Why don bots collide with objects?
A. Bots don’t automatically collide with other objects in a world because collision detection in Active Worlds is the responsibility of the client, not the server. When a user collides with an object and stops, it is because their browser (i.e. a client) detected that there was an object nearby and performed the necessary calculations to determine that, given the size and dimensions of that object in three dimensional space, the user’s avatar has come into contact with it. For a bot to collide with objects, it too would have to perform the same analysis of its position compared to the other objects in the world, and stop if it decides that it has hit something. While “perfect” collision detection requires a precise knowledge of the physical structure of all objects in a world and is thus fairly complicated to implement, there are some simpler approximations of collision detection that a bot developer can use if avoiding object collision is desireable. For example, the bot could use the
