T w e n t y S i d e d
Recently someone sent me a link to this video, where the author takes us on a tour through my old stomping grounds: Active Worlds: The 27-Year-Old Virtual World You Haven’t Heard Of
Link (YouTube) |
What a blast from the past. This software was my life for about 16 years, from 1994 to ~2011-ish.I don’t remember what the end date was. For the last 6 months I was working part-time on again / off again. So my job sort of fizzled out rather than ending abruptly. I was pretty checked out by the time it was over, much more concerned with this website and the work I was doing at the Escapist. In the 90s I did a little of everything: I made 3d models, created texture maps, built environments, provided tech support, and authored tools. I even maintained the website for a bit. Then in 2001 I was moved to the programming staff and I began working on the software itself.
I made some of the stuff you’ll see in this video. At the 1:20 mark, the author jumps to Metatropolis. That was my baby. Like Facebook’s Metaverse, I named the place after the virtual world in Neal Stephenson‘s book Snow Crash. In my defense, the book was a lot more relevant in 1997 than it is today. I realize the Metaverse is a bit cringe and out-of-touch today, but I made Metatropolis in 1997 when this stuff was still sort of hip and forward-looking. I talked about some of the Metatropolis rendering tricks back in 2009 during my procgen city project.
At 1:44, you can see a streetlamp on a corner. Today, that would be easy to create. You just make a lamp and stick a light source under it. But real-time lighting and shadows were not feasible on the consumer hardware of 1997, so I had to fake the light. That pool of light on the ground is a custom texture with a hand-drawn shadow. Ridiculous. Most kids in 2022 would look at this and see how primitive it all looks, but in 1997 it looked like I’d pulled off some Carmack-level sorcery and jumped ahead a couple of graphics generations. But no. It was all smoke and mirrors. The illusion was broken the moment you placed another object under the light and saw it didn’t cast any sort of shadow.
Let me end this with a comment I left on the video:
I was a developer on AW from 1994 to 2010. I know from the outside it felt like the company had no plan. Internally, it was because most of our income came from corporate clients. Those outrageously priced universe servers? Lots of companies would buy those, and then pay us to make content for them. They wanted a platform for training, remote meetings, distance learning, etc.
Those corporate clients kept the lights on for years, but they also took a ton of our time. We had to take those jobs to pay the bills, but those jobs also greatly slowed down our progress on the software.
Thanks for such an in-depth video. It was great to see those garish old polygons again.
This thing was a big part of my career. It looks old and janky now, but I’m still happy I got to be a part of it. This was a fun way to spend my 20s and 30s.
Footnotes:
[1] I don’t remember what the end date was. For the last 6 months I was working part-time on again / off again. So my job sort of fizzled out rather than ending abruptly. I was pretty checked out by the time it was over, much more concerned with this website and the work I was doing at the Escapist.
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Typolice:
Should be “procgen”.
I haven’t watched the video yet, because things are a bit too hectic right now, but later today I definitely will!
One of my favourite pieces of content you’ve done is Crash Dot Com, and I frequently reread it. So I’ll be very interested in seeing this!
Hi Shamus,
I don’t think you and I ever had the pleasure of properly meeting, but as someone who has been on both sides of the ActiveWorlds debate, both as a citizen and as a contractor for AWI, I am always fascinated by the stories you’ve shared about your time with them. I’ve followed your blog for decades, but I don’t think I’ve commented until now.
COFMeta is one of my favorite AWI worlds and, to me, it always seemed like the one that was closest to Neal Stephenson’s interpretation. However, I didn’t know (or didn’t remember) that you were behind its creation, design, and development. I spent a lot of my earlier years in COFMeta and I still have some builds littered around. There was even an initiative in 2007 or so to update COFMeta’s ground zero and redesign it to use 4.1-era technologies. If I come across any remaining photos, or even a location, I’ll follow up. So, I guess, thank you, for COFMeta. It seems like a trivial thing to thank someone for, but you were indirectly responsible for a few of my best memories from ActiveWorlds, so thank you.
All the best,
Mark
That’s cool and all but your design for the Lizard was kinda lame in your first Spider-Man movie.
Was it your idea to cast Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker or was that decided by the higher-ups at Sony?
This was a great video – thanks for sharing. It deserves a lot more views than it’s gotten.
Somehow, I never heard of AW until reading your blog, and too long after it was the right place for me to be. I had heard of Second Life, but never tried it, either. I spent more time in text-based games and commercial pre-packaged worlds and never made it into these kinds of spaces.
Watching this video is still a huge nostalgia hit – so much of the content feels like the internet I grew up with – the building showcases the same cultural spirit of the websites, forums, and user generated game maps of the time, but all squashed into a single(ish) and interactive video-based world.
It’s uncanny how many small bits of the video – phrases, tone, or sentence structure on the signs, images used, or even the general structure design just trigger long lost memories and memories of feelings.
