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Published:	December 6, 2009
Category:	3
Author:	Mark Randall
Editor:	Mark Randall
Modified:	December 6, 2009

A summary of the drama in the Activeworlds Universe and Forums for Dec 6th, 2009.

Activeworlds 5.0 Launch

The Activeworlds 5.0 browser finally came to launch on the first of the month with little specific fanfare as the only major addition - the new gateway - had already been released the previous week.

The launch went reasonably okay with few problems upgrading, however a slew of Unicode related bugs immediately hit the browser in addition to instant crashes when right clicking particles, global jump systems were also floored as teleporting behaviour changed rending most SDK teleport mechanisms offline.

Most of these have now been fixed in the latest update.

Yearly Email Freebies

This year again each expired user has been granted a free one month citizenship extension (to expire on January 2nd) to coincide with the launch of Activeworlds 5.0. This has caused the universe count to spike significantly, registering over 200 users late on Saturday night.

Christmas Specials

Activeworlds, Inc has announced a fairly weak set of Christmas Special offers for 2009 including a "Gift Citizenship" for $29.95 - which only allows an existing citizenship to buy a brand new citizenship for someone else.

Also offered was a more respectable P30/5 with VoIP and a free citizenship for the cost of $69.95 - although no hosting is included.

There are no offers for existing citizens to renew this year.

AWTeen Christmas

AWTeen has now switched into Christmas mode with a ground zero renovation based on an old winter design and a large Christmas Tree right in the middle.

If you would like to leave a gift for another user please telegram Matthew with the name of the person you wish to leave it to plus an optional message to be tagged on to it.

In other AWTeen related news; Brock would like to remind everyone that it is "AWTeen" not "awteen", "AWteen" or "AwTeen". He clearly has too much time on his hands.

Nina Taru has also returned to being a full time Caretaker after her moving house to Florida. Frosta remains out of action while she recovers from illness. GSK would like to see all of the CTs fired and be given the rights himself. I think not.

Events and Partys

Be sure to check our the Events Calendar for some great upcoming events including the 2nd Winter Building Competition starting in a few days time, and also the Peacekeeper and AWSchool Christmas Partys.

Winter: http://www.awportals.com/events/view.php?e=17

AWSchool: http://www.awportals.com/events/view.php?e=118

Peacekeepers: http://www.awportals.com/events/view.php?e=120

Yellow World Conference

Digigurl would like the world to know that she is a recluse. However she would also like people to know that on the 18th of December Yellow world will be having a world conference on Voice Over IP in an attempt to rectify this.

You can find out more about it at http://forums.activeworlds.com/showthread.php?p=118079

Unicode

Dr. Squailboont has found a pretty informative article on Unicode and specifically UTF-8 that will be of benefit to SDK programmers looking to ensure their applications are compatible with the new codebase.

The article details UTF-8 rather than UTF-16 but should still be informative for users that do not wish to force their applications to use wchar_t.

Read it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

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