Assorted Pictures:

There Magic

And now for a little bit of There Magic:

There are two things which are absolutely forbidden in There:

1. You must never ever ride your buggy on the Egyptian Pyramids.

2. If you are female, you must never run around without a shirt on.

So, I only do these things when no one is looking!

(Yes, that picture is a completely un-doctored screen shot of There.)

So how do you do these bits of magic? I'll give you the specifics first and then the general tools to do other bits of magic.

Q: How do you ride a buggy on the Egyptian Pyramids?

A: You can't of course. Vehicles are not permitted, but that doesn't mean you can't drop one from the sky!  They took away the easy method, but the hard way is actually kind of fun. 

1. First you need to get to the north edge of the island where vehicles are allowed. If you do not have a teleport link to it, you may have to go there the long way. You cant get there from the Egyptian waypoint, so the only way I know is to start from Caldera and go north till you find Egypt, then go to the far side of the ocean. Make it a favorite, because you probably do not want to go out this far again.

2. Put on a hoverpack and climb straight up. You need to go up at least 400 there meters. To get your height, open a browser to http://webapps.prod.there.com/places/whereami and look at the Z value, it should be above 6000400 before you can safely go forward.

3. Do an overhead view and steer your hoverpack over the place you want to drop your buggy.

4. Drop the buggy, if it lands in a bad spot just retrieve, move and try again. Once you drop it successfully where you want it to go, hop off your hoverpack and follow the buggy. 

5. When the buggy wanders into a no vehicle zone like this, the only interactions possible are "Ride Shotgun" and "Retrieve" (Warning! do not use a borrowed buggy or borrowed hoverpack for this trick as you will not be able to pick them up). 

With some practice and luck, anything is possible:

Q: OK, Stop right there, how did you get a buggy into the Egyptian Tomb?

A: Basically it requires some precise hoverpack flying using either a GPS compass or a lot of whereami commands. A brief history is in order first. Back in the days of Beta this could not be done, there was an impenetrable force field blocking access to the Tomb as well as the area in front including the Sphynx. Well people found ways to take advantage of this force field. First, it was easy to build a sky pad over Egypt, second there were holes in the barrier you could crawl through. These holes demonstrated that the vast tomb is not in the small tomb room at all, but is actually hovering above all invisible like.

That changed with V1. They got rid of the force field above as people quickly found out when they went to their pads and holes and ended up in the courtyard instead. That is how I dropped a buggy on the Sphinx. But, I quickly noticed that the tomb was still there all cloaked in the exact same position. So I did some recon work with a hoverpack  and found that we could drop into the Tomb from the sky if we hover directly over where the Tomb should be. The golden coordinates are X = 22400, Y = 22160, Z = 6000400. Well if you hover to this spot (or as close as you can get, don't worry too much about Z, in fact using hoverboard "up" control will allow you to stop on a dime!), you can toss stuff down. Your stuff should hit the ground then bounce then disappear, If so it is in the Tomb! Then just hop off the hoverpack and follow it down.

No Really, anything is possible!

Q: How did you get the dog and the Buggy into Templar?

A: The buggy is easy, hoverpack near the top of the Tyr Castle but below the crystal part and get as close as you can get to one of the vertical walls up there, then take out your buggy. It should go through the wall and land in the Templar. The dog is a bit more clever of a trick. get yourself behind a wall at the very base of the castle, you will end up below the Templar in a space where dropping is allowed. Take out a dog and repeat the "jump" command over and over till the dog disappears. Then jump yourself over and over and you will join your dog in the Templar. You can also use this technique to get a Feelium Ball  inside the Templar.

Q: How do you figure this stuff out?

A: It all comes down to one thing: Learning how to pass through walls! There are three proven techniques that will get you behind any wall in There.

1. The hoverpack trick. This is the easiest, just hover up to a wall so you are as close as you can get, then Hop Off the hoverpack. Presto you are in like Flinn. This technique will get you into the Oro Lounge even though you have to be Legendary to enter the normal way.

2. The Buggy Ride Shotgun Trick. This is a little more difficult, but works on stubborn double walls where the hoverpack trick does not. Walk up to a wall, drop a buggy which will fully or partially emerge behind the wall. Then quickly "Ride Shotgun" then "Get Out" and then retrieve the buggy.

