Here is where other fans of the There.com three-dimensional metaverse game can share in DoctorGibbs' collected, unofficial, resources. BarkerGirl is DoctorGibbs' android, the blameless issue of his fiendish experimental mating of There with PERL.

Lots of Teleport Links. This page has hundreds of direct links to places, funzones, clubs, and houses. Just click on any link to teleport there. Hint: If you make it your home page, you'll be able to get to places FAST, just by clicking on "There" and "Browser" within the game.

Links to the New Islands. Comet Island (sometimes called Snow Mountain) and New Kansas (sometimes called Kansas) appeared in There after the August, 2004, upgrade. At this writing, they have no permanent structures to teleport to, but this page lists all teleportable signs that were seen in late August, 2004.

Metrically Accurate Maps of There. I've plotted about 8000 geolocated There features onto accurate map grids. Plotted objects consist of ~6000 obstacles whose locations are in the ThereClient; ~1000 fixed teleport locations (houses, funzones, and other places); and about ~1000 PaZ's or signs that I observed during one month by actually driving around the islands. The map base is derived from There SatCam pictures. View the index map at 100% scale to display the 1 km and 5 km grid squares properly. The detail maps show placenames for all fixed teleport destinations and settlements of numbered houses. These are all PDF files -- you need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them.

• Index Map (Overview of There - use for locating other maps.)
• Caldera Detailed Maps   West   Northwest   Northeast   East   Southeast   Southwest
• Cangrejo Detailed Maps   North   East   South   West
• Motu-Motu Detailed Maps   Northwest   Northeast   Southeast   Southwest
• Motu North Detailed Map    [a.k.a. Lava Island, Wonderland Island, Triangular Island, and (incorrectly) Jojabi]
• Ootay Detailed Map
• Nada Detailed Map
• Malahini Islands Detailed Map    [includes Burojo, iVillage, and Star Keeper islands]
• Saja Detailed Map
• Egypt Detailed Map
• Tyr Detailed Map

Clickable Teleport Map. Here is a map of There that you can click on. You'll get back a list of the nearest teleport destinations, clickable links to teleport to them, and driving directions from there! Great for exploring new areas.

SkyPAZs. Here are teleport links to all destinations in the above map data base at altitudes greater than 1000 m. Beware: Many of these may not still be in-world when you click on them. But they might come back someday, so keep trying!

Auto-magical Outfit Changer. If you are a fashionista, or computer slave to one, you'll want this! When running, the tool auto-magically changes you into a different one of your outfits every 30 or 60 seconds (or whatever time you set). You can also define subsets of your outfit collection for it to randomly cycle through. Thanks to Emmanuelle, who inspired it, and to june_uruTMP who helped with testing! Important note post-August 2004 upgrade: see here.

	DoctorGibbs' Perl Toolkit for Interacting with the There World
	Part 1. Introduction and Prerequisites
	Part 2. Finding the There Window and Activating Localhost
	Part 3. Program Your Avatar to Converse, Dance, and Emote
	Part 4. Program Your Avatar to Walk, Turn, and Run
	Part 5. Closing the Loop: A Simple Autopilot
	Part 6. Teleporting Your Avatar (and also interacting with main menu and webapps.prod.there.com)
	Part 7. Examining Objects Around You
	Code files:    TherePerlGlobals.pl    TherePerlSubs.pl   Test Program    OutfitChanger.pl
	...More to Come...
	(Part 8. Interacting with Objects: Hop On, Hop Off, Enter, Exit)
	Important note post-August 2004 upgrade: see here.

I'm sure there are typos, errors, and missed opportunities in the above. Please send your corrections and suggestions to doctorgibbs@therefan.com, or ThereMail to DoctorGibbs .

	DoctorGibbs' Favorite Tips and Tricks

Tip: To make all avatar nametags invisible (for screenshots aerial or otherwise, e.g.) do this: First, type SHIFT-CTRL-L in your There window. (This turns on your localhost:9999 server.) Second click here on Nametags Off. To restore the nametags, click here on Nametags On. To understand this, view source for this page: The links set environment variables in your local There client. (Thanks to mystic_1 for this insight.)

