Important: If you are interested in using Active Worlds with 3D hardware acceleration, you are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Active Worlds 3.0. Version 3.0 has been completely redesigned to run natively on 3D hardware.

Active Worlds 2.2 uses version 2.1 of the RenderWare rendering library from Criterion Studios. A Direct3D driver is available for RenderWare 2.1. Using this driver with Active Worlds 2.2 is not officially supported by Activeworlds.com, Inc. but you are welcome to download the Direct3D driver and try it out for yourself!

At a minimum, this driver requires a Direct3D-compatible video card that supports both perspectively correct texture maps, and windowed (not full-screen) mode. Most new 3D cards today meet these minimum requirements.

If you would like to try the RenderWare Direct3D driver with Active Worlds 2.2 on your computer, first click here to download the driver.

Unzip the driver directly into the Active Worlds directory on your computer. Then, open the file aworld.ini for editing. Look through this file for a section that begins with

[performance]

below this section, add a new line that says:

direct3d=1

Save the file, and then start the Active Worlds Browser.

The Browser will attempt to initialize the Direct3D driver on startup. If this attempt fails, you will see a dialog box with the message "Active Worlds was unable to load the Direct3D rendering driver. Active Worlds will now attempt to load a different driver." This means RenderWare was unable to use the Direct3D driver on your video hardware. Please keep in mind that just because a video card claims to support Direct3D, this does not necessarily mean that it provides the hardware acceleration features which RenderWare requires to take full advantage of Direct3D.

Several users have reported better luck using the Direct3D driver after upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft's DirectX. If you are experiencing difficulty with the Direct3D driver, you might want to consider upgrading to DirectX 7.0. Also, you should always make sure that you have the latest and greatest driver for your video card installed. All video card manufacturers have their latest drivers available on their web sites.

If, after following these steps, you do not get an error message, then RenderWare was probably able to load the Direct3D driver successfully. However, it is possible that you may see disrupted or distorted effects in the 3D viewport as a result. Another possibility is that a crash may occur. If this happens to you, open up the aworld.ini file again and remove the "direct3d=1" line to disable Direct3D.