I agree with the narrator, this (like so much of the early internet) needs to be preserved and maintained.
Have you considered asking The Zucc for a job? You certainly have the experience building the sort of thing he’s into these days.
I love this so much. It’s an illusion, for sure, but an extremely effective one. Consider that games pull this sort of trick all the time, and they work very well until the player inevitably breaks the illusion. It’s the sort of thing that’s not possible to maintain for long because there’s always going to be someone who tests it, but the way you manage to create the illusion is still quite impressive.
Getting a job with Facebook sounds like the kind of thing that would cause Shamus’ blood pressure to spike into the quadruple (or higher) digits.
Right before the blood exited his body in a brief fountain.
That will just make it easier for them to turn him into a robot! And he can join Zucc in his quest to exterminate the human scum!
Is Snow Crash really that dated?
I’ll admit I haven’t read it myself quite yet, but it’s been on my ‘to read’ list for years. And some of the concepts I’ve heard from it like the dangers of memes, digital spaces created by the public, and such seem more relevant than ever.
Again, haven’t read it yet, but the only dated-dated thing I’ve heard, is the focus on skate culture as this next great punk wave that just didn’t really happen in our world.
Snow Crash holds up really well and hasn’t felt dated on recent readings. A lot/most of the tech described is still future-tech, although not as far-future as when the book was published 30 years ago in 1992. Re-reading it 30 years later, a lot of the ideas feel remarkably prescient – I have no idea how many of the ideas were Neal Stephenson’s own creations, vs. him collecting other peoples’ ideas, but he managed to compile them all into a very fun read that’s got a lot of “wow, he nailed that” moments.
The audiobook is a great version of the story, too.
A good amount of this stuff is just that people thought the book was extremely cool and purposefully created/used things from it. As an example, we have ‘avatars’ on forums and such because people copied the terminology from his book.
The high-tech weapon that refuses to to fire until it’s allowed to download the latest update would fit right in nowadays…
Snow Crash is certainly less dated than it could be. It’s at least partially a satire of the genre it inhabits, and a lot of the dystopia is played for comedy rather than “oh no, this is the horrible future which inevitably awaits us!”
Snow Crash is simultaneously the dumbest nerd shit and a parody of the dumbest nerd shit, and as such it ages pretty well because it knows that it’s ridiculous.
There’s a kind of an uncanny valley in semi-realistic near future SF from a few decades ago, where things are close enough to real life that we really notice the things that are ‘wrong’. (Bladerunner, for example, is more wrong, but it feels exotic enough that it doesn’t matter.)
Snow Crash doesn’t specify a year, but it appears to be set in the 2010s or so. Anything super-futuristic in it looks pretty silly now. (It looked pretty silly then, too, and the author knew it.)
“Snow Crash” had the most realistic view of VR/Metaverse to date – Stephenson clearly knew more about computers than most cyberpunk authors either before or after him. I’ve read it maybe 10 years ago and to me it didn’t seem dated at all, and the line about TRUE hackers/programmers doing things in text editors, not in fancy VR avatars set me giggling and praising the author.
I mean, almost no other writer is willing to admit that doing actual programming/hacking in VR is most likely a stupid idea. They either just go for the “rule of cool” and omit any technical details or contrive some stupid crap about “seeing code with all your senses”. And yes, you may guess from the last sentence that I dislike early Gibson very much (even though he had his reasons for going all voodoo on computer science, I still think his reasons were stupid and the result is uninteresting – “Shockwave Rider” is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson ever wrote, and it came out before there was cyberpunk).
The whole genre is dated. It asks “what if X?” and goes in interesting directions – but in the real world, X actually happened and it’s somehow both boring and horrible.
This reminds me of that meme showing all the people living in absolute squalor and poverty through the ages, then the person in 2022 with a nice house, car, and literally all the information that ever existed at his fingertips saying “This is the worst”.
Despite the primitiveness I think Metatropolis has a pretty solid art style. Maybe it’d be a nice look for a retro styled imsim or something. Boomer shooters were making a return and Deus Ex might be returning from the grave, so why not, right?
I thought that, too. It actually reminded me of the city from Ion Fury, except with less verticality.
Strasz mentions “Circle of Fire” quite a bit. Did you ever interact with them Shamus?
Here is how it worked:
Rick Noll ran CoF. He hired me to help him make stuff as a contractor for Activeworlds, back when it was owned by Worlds Inc. Worlds Inc tanked, and sold Activeworlds to CoF. Rick then hired most of the Activeworlds devs. So I was arguably employee #1 at CoF?
I’m impressed you used to work for Rick Roll, he was famous a few years ago. Hopefully he never gave you up or let you down.
This comment section is gold.
That was a really cool video. While I love your unique perspective on digital worlds and the tech industry in the ’90s, you were at the bleeding edge of developing that technology. So it was interesting to see it from the point of view of a normal user. And a lot of the things he said echo the way I experienced the Internet from those days, and how those places don’t exist anymore.
