SW City

SW City is a multiple award-winning virtual city that exists within the Active Worlds 3D browser. A predecessor of Second Life, Active Worlds was the first virtual reality software to popularize the notion of virtual worlds back in 1995. Whereas Second Life’s grid is comparable in size to San Francisco, Active Worlds’ Alphaworld, where SW City is located, is 4.4% larger than the state of California.

SW City itself spans about 23 square miles, or 60 square kilometers. That likely makes it the largest team-developed virtual reality environment in the world. If it was moved into the Second Life grid as a series of private islands, it would take up 916 regions (each .065536 km²), costing between $229,750 and $916,000 in one-time setup fees, and somewhere between $824,400 and $3,252,640 in monthly fees per year to maintain, depending on the distribution of full, homestead, and openspace regions the city would require. Since most of SW City’s land is developed, our costs would be closer to the annual 3.2 million dollar mark. That’s about a million dollars more than the income of the average new Lamborghini buyer!

But because it is in Active Worlds, we get to build for free, minus the cost of citizenship.

My Involvement With SW City
I met SW Comit on the Nintendo.com forums way back in 1997 when we basically came up with the concept of Super Smash Brothers together. He invited me to play a game called S.C.A.R.A.B. as part of his new guild the Scarab Warriors. We did that for awhile, and then I was invited to build in an early virtual city in 1998. In August of 1999 I returned and started building in SW Comit’s new town of SW City, which he had founded that March.

I began to build a replica of the N64 game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and was nearly finished with the Castle Town area of the game when I joined the staff of SW City a year later. The group of friends I have met since then have become very close, to the point where most of us try to meet together each year for a couple of days in person–our own little mini-convention.

SW City Interactive
SW City Interactive is a whimsical urban fantasy adventure MMORPG built within SW City and the Active Worlds universe. Think of it as a PHP MMO with a nice graphical layer built on top of it. I serve as a beta tester and general idea man for the game. It is constantly being developed, and anyone can play for free. Visit the Interactive website to learn how.

Visiting SW City
If you’re going to visit SW City (and I strongly recommend that you visit at least once), then I suggest you do several things. First, download and install the Active Worlds Browser. Second, download and install the Alphaworld Enhanced graphical enhancement pack. You’ll thank me later. All of the screenshots and media on this website utilize this mod. Thirdly, open Active Worlds and then click on this link. If Windows asks you what program it needs to open it, browse to the Active Worlds installation folder and select aworld.exe. It will then teleport you to SW City’s town square, the central hub of SW City and SW City Interactive. (If for some reason this doesn’t work, teleport manually to the World: AW, and Coordinates: 2217s 3610e)

Media

I created this video in 2005*. Many of the areas shown here have since been graphically updated, and there are many newer builds whose look surpasses those shown here. Still, this should give you a good overview of SW City.

This video, recorded in 2007, travels through a good portion of SW City’s main island, showing you the types of environments we’ve created.

*The calculation for the 130 square kilometers in this video is in error. I’m not sure where I got that figure since I just redid the calculation for this page and it came to a little under half of that area.