| |
Adobe Atmosphere (abbreviated Atmo) is a 3D computer graphics creation product originally developed by Attitude Software. In November 1999, Adobe Systems purchased the technology. Adobe released its last version of Atmosphere, version 1.0 build 216, in February 2004, then discontinued the software in December 2004. The product spent the majority of its lifetime in beta testing.
Atmosphere focused on explorable "worlds" (later officially called "environments"), which were linked together by "portals," analogous to the World Wide Web's hyperlinks. These portals were represented as spinning squares of red, green, and blue that revolved around each other and floated above the ground. Portals were indicative of the Atmosphere team's desire to mirror the functionality of Web pages. Although the world itself was described in the .aer (or .atmo) file, images and sounds were kept separately, usually in the GIF, WAV or MP3 format. Objects in worlds were scriptable using a modified version of JavaScript, allowing a more immersive environment, and worlds could be generated dynamically using PHP. Using JavaScript, a world author could link an object to a Web page, so that a user could, for example, launch a Web page by clicking on a billboard advertisement (Ctrl+Shift+Click in earlier versions). By version 1.0, Atmosphere also boasted support for Adobe Flash animations and Windows Media Player movies.
Atmosphere-based worlds consisted mainly of parametric primitives, such as floors, walls, and cones. These primitives could be painted a solid color, given an image-based texture, or made "subtractive". Invisible, "subtractive" primitives could be used to cut "holes" in other primitives, to build more complex shapes. Many worlds also contained animated polygon meshes made possible by Atmosphere's implementation as a subcomponent of Viewpoint Corporation's Viewpoint Media Player. However, Viewpoint stopped supporting the Atmosphere subcomponent some time before Atmosphere was discontinued.
Unlike the more centralized structure of Active Worlds, in which environments are primarily built within AlphaWorld, Atmosphere worlds were spread throughout the Internet, usually hosted on the author's own Web site as .aer files. (The .aer format was later used solely for building, once the binary .atmo format was created.) As with ActiveWorlds, the user navigated an avatar; in later builds, an option allowed the user to see his or her own avatar. An early quirk of Atmosphere displayed users whose avatars had not yet loaded as colorful, slanted cylinders, and announced the arrival of users with a "bug zapper" sound.
Whereas in ActiveWorlds it is only possible to communicate with users within a 200-meter radius, Atmosphere users could chat with all the users in the world. This was more appropriate for Atmosphere, considering the smaller sizes of most worlds. Technically, users could chat with anyone in the same YACP channel, a reference to the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol. The exception was when worlds would receive too many visitors, as was often the case at HomeWorld: worlds would "clone," creating duplicate channels for the same world, which would often cause confusion for users. Some world developers wrote scripts that limited communication to users within a certain distance, for greater realism.
A built-in Havok physics engine, detailed rendering, and dynamic lighting (with support for lighting effects like fog) also contributed to the realism of Atmosphere worlds. Many world authors wanted to create large worlds, in order to build more realistic cities, for example, but such worlds would often take an excessive amount of time to load in the visitor's web browser, especially if the visitor was using a slower dial-up connection. To alleviate this issue, Atmosphere supported loading sections of the world – subworlds or models – as they became needed; a city could now be loaded block by block, rather than all at once. One of Atmosphere's problems, however, was excessive memory usage, which was exacerbated by the use of advanced features such as embedded models and Flash movies in many worlds.
Atmosphere's chat console used the Windows-1252 character encoding. |