But that reminds me – I know you’re currently busy with… life… but do you ever plan on writing about the MetaVerse? Because your experience at ActiveWorlds means you could offer a very unique perspective…
I think it’s sensible to defer writing about the metaverse until there actually is one. There’s only so many ways you can point out how lame something like Decentraland is before you start repeating yourself. The rest of the metaverse currently boils down to, “this would be cool if Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t involved”.
Wow, I’ve heard you mention Active Worlds a quite a few times but never realized I am now doing your exact same job. Only difference is my company uses the Hubs platform, but I still make the models, do the programming, hack the hell out of everything, etc.
This blog got me into programming so it’s weird coming full circle lol.
When I read your old blog posts, I would never have thought that this is still running! How about a guided tour for patrons?
I remember when City of Heroes released Arenas (for PvP) in 2005. They were horribly overoptimistic game design. But the modeling had these impressively reflective floors. That weren’t actually reflective at all, just an identical building upside-down through a clear floor.
I admire these tricks to get around processing limits. It can also lead to terrible practices for coding, but there’s a cleverness to it that you don’t see when everything can be brute forced.
Well, I’d argue the modern methods aren’t all brute-force, and can be even more elegant than duplicating geometry. Screen Space reflections, for example, requires very little overhead. The modern way of doing a reflection like in CoH would be a reflection plane, which basically just renders the scene already in memory from a different angle instead of duplicating all the geometry. I can’t say if it’s more or less resource intensive, but my intuition says it’s more efficient than doubling the building geometry.
Screen space reflections are pretty heavy on fill rate while planar reflections are heavier on geometry. That sounds like a big win, but geometry isn’t anywhere near as expensive as it used to be. You also need a bunch of fallbacks for SSR to avoid the problems of reflections disappearing at the edge of the viewport (because the reflected rays go out of the visible area) so you’re going to want to be rendering some cube maps as well.
On the other hand there are some major advantages for SSR; I implemented them in a procgen project because I was doing flowing water/erosion simulation and therefore there simply wasn’t a single sensible plane to pick for planar reflections.
This is so cool. Shamus any chance that you would show us around the old place on a stream and/or a community meetup?
I played all the way through Broken Reality but it wasn’t until this video that I realized it was about Activeworlds. Sure, BR is also generally about Geocities and early social media and other late 90s to early 00s internet culture. But there’s so many worlds in that video that clearly correspond directly to specific levels in BR. And what happens in BR directly mirrors what happened to Activeworlds.
I probably didn’t figure it out sooner because I’ve never used Activeworlds myself.
YouTube helpfully “suggested” I watch the above video. Clever YouTube. I worked as an artist at AW from 2000-2014, almost 15 years. And from there I saw your comment, Shamus, and couldn’t help but track you down. I had an old friend from AW recently pop up and tell me about Unreal 5. Needless to say, it blows my mind. All the tricks and hacks I had to learn to make content that could run smoothly and look great are kind of done away with. There are no limits anymore to what can be created. It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park, where the archeologists just saw real dinosaurs and comment they might be out of a job. “Don’t you mean, ‘extinct’?”
But this video has so much nostalgia because we were there at the beginning of the journey, both employees and users, when 3D content was all starting on the internet. My word, this was at the time of dial-up internet. It was like, “What can we do with this? How can we do it better? How can we stretch the limits?” And boy, did everyone bring something to that table. It was exhilarating and fun and everywhere you turned someone was doing something that got everyone excited about new possibilities. Shamus, you really were a creative genius. Your mind could deconstruct and put things back together in amazing ways.
Activeworlds was one of the few places that ripped away our identities in the real world and let us explore whatever we wanted to be, all while being next to people who wanted to do the exact same thing. Communities, events, contests, games, cultures, clubs, history, art, and tech….all sprang up around this idea of “What can we do? What can we build?”, in a dizzying, drama-inducing whirlwind.
I don’t know if one book could ever contain the story of that era. It was bigger than all of us. And watching that video, I realize a lot of what I did (especially the things I’m most proud of) never made it to the general public. That makes the story even bigger than most realize. But I smile, and remember, and am glad I was a part of it. To have something stretch who you are and your understanding of things as greatly as that environment did was truly something special. And unlike almost everything else online from that era, it is still there. Literally a walk down memory lane. It was an adventure I was glad I took.
I watch documentaries on Disney or Coney Island or any number of other fun things that shaped people’s entertainment and lives “back in the day”. Maybe one day our documentary will come. This video did a great job of showing some of the successes and downfalls we had along the way. Nice job, Strasz.
STACEE!
Wow. It is so good to hear from you. I wanted to look you up after watching the above video, and I had no idea how to find you. I thought about you and Mike a lot while watching that video.
And yeah, you made a ton of brilliant stuff that the general public never saw. Alas.