Frequently Asked Questions
We hope this document will answer some of the questions you have
about Alice. If you don't see the answer to a question you have, please
click here to let us know.
Alice currently runs on Windows 95 PCs only.
To run Alice you must have:
- Windows 95
- a VGA graphics card capable of 16 bit color
In addition, you should have the following:
Alice will run on a 486, but it will run very slowly.
- A Pentium running at 90 Mhz or better
- 16 megs of RAM
- Fast VGA graphics. WRAM is better than VRAM which is better than DRAM.
- 20 MB free disk space
With Alice you can create your own scripts that control the motion of 3D objects on your Windows 95 PC. Alice objects can move, spin, change color, change size, make sounds, and can even react to the click of a mouse or to keyboard keys. In short, Alice is a "workbench" for trying out ideas in the realm of interactive 3D graphics. Alice's infinite Undo mechanism and the its ability to execute snippets of Alice script "on the fly" as your main program runs encourages you to ask "what if" questions as you develop.
Alice hasn't been public for very long, so we expect this answer to change as we hear back from our end users. So far, people have used Alice to make simple 3D games (some of them networked and multiplayer!), simple animations, and for creating "animated diagrams" of 3d technical diagrams. Have you seen or played the "Light Saber Game" yet?At the University of Virginia's User Interface Group, we use Alice for exploring and inventing new 3D interaction techniques for the desktop and for VR. Using Alice keeps us from having to struggle with difficult-to-use and hard-to-modify 3D software libraries.
Alice is designed to be simple enough that it can be used by people who don't necessarily call themselves programmers. If you've ever used Hypercard, programmed a moderately complex spreadsheet, or ever programmed a little in BASIC or LOGO, you're probably ready to write an Alice script.
No. Alice is useful for describing 3D object behavior, not for creating 3D objects themselves. Alice does come with a library of about 200 (growing every day) pre-made objects, and you can also make your own objects in any other modeling package, and then import them into Alice for animation of their behavior.
Alice reads DXF, OBJ, A3D, and VRML 1.0 file formats.
Unfortunately, not yet. Alice depends on a layer of Microsoft software called Direct3D. Microsoft currently does not provide a version of Direct3D that runs on Windows NT, but we understand that it is currently under development. Shortly after this port is available, we will have an NT version of Alice. Unfortunately, no time has been announced for the release of Direct 3D for NT.
Sorry, Alice does not run on the Macintosh. Alice uses Microsoft's Direct3D library for creating 3D graphics, for which there is no Macintosh port.
Not at this time. The original version of Alice ran on SGIs but our goal has always been to produce a version for the PC. We have discussed a port back to the SGI from the PC, but at present have no timeframe or explicit plans to do so. Companies interested in partnering with us to bring Alice back to the SGI should contact us through email at: alice-admin@virginia.edu.
3D Site has a long list of Windows 95 graphics programs, as well as tons of information about the 3D graphics field.
Snapshot is a useful screen grabbing application that we find useful.
Alice doesn't need any special 3D hardware to run, though Alice will take advantage of any 3D board that accelerates Microsoft Direct3D if one is present in your machine. You can get perfectly acceptable performance from a fast VGA board, where "fast" describes the pixel-fill speed of your graphics board (this is the measure of how many millions of pixels per second go to the screen). Although a fast CPU is good, fast video is more important to Alice. If you're shopping for a good (non-3D) VGA card for Alice, look for WRAM: WRAM is generally faster then VRAM, which is generally faster than DRAM. Look in this space in the future for lists of 3D boards that work with Alice and Microsoft's Direct3D.
Alice does not use Java, but uses a programming language called Python. Java's a fine language but is not appropriate for meeting the goals of the Alice project mostly because we deemed Java to be too hard for our intended target audience of undergraduate novice and non-programmers.
Many people who saw our booth at the SIGGRAPH 96 conference and those who have been to our monthly open house have seen the Light Sabre game we did in Alice, and have asked about the availability of the Alice script that drives the game. We have decided not to release the source code to the outside world for two reasons: (1) we have significant copyright concerns about making this widely available (fair use lets us show it, but it is not clear that wide distribution of this game constitutes 'fair use') and more importantly, (2) the code makes references to trackers and headmounted displays which we are not prepared to support at this time.
Hand painted textures were applied to all the models in Alice using Amazon Paint, which allows the artists in our groups to apply hand painted textures to 3D models. Amazon Paint outputs .obj files with u,v texture coordinates and the texture files themselves. To load a textured object, Alice follows the rule that a texture with the same name as an object that is created is applied to that object.
The list on known Alice bugs is always: here.
Colors?
If you have color table problems (the render window turns psychedelic colors when it doesn't have focus, the Alice windows change color when they get or lose focus) try increasing the color depth. This problem usually occurs if you're running with 16 or 256 colors. Alice requires that you run your video card with at least "High Color (16 bit)" color. You can try changing to 16 bit color by clicking the right mouse button on your Windows 95 background, and choosing Properties, then Settings
Number Nine Boards?
One of our alpha testers has discovered a problem using DirectX with a Number Nine FX Motion 771 card. If you're using that card as your video card, you need to be using the 2.05d version of the drivers.
Mach64 Boards?
One of our alpha testers discovered that to run Alice using a Mach64 card you need to be using the ATI Graphics Pro Turbo PCI (mach64) setup, not the ATI mach64 PCI (macxw4) setup.
Compaq laptop computers?
Currently, there is a problem with the VGA chip set and drivers in Compaq's LTE 5300 laptop computers that makes it impossible to run DirectX on these machines. Since it's pretty tough to replace the display system in a laptop, anybody who wants to run Alice on a Compaq LTE 5300 is going to have to wait until Compaq gets the new drivers written (which supposedly will fix the problem). Compaq says that they are writing a new driver, but we don't know when it will be released.
Old Direct X?
We've also discovered that problems can arise with the "ECILA" layer of Alice (the low level database layer) if you've got old, incomplete versions of the DirectX or RSX DLLs on your machine. The problem can be solved by removing all traces of DirectX or RSX (whichever the case may be) and then re-installing the newest versions of each (RSX version 1.0 and DirectX 2.0).Missing D3DRM.DLL file?
D3DRM.DLL is installed as a part of the DirectX installation, which occurs during the first phase of Alice installation. When your system complains that the file is missing, the problem is that Microsoft's DirectSetup function (which is called during installation) isn't installing the DLL's correctly.There are a number of possible reasons this can occur:
1) You had an old version of Direct3D installed on your system, and it isn't being cleaned up correctly. The solution is to remove any DirectX DLLs you can find from your system directory and reinstall. Although DirectX installation is a part of the Alice install process, you can also pull down http://alice.virginia.edu/software/idirectx.exe to only run the DirectX install part.
2) I have run into two cases where Microsoft's DirectSetup function didn't function correctly when the Alice auto-install executable was run from a drive other than the C: drive (for the single large executable only - for some reason this doesn't seem to be a problem for the disk version. The solution here is to reinstall DirectX from the C: drive.
Regardless, the first time DirectX is correctly installed on your system you will be prompted to reboot so that Win95 can register the DLLs. You can also check to see if DirectSetup is being run by checking the upper left hand corner of the install screen after Alice has copied files during the first phase of installation - DirectSetup will report on the progress of the DirectX installation.