3. The Buggy Collide Trick. Park a buggy right next to a wall. Run between it and the wall. Your collision with the buggy will shoot you behind the wall.

Now there are other methods such as having a friend shoot you through a wall with a Tommygun, but they are rarely more useful than the above. Once you are behind a wall you can see things not seen anywhere else, or if the object you are inside allows paintball, you can shoot at people and they can't shoot back (I like to hide inside bones in the Boneyard, or underneath the shops in Zephyr. If you are inside a rock and your dog is outside, you can use the "come" command for some flying dog fun!

Q: How do you get behind walls where no vehicles are allowed?

A: I was about to get to that. The generic answer is, fly high above the area where the wall you want to get behind is. Then from the sky, drop a buggy right next to the wall. (This is often time consuming as it may take many tries to get it by the wall.) Then, use above method 3 to get in. I've used this technique to get under every structure in Egypt and both the Forest and Desert waterfalls. By the way, underneath the waterfalls you can spy on what's happening in the "secret pools" without the people in those pools finding out you are there. There are places where the generic technique does not work, but some cleverness will get you there anyways.

Q: Now for the big question: How can women run around topless in There?

A: The same way men do, by wearing a skin colored T-Shirt. Problem is, it is highly unlikely that There will ever approve such a thing, but there is a way around that problem on the client side. When I created the Itsy Bitsy Black Bikini above, I first created a base "topless" T-Shirt then painted the Bikini over it. So all I did was find the There file my approved shirt used and replaced it with the base "topless" T-shirt I created. Here is a zip file containing topless jpgs in all skin tones.

Q: How does it work?

A: Well believe it or not, if you are a player, the entire planet of There is on your hard drive stored in a bunch of files. The there landscape that you run around on is not streamed in from the internet, it comes right off your hard drive. All you are getting from the internet are instructions for the display of moving and movable objects (other avatars of course, moving objects like buggys and balls, and the position and orientation of dropped objects), and the occasional new texture file when you see a shirt for the first time for example. Many of the files that make up There are of standard formats like DDS (direct draw standard texture), OGG (a compressed audio file similar to MP3) and SWF (macromedia flash file), others like MODEL and ANIMATION are proprietary formats to prevent people from creating their own competing There world. So if you replace a file There world file with one of your own, the There client uses the hard drive file instead of downloading one from the internet.

Q: Nice info, but what good is it? A: The best use is trying out developer designs in the game before you submit them. The picture to the right is a test of a pink and purple TUV which does not exist in the game yet.. Q: How do I test my own designs?  A: First thing you need is a way to see DDS files. The best way is to download and install this free DDS Thumbnail viewer. This will allow windows XP (maybe ME as well) to treat DDS files like any other graphic format. Next you need a way to create DDS files which if you have There Previewer then you already solved the problem. Every time you load in a JPG texture into Previewer, it converts the JPG into a DDS file and saves it in the same directory the JPG was loaded from. Next, find the file you want to replace.

All the files are in the "There\There Client\Resources" subfolder, and they are abbreviated in easy terms. Women's shirts, for example are in "\av\ft0\ub" which obviously stands for "avatar-female type-upper body". With the DDS Thumbnail viewer working, you just view the folders in thumbnail view and suddenly you can see all the textures stored on your hard drive. So the steps are:

1. Use the painter kit tools to create a texture that could be used in There.
2. Use Previewer to test your texture and convert it to a DDS file.
3. In Explorer, scan the Resources subfolders until you find a texture for something you own that is of the same type as you texture (i.e. if you created a new shirt, find the name of the DDS texture file for a similar shirt you own) This may take a while as there are MANY texture files to go through.
   There is an alternate procedure if you cannot find the file, or you do not want to go through all the files: 1.) Teleport or move to a spot in the middle of the ocean away from anybody. 2.) Put on the clothing item, or take out the object you want to re-texture. 3.) Press CTRL-SHIFT-L to start debug mode. 4.) Open up the in game browser (There > Browser) and type in the address "http://localhost:9999" without quotes. 5.) Click on the link about halfway down that says "Material Statistics" then "listMaterials". 6.) Look down the list for a texture in the directory the item should be in, for example if you want to recolor a female shirt, look for a texture beginning with "av/ft0/ub/", pants would begin "av/ft0/lb/", male avatars replace "ft0" with "mt0". The name after the directory, is the name of the file you need.
4. Find the DDS file created in step to 2, and rename it to the filename you found in step 3.
5. Back up the file you want to replace, especially if it begins with a letter. Copy and paste this file into the resource directory and say yes when it asks if you want to overwrite.
6. Launch There and put on (or take out) the object with the texture you overwrote. You will see what everyone will see when the object is submitted and approved.

