User:The Courier/FAQ

Whether you are being welcomed to Virtual Paradise, or you are someone who wants to simply learn more of the inner workings of VP, this is the article for you! If you are unable to find the answer to your question, please join our Discord server for support!

General

What is Virtual Paradise?

Virtual Paradise is an custom-made, online sandbox platform that is heavily inspired by virtual worlds from the 1990s & early 2000s. There is no real objective in VP unlike most games, and can be similarly also compared to something like Minecraft creative mode. There are a series of online servers called worlds that anyone can visit and mostly build within, although most users will gravitate towards Blizzard or VP-Build to create content in.

Who develops VP?

Virtual Paradise is maintained and developed by Edwin as a hobby project during his spare-time. He is the benevolent dictator-for-life of the VP project.

Is this an AW clone?

Virtual Paradise takes heavy inspiration from Active Worlds in particular as VP began development during the hey-day of Active World's prominence as the premier virtual world during the early 2000s. Most of the existing community came from Active Worlds or an inspired server using AW software, so the culture within the general community can be somewhat familiar to a veteran who primarily used AW. VP however, does not use any source code from AW and is a completely homebrew sandbox platform. However, VP does have a lot of very similar building functions that make it mostly compatible with AW-style content creation, as well as a similar user interface.

Controls

How do I move around?

Virtual Paradise uses both WASD & arrow keys for movement.

• W/Up Arrow is used to move forward, S/Down Arrow is used to move backward.
• Left/Right Arrows is used to move left or right, but A/D are used to strafe left & right.
• Page Up/Page Down is used to look up & down, flying/hovering can be done by using the + & - keys.
• Shift can be used to go through objects and terrain.
• Holding CTRL while using arrow keys can be used to run/move faster.

How do I manipulate objects?

In order to manipulate the 3D environment, simply right click an object or your avatar and you will be shown the Object Properties box which lists all the basic information of an object including its owner & time it was last touched. Use the insert key followed by the arrow pad & +/- buttons to move an object around as you would normally move yourself around. If you have a mouse wheel, you can use that to rotate an object around. To leave the building environment, simply click anywhere on the 3D screen or close out of Object Properties. In order to change an object to something else, you must have the name of the object file on hand, of which there is a wide selection of content at Builder's Supply Content Yard (type !j bscy into VP chat if you are in Blizzard world).

We will have videos that demonstrate how to actually build something in a future update of the FAQ page, these instructions are mainly meant to be a serviceable introduction to the Object Properties interface & object manipulation.