Universe Pavatars

Starting with version 4.1 of Activeworlds, universe administrators have the option of making Personal Avatars available to their users. Personal Avatars are avatars that can be unique to each individual citizen. These avatars are "portable" between worlds and function independantly of the world avatar list. They are not available to tourists. There are serveral steps required to making these avatars available.

Setting Permissions

Each user must have personal avatars enabled for their citizenship before they will be able to use their own personal avatar. Furthermore, the world they are in must allow personal avatars to enter. If these conditions are not met, then the "My Avatar" option will not appear in the avatars menu, and the user will instead have to use one of the standard avatars from the world list.

Paths

In the Universe Options you will need to set the paths for where the browser should dwnload personal avatars and their related files.

"Personal Avatar Path" is the path where the avatars and the ini files are stored.

"Personal AV texture and SEQ Path" is where the browser will go to download the sequences and textures. Note that the browser will append the proper sub-directory to this path. So, if you set this to "www.yourdomain.com" then the browser will download the sequences from "www.yourdomain.com/seqs" and the textures from "www.yourdomain.com/textures".

Some galaxies have found that setting the "Personal Avatar Path" and "Personal AV texture and SEQ Path" to the same as the world object path is the best solution. These galaxies then place the av0000000.zip and sq0000000.zip files within the normal avatar folder.

Geometry File

With personal avatars, each user gets their own geometry file, so it is possible for everyone to have a unique avatar. Note that since they are downloaded from the universe avatar path, it will be up to you to put the files in place and make them available for download.

Each citizen will need their own file in the avatars path, and the filename must be in the format av0000000.zip, where the 0000000 is replaced with the user's citizen number. Thus citizen 12345 will have their avatar stored in av0012345.zip. The geometry for their avatar must go in this file. It may be either an RWX or a COB file.

INI File

Each personal avatar must have a configuration file to go with it. This is a simple text file which is used to define the various sequences the avatar will use. While it is called an "ini file", the text file itself can have any name. The important thing is that it is placed within a file named sq0000000.zip, where the "0000000" is replaced with the citizen number. So, citizen 12345 would need the ini to be placed within a file named sq0012345.zip. This file must be placed in the same directory as the avatar itself. This file will be downloaded at the same time as the avatar, and will tell the browser how to animate it.

The format for the ini file is as follows:

[options]
autowalk=0
autolook=0

[implicit]
wait=xxxxx
endwait=xxxxx
warp=xxxxx
idle=xxxxx
fly=xxxxx
swim=xxxxx
fall=xxxxx
hover=xxxxx
float=xxxxx
jump=xxxxx
run=xxxxx
walk=xxxxx

[explicit]
gesture1=turn,qturn
gesture2=xxxxx,xxxxxx
gesture3=xxxxx,xxxxxx

In the [explicit] section, each gesture on the list will become a gesture button in the user's browser. The line:

gesture1=Dance,qmaca

Means that the first gesture button will cause the user to perform the qmaca.seq animation, and the button will be labeled "Dance".