Exploring DeltaWorlds' AlphaWorld: the ActiveWorlds Preservation Project

Brief Summary of DeltaWorlds

UCGPVW structure

DeltaWorlds is an early User-Created General Purpose Virtual World (or UCGPVW for short). “User created”, means all assets in the virtual world are user created. “General Purpose”, means the software itself has no inherent game mechanism. The purpose of participating is simply social interaction and world building, allowing the users to create whatever they want to live and interact in. Outside of a very small number of MMORPG style worlds, there is no explicit objective to participating in a particular virtual world within DeltaWorlds. Users assign their own meaning to participating in most of the virtual worlds, and are only bound socially to treating each other with basic courtesy. There are no default enemies or monsters, no quests in most worlds.

DeltaWorlds’ reason for existence

DeltaWorlds is a preservation project or, “fork,” (however you want to view it) of the first 3D UCGPVW called ActiveWorlds. ActiveWorlds was previously called AlphaWorld and was launched on June 28th 1995 by Worlds, Inc.

During 1997 AlphaWorld was renamed ActiveWorlds (at activeworlds.com). AlphaWorld remained one of hundreds of different worlds within ActiveWorlds. ActiveWorlds eventually allowed users to purchase their own access to the proprietary ActiveWorlds server software to host their own “universe”, separate from ActiveWorlds. Someone ended up doing that, who eventually named their universe “DeltaWorlds”. DeltaWorlds has since become a place to replicate mid-1990s AlphaWorld and other early ActiveWorlds worlds for long-term preservation.

The browser for DeltaWorlds itself is an old, slightly modified ActiveWorlds client, dating back possibly at least 10 years before today. DeltaWorlds policy and software versions also serve to resolve numerous complaints about how ActiveWorlds degraded over time. Unlike ActiveWorlds, DeltaWorlds is free to become a citizen and it may also avoid arbitrary bans/locks in brand name ActiveWorlds described by the ActiveWorlds historian, “Eep”. Using DeltaWorlds may also help avoid webcam/mic manipulation and other abuses from more modern ActiveWorlds clients according to DeltaWorlds owner Xandrah Tompkinson.

The largest preservation project for DeltaWorlds is preserving and maintaining the AlphaWorld world from ActiveWorlds, still one of the largest Virtual Worlds in existence.

To get a sense of what DeltaWorlds and AlphaWorld is like, it’s efficient to watch it in action. Below is a video of me exploring and narrating AlphaWorld within Deltaworlds as a new citizen.

AlphaWorld (Via DeltaWorlds) Video Exploration - 07/09/26

How to Explore Deltaworlds’ AlphaWorld

AlphaWorld’s grid which serves as its building “floor” is a square “flat world” divided evenly into geographical squares called, “cells”. Each cell is meant to be the equivalent of 10 meters in meatspace. There are 32,750 cells in each cardinal direction to build on in AlphaWorld for a total of 4,290,250,000 cells in AlphaWorld.

Users of AlphaWorld are not meant to build outside this grid but techniques have been found to build outside this grid in the past regardless. Users can build both on top and beneath (underground) this grid floor. Brent Ryan wrote in the Journal of Urban Design that it would take 40 hours of walking to traverse from the center of the world to an edge using the virtual avatar you navigate with.

To compensate slow walking speed, the game allows you to fly far above the grid and buildings or even teleport directly to a coordinate of your choice instantly.

Like most UCGPVW’s with an established world center, areas outside the center of AlphaWorld become less organized the farther you venture out. Unless you have been informed by someone of a coordinate within the world, navigation primarily involves finding “warps”, or physical vertical planes you can walk through which transport you to the area labeled on a sign above the vertical plane. As these warps are placed haphazardly throughout AlphaWorld, navigation through the world is unpredictable. From a user perspective, you find yourself arriving at what I call “islands” of cityscape, defined by a seemingly infinite land surrounding rather than water. These land buffers between “islands” are most often too large to walk between them, rendering you stranded in any particular “island”, unless you teleport out through a warp, use a reserved coordinate, or simply restart your journey at spawn.

