Sorry folks, I moved to a new host recently and managed to break the site. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I’ve figured out what I’ve done.
MS V-Chat Worlds Rediscovered
Sorry folks, I moved to a new host recently and managed to break the site. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I’ve figured out what I’ve done.
I got to thinking that, short of a real multi-user environment, it would add interest to have some of the original avatars in the worlds – they could even wander about. I’ve done a few experiments and it’s starting to look fairly close to the original: (apologies to JamesC for nicking his name, but I…
The V-Chat worlds all automatically play their background sound loops. These were included in the originals as song1.wav and often song2.wav. After trying a few options I settled on using howler.js to play these sounds, which has proven really easy to use and works across every platform I’ve tested it on. Today I added the…
Most of the V-Chat worlds remained the same between the different versions of V-Chat – the original MSN/v1.1, the v2.0beta and the final v2.0 release. However, a few of the worlds were changed between releases. Compass had a very minor visual change between v1.1 and v2.0beta, which replaced the Practice World billboard image on the…
After a couple of breakthroughs on converting to X3D, I have now published all of the Microsoft-released V-Chat worlds that I have. Rendering is as true to the originals as I have been able to achieve. It is particularly pleasing is when imperfections in the originals carry through to the conversions! There are still a…
This covers the last of the structures found in the world.wdb files, which I call VCLight, though until quite recently it was called VCMystery. I’m not entirely sure it’s about lighting, I just can’t think of anything else it might be. It has the following structure: b0 is either &H00, &H01, &H03 or &H04. b1…
In the previous post I described the overall structure of the .wdb file format, including the file header, the collision fence and the scene node hierarchy. This time I will go into the VCGeometry structure. The VCGeometry starts by defining a list of numPoints 3D points, held in the file as a series of VCPoint…
V-Chat worlds are held in a proprietary format that to my knowledge has never been publicly released. These are my notes on the .wdb file format, for anyone that might find them useful. I figured most of this out after many hours detective work with a hex editor, mapping the file out starting with obvious…
I wanted to preserve use of the original texture images with their vertically stacked animation frames, but also to have the animation work in a standalone x3d file that is inlined into the web page. V-Chat geometry is stored in world.wdb files which very usefully include the names of animated textures in the form AnimXXYY,…
Preview of Compass added, plenty of issues to address though: navigation, texture animation, geometry animation, rendering fidelity, links, portals and sound. Update: Navigation fixed – Viewpoint orientation had negative y value. Added Ctrl-drag for strafe and raise/lower. Trapped a potential divide by zero in the moveIt() function.