Q. How can you move the camera position to get better screenshot angles?

There are three techniques, and two are both really black ninja hacks.

Technique #1: Press CTRL-SHIFT-L then bring up browse with this url: http://localhost:9999/environment/top?variable=flipCamera&value=1&modify= Warning: it is possible to get your camera stuck in an unworkable position with this hack (hint: do not click VIEW).

Technique #2: This requires that you have two There accounts and a decent enough computer to handle two copies of There running. First, log in the normal way in one account. This way you get updates that need to be loaded. Then create a shortcut with:
Target: "C:\Program Files\There\ThereClient\There.exe" -U -s 64.125.216.57:2311 and Start In:"C:\Program Files\There\ThereClient" 
The part highlighted in yellow may be wrong. To find the right address, click Start and Run... and type cmd and click OK. Then at the DOS prompt type "netstat" without the quotes. This will show you all the addresses you are connected to, and if you are connected to There there should be one address ending in :2311 that shows up alot. That is the address to put in the yellow. The sign in will look different then usual, but it will work. Once there you can have one avatar as the "camera" (using first person) and one as the model.

Technique #3: Use the latest GPS compass located here and use the flipCamera option.

Navigating the Islands Data

Want to try traveling from island to island without teleporting? Here is the data you need. 

This data is best when used with Myrmex's new GPS compass patch located here!

Distance (in kilometers)

	Burojo	Caldera	Cangrejo	Comet	Egypt	Kansas	Motu-Motu	Nada	Ootay	Saja	Tyr
Burojo		39.7	24.5	190.2	48.4	145.3	15.7	51.2	49.8	174.4	205.7
Caldera	39.7		15.2	195.2	31.0	124.2	24.8	11.6	10.2	213.8	235.1
Cangrejo	24.5	15.2		189.1	33.8	128.7	10.3	26.8	25.4	198.7	223.1
Comet	190.2	195.2	189.1		225.0	120.7	194.2	198.4	198.6	237.8	146.0
Egypt	48.4	31.0	33.8	225.0		153.7	34.9	32.5	31.5	217.0	253.9
Kansas	145.3	124.2	128.7	120.7	153.7		139.8	120.0	122.7	277.7	235.4
Motu-Motu	15.7	24.8	10.3	194.2	34.9	139.8		36.1	34.6	190.0	219.2
Nada	51.2	11.6	26.8	198.4	32.5	120.0	36.1		1.6	225.5	245.0
Ootay	49.8	10.2	25.4	198.6	31.5	122.7	34.6	1.6		224.0	244.1
Saja	174.4	213.8	198.7	237.8	217.0	277.7	190.0	225.5	224.0		127.9
Tyr	205.7	235.1	223.1	146.0	253.9	235.4	219.2	245.0	244.1	127.9

Heading chart (N = 0° E = -90° W = 90°)
Correspond to headings using this compass

Speed Tests of There Transportation

To figure out how long it will take you to travel from island to island, you need to know the speed of your chosen transportation. The following are the results of speed tests conducted in as scientific a way as possible. All tests were conducted without turbo over the ocean, except for separate tests done on the buggies over land with surprising results! 

Workarounds!

Here is a list of annoying bugs in There that are correctable without too much effort. Thanks to Nalora and others on the official forum for collecting these. Note these are not official fixes and I have not tested all these myself, Use at your own risk. Grey indicates this bug is reportedly fixed, but leaving workaround in case it comes back.

Inventory Issues

Chat Issues

Voice/Sound Issues

Performance Issues

Environment Issues

House/Funzone Issues

Event Issues