AlphaWorld’s Incentive structure

Unlike modern 2D UCGPVWs like Manyland, Heartlands, and Tilemap Town, the incentive to build in AlphaWorld is land scarcity coupled with permanent land property rights.

In DeltaWorlds, once a plot of land is claimed by building (anything) on it, it is forever that person’s land. AlphaWorld users are incentivized to claim as much land as possible using attractive and memorable coordinate axes. Bots have claimed thousands of land cells that otherwise wouldn’t be claimed just for vast ownership rights to be held by the various bot owners.

Historical incentives of claiming virtual land

When any sequence of computer bytes can be easily replicated and hosted elsewhere, any incentive to “claim” virtual land seems absurd at first. But that hasn’t stopped people from assigning meatspace value structures on ephemeral digital property consistently across decades. Early online virtual billboards were similar to the land scarcity incentive in AlphaWorld. With early virtual billboards, you would claim a limited number of pixels within the billboard, and then they were yours forever in a finite grid of pixels. This was most often done to advertise meatspace products. Early bulletin board pixel claimers and virtual world claimers in UCGPVWs see value in otherwise ephemeral sequences by the associated thrill, novelty, power, social capital, popularity of the associated URL, and/or advertising potential of claiming digital land. AlphaWorld itself has plenty of bulletin boards within it. It even has permanent virtual malls dedicated to selling (now mostly defunct) meatspace products.

AlphaWorld: the land of permanently unfinished and abandoned property

The lack of sharing gives AlphaWorld its overall dilapidated urban feel. Users can’t restructure long-abandoned property with any ease. The only solution is to contact the admin for all of DeltaWorlds or ActiveWorlds, and hope they help out with repairs. Unfortunately, there are too few staff to manually fix the thousands of previously hotlinked broken images and wav files. Therefore, AlphaWorld will likely forever remain a vast array of abandoned and unfinished buildings.

Other worlds in DeltaWorlds

While exploring DeltaWorlds, I took a look at its other “worlds”, separate from AlphaWorld. In theory, because the game lets anyone create a world, users have the ability to craft highly personalized experiences. There are a few small worlds like this that are only about the size of the building and showcase the builder’s unique artistic vision.

Software Performance

The client software runs fairly smoothly on just about any computer with an Intel CPU and at least integrated graphics going back at least 8 years. I expected it to be a bit faster than I encountered on my 2018-era laptop, considering it uses a 3D engine dating back more than 22 years prior to 2018. However, given the client copyright for DeltaWorlds suggests updates around the mid-2010s it’s possible whatever client they are using has 3D performance upgrades from around that time. DeltaWorlds, and even the AlphaWorld within it, is currently impractical to run on particularly primitive machines like the original 1990s machines the game was originally designed for.

Future

I think DeltaWorlds’ main distinguishing feature is its existing primitiveness. And that’s not a bad thing. The graphics engine and virtual object building rules seem to enforce a ceiling on how advanced the 3D objects are, reducing heterogeneity in 3D object complexity. Extreme heterogeneity in 3D object complexity makes games like Second Life sometimes a headache to look at. In one area you may see an avatar with thousands of triangles standing next to a building made of a few simple planes. This looks somehow more unnatural and jarring than a sea of more uniformly primitive 1990s 3D graphics. Additionally, newer UCGPVW’s allowing users to create 3D objects that are too complex leads to poorly aligned vertices, graphics that feel too “busy”, and poor game performance.

The more uniform 3D simplicity of DeltaWorlds is partially enforced by each world requiring users to pick from a pre-established “lot” of objects approved by the world owner. This can, at least in theory, allow for very efficient memory usage. I hope DeltaWorlds retains its computer hardware efficiency. In fact, it might be best to optimize that as far as possible, to maximize the game’s main draw and benefit.