Active Worlds 3.1 Beta Coming In December

Hot on the heels of 3.0, the Active Worlds Development Team is now hard at work on Active Worlds 3.1, currently scheduled for a beta release in early December. While we can't tell you all of the details of 3.1 yet, we can give you a peek at some of the features currently being worked on:

• support for DirectSound (including MP3 support!)
• new action commands for creating spinning and moving objects
• multiple light sources
• new world server which can host multiple worlds in a single process
• new Windows GUI for the world server

There's An Upgrade for 2.2 Available Now!

Version 2.2 of Active Worlds was originally released in July, 1999. Since then, version 3.0 has become available with many new features, including support for 3D accelerated video cards. All users are strongly encouraged to consider upgrading to 3.0 to take advantage of the new functionality.

However, version 3.0 has some new system requirements and we recognize that not all of our users meet these requirements. For those users we have provided an upgrade to version 2.2 (build 306) with the following enhancements:

• High resolution textures - this new version of 2.2 supports higher resolution (256 x 256) textures, something that was previously only available in our "high res" CD-ROM product.
  
  
• Support for the new "texture" command - the new texture command, originally introduced in Active Worlds 3.0, will work with this new version of 2.2 as well.
  
  
• Support for the new "mask" argument for the "animate" command - Active Worlds 3.0 added a required "mask" argument to texture animations that use masked textures. This new version of 2.2 recognizes the "mask" argument as well and will correctly process animations that use the mask argument.
  
  
• Better foreign language support - this version should work better on computers with "multi-byte" character sets such as Chinese.
  
  
• Many small bug fixes

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