This page should have more in it, seeing as I've been spending enough time
in VZones (and I utterly adored Habitat), but really I've put this here
hastily because of a conversation in the
VZones-Delphi Forums and some
screenshots that could be useful. Someday I'll have plug-ins here, especially
for games that I think are lacking from VZones (like Chess).
Yes, I used to work for Avaterra. I kept it a secret because Avaterra employees tend to get harassed inworld (like my friend, Artist Raytracer, can tell you). That stopped in April of 2000 because the Canadian division fell apart. Internal politics ripped both the Canadian and Californian divisions to shreds. I hear the staff has changed almost entirely, with the California staff replaced by volunteers and VZones veterans. I wish them the best.
Thank goodness that the VZones client software authors included DDE (a way for windows programs to converse behind-the-scenes), and kept it in when they made client 3.0. I use Leadman's plugins for parking (to get my 500 tokens!) and for recording conversations like town meetings... not to mention their use for Bingo Games and Acromania. Eventually I'd like to write a Chess plugin...
There's been some concern about visibility with VZones -- a feature that was present in version 2.4 was no longer availible in version 3.0, to increase the size of the picture-viewing area. After arguing for a while about how larger display trades off illegible fonts, someone finally pounded into my head that a user might switch frequently between large and small mode to alternately view the picture and the text. D'oh!
hj.com has some software for magnifying your desktop, for the low-low price of $295. Jerks. I went looking elsewhere and found a Polish author who made an ActiveX control called 'Lupa' for magnifying images, and created a free demo that does a bang-up job.
For all the advertising done in VZConnections (people who walk in, shout what they're selling, and walk out), and all the shoppers raring to go ("N E Shops Open?" repeated over and over at the apartments), I think there should be an index somewhere of shops and when they're open. I'd do it myself if (or when) I have the time.
Ahh, the good old days of text-adventure games where you drew a grid of boxes with lines between them so you wouldn't get lost in the Great Underground Empire (G.U.E. in Zork). Some users have made excellent maps so you don't get lost in Dreamscape or VZConnections. I have a soft spot for maps, houseplans, and the like.
Yeah yeah, I've heard about the unglue patch, the stealing patch, and such. The client authors used an embedded scriping language in the client, and they were thoughtful enough to leave the scripts as plain text for people to edit and use. Near as I can tell, all the security is on the server-side, so there aught *not* be such a thing as an unglue patch, but creative people can tweak or improve the client's interface (like the ol' Paint Patch, and the shopkeeper patch I've seen around).
No, I'm not going to tell you how to muck with it. If you're smart, you'll reverse-engineer it yourself and figure it out. I've already given you a hint. Beware of people offering a patch, because the scriping language *is* powerful enough to make net connections that could be used for trojans. I also feel kinda guilty, because I can just imagine the tech support calls Avaterra will get from people using hacked clients, who will (of course) deny that they hacked their clients.
I'm also tinkering with skinning the VZones client (aka changing the 'chrome') Bill the Galactic Hero has an applicaton that sits overtop the buttons to substitute different looking buttons -- useful for less mouseclicks, but there's software that changes MS-Windows software to have different bitmap images in them (sorry, I didn't find a Macintosh version).
Sure, why the heck not.
