VoIP to an ongoing world voice chat and to zone voice chat.
Do not relogin to a world's voice chat, if a change in VoIP rights does not affect a user's particular VoIP rights.
Increased length of universe welcome message to 1000 characters.
Shadows were rebuilt when world attributes changed.
Fixed a transparency issue caused by the skybox, clearing z-buffer and do not clear image buffer each frame.
Treat PNG and GIF formatted textures and pictures the same way as masked textures in regards of transparency.
Accurate display of x-y-z- coordinates in the object property dialog.
Keep the size of scaled objects when selecting them and display an orange bounding box in order to mark them visibly as scaled object.

New in Build 1051 beta

11 November 2008 beta

Browser change list:

Fixed crashing issue related with model-update-queue, occurred most when scanning through worlds for a long time or switching worlds/login after staying at a crowded area for a longer period of time.
Fixed toolbar not redrawing when floating or when message set was switched.
Modified login dialog, in order to take email addresses for the login name, longer passwords (from 12 characters to 16 characters), and in concerns of larger fields for international language sets. The entered email address must confirm to RFC rules and must use standard ASCII characters only.
Several fixes in regards to Unicode character display and character set translation.
Fixed cell size count not working right, if multibyte Unicode characters were involved.
Calculating object moves in double precision (64 bit) floating point numbers for more accuracy.
Voice chat was reset when world attributes changed.

The following change list applies to universe- and world servers, as well the SDK:

Added capability to login using a unique email address. No other citizen can must the same email applied, in order to login with the supplied email address. The entered email address must confirm to RFC standards using standard ASCII characters only. Citizennames must not contain the at-sign.
Fixed using longer UTF8 encoded names with voip crashed the server.
Increased size of internal string buffers to 3 times the character length, as UFT8 encoding may take up to 3 bytes per character.
All ASCII methods used by the SDK now translate codepage dependend MBCS strings to UTF8, optionally using the provided codepage otherwise using the system's codepage.
Added definition for user name length, password length and email length to the SDK header files.
Fixed cell size count not working right, if multibyte Unicode characters were involved.

New in Build 1050 beta

6 November 2008 beta

Converted browse and tools to use Unicode character set in replacement of codepage dependend MBCS (Multi Byte Character Set).
Increased default font size of chat messages.
Improved font appearance, in particular for Asian fonts, for all windows of the browser.
Preparing for larger input fields for some fields.
+ All modifications that were done to 4.2 until today.
+ SDK 5.0 beta build 80 is available, with Unicode support added.
+ World 5.0 beta build 100 is available, with Unicode support added.

Beta Start - Schedule

The 5.0 Beta scheduled to start on 6 November 2008. As of 24 November 2008, all features are ported to use Unicode in the Browser, the SDK, the Admin Tool and the Servers.