Tip: Similar to the above, to gain full control over your "user camera" (what you see in your There window), type SHIFT-CTRL-L in your There window and then click here on Camera Controls On. A control panel will come up. Click on its words to do various neat things, both in aerial and standard views. You can even leave the camera behind, to "spy" on a fixed scene while your avatar walks off-screen -- not that you would actually do this! If you seriously mess up your camera, log off and then log on again. It will be restored -- hopefully! (Again, thanks to mystic_1.)

Tip: To get a browser with an address bar and other controls, type CTRL-N (for "New") from within any browser window in There (e.g., Shop Central). Sometimes you have to highlight a bit of random text in the window first.

Tip: If you have teleport links on your web page and are annoyed by the redirection warnings from the There-gods, you can use JavaScript to make them go away. For a full discussion, see here.

Tip: Be sure to type a closing apostrophe on your emotes! Then you get the actions without the superfluous emote words in the balloons. So, type 'wave' instead of 'wave . Your balloon will show ['wave'] but anything in brackets like that is invisible to the people you are talking to! If your balloon has only invisible emotes, it will be completely invisible.

Tip: SHIFT left-arrow and SHIFT right-arrow makes your avatar step sideways, to the left or right.

Tip: To get a list of placenames to which you can teleport by name, go to the URL http://webapps.prod.there.com/places/places?count=200.

Tip: To teleport to one of the allowed placenames (see above tip), go to the URL http://webapps.prod.there.com/goto/goto?placename= appending the placename to the end. (Be sure to change spaces to plus-signs if there are any in the name, for example http://webapps.prod.there.com/goto/goto?placename=Beacon+Manor .)

Tip: You can similarly teleport to many locations or objects if you know their DOID numbers. You toggle these as visible by pressing SHIFT-CTRL-D. Then, the teleport URL is http://webapps.prod.there.com/goto/goto?obj= appending the DOID number to the end. I don't know a good way of figuring out which DOIDs can be teleported to, other than trying!

Tip: Another service provided by webapps.prod.there.com is to display an avatar's profile given their DOID number. This is useful when you have only the DOID number for the owner of an object, house, or PAZ, but not their name. The URL is http://webapps.prod.there.com/profiles/profiles?op=view&AvatarDoid= appending the DOID number to the end.

Tip: If you want to understand the guts of web pages displayed by There, it is sometimes frustrating that View/Source shows only the XML and not the generated HTML. The solution is to install Microsoft's "Internet Explorer Tools for Validating XML and Viewing XSLT Output", which you can find here. Then, you can right mouse click on any screen and have an option to see the HTML. Very useful. Addendum: Other Thereans have suggested these other methods: (1) add the string "&omitXsl=1" to any page that returns XML, Example: webapps.prod.there.com/profiles/profiles?op=edit&omitXsl=1, or (2) use the URL "view-source:http://...".

Tip: If you look at any of the >6000 "scene" files on your computer in the ThereClient directory tree, you'll see that they specify locations by six variables: (r, theta, phi, localX, localY, localZ). The formulas to convert this to the standard (X, Y, Z) are as follows:

X = sin(theta * Pi/180) * r + localX
Y = cos(theta * Pi/180) * sin(phi * Pi/180) * r + localY
Z = cos(theta * Pi/180) * cos(phi * Pi/180) * r + localZ

Tip: Headings (either compass headings or orientations of objects) in There follow a convention completely different from the real world! In There, East is -90, and headings range from -180 to +180. In the real world, East is of course 90, West is 270, and so forth. The conversion is

RealWorldHeading = -ThereHeading
if (RealWorldHeading < 0) RealWorldHeading += 360

Tip: You can put a There login box onto your own web page if the page is hosted locally on your PC and accessed by the file:// method. Here is a very simple form that logs you in and starts the client. (View source to see how little is required to do this.) The reason that the page must be accessed by the file:// method is that, otherwise, There detects it as a redirection link and intercepts it (as you will see if you try the form from this server). Probably there is a JavaScript way to get around this limitation, but I haven't tried, yet. [Roland_P has added some details. See here.]

Tip: You can also include a redirect page reference with your login form. In that case, the client is NOT started, but you go directly to a There web page that would normally ask for its own login. Here is a simple version of such a form. (Again, view source to understand.) You can't use this to login and automatically teleport somewhere, since the client is not started. If you want, you can make the name and password fields hidden and containing your name and password, and thus construct "one click" links to internal There pages. Because you are accessing the file locally on your own machine by the file:// method, this is not as insecure as it sounds!

Here are links to some of my favorite There-related pages: