New version of Croquet released today

The Croquet Project is one of SL's potential future competitors and today they've released a new version - version 1.0 Beta.

I think it's important to keep these guys in our rearview mirror. Their website is:

http://www.croquetproject.org/

I just checked it out (I check in on the project every few months) - and man, its still very, very far in SL's rear view mirror, hehehe.

Regards,

-Flip

Yes. But what are it's requirements and such?

Pretty interesting, it looks like they are able to take application output and display it on objects.

Like Flash on a prim. Mmm that would be cool.



Also they support for concurrent developers on the same document working side by side.



Both are feature that would be nice to get in SL.

It requires that its users are unaware of Second Life.

Some other features are:

1) It is open source. This means that anybody can get in and hack around at a deep level to their hearts delight. Something missing? Just go ahead and add it. I think it is built on squeak and smalltalk.

2) it is free (as in both beer and speech ).

3) it can run P2P - it does not _Need_ to be connected to the internet. Two machines side by side with a cable can connect.

4) you can run all your existing programs inside it - yep that includes browsers and other things. It could replace your OS rather than any particular application.

5) it generates a very small amount of network traffic.

6) it could be used in a 'mesh like' set up b/c of 3 & 5.

It is worth checking out if you are creative and handy with code IMO.

Seb

The installation process repeatedly asked me for a password. Did it do that to anyone else?

Sorry but posting other games on this forum is crude and tacky.

This post has been flagged and a Linden will make the final call

I disagree.

LL has repeatably shown that they are willing to tolerate and accept competitors -- hell Andrew Linden helped out the Open Source Metaverse project with a little advice on their forum.

It's in stark contrast to certain others, like say, ActiveWorlds, where even mentioning the name "Second Life" in the gate-world will get you automatically banned from the universe.

Croquet is still primitive -- but if it develops in a big way, then it's something LL could potentially integrate (open source and all), and that's something LL has said in the past.

That just looks cool. Seems like a great way to teach people software, if they can watch what you are doing via Croquet. Holy schiznit, you could play Second Life IN Croquet, oh what a lark that would be.

I bet it is a Platform not a Game...looking forward to checking it out...

Yeah, see, it's just a platform, not a world.

I don't see cultures springing up around Croquet, or stories, or locales. It's just another way of displaying what's on your desktop or in your IM client.

It's super-sweet VRML, but it lacks the sense of place that SL has developed (much to some people's chagrin, I'm sure)

This is what worries me about the ever-increasing popularity of islands. It fragments the community and makes it hard for random, chance encounters and meeting new and interesting people.

This is also what frustrated me about ActiveWorlds; as much of a social butterfly as I am, I found it extremely hard to make long-term friends or ever find people with similar interests.

That's what separated Second Life for me; while very technically advanced, the community made it easy to find and socialize with people, and random chance encounters exist around every corner. One of the first times was when I met Schwanson and Camille for the first time in Hawthorne; we ended up with a huge 30 meter high monkey on a toilet with a schlong. Pretty hilarious...

Regards,

-Flip

Yeah, that's my concern too. I'm a rather anti-social person, yet my first month or so in SL I spent my time flying to the various scattered green dots and bothering them to see what they were doing. I met most of my friends that way.

Or giving rides to random people in the Olive sandbox with my physical trebuchet...

Or watching Ezhar and Kenzington attack, capture, and sink the Little Tokyo blimp with a prim magnet...

Or stumbling across dozens of activities that people were doing. When you continually fragment the world with these little gated, private areas, you lower the ability to spread ideas and communication; indeed, why would anyone go to maingrid now, when all their friends chipped in and bought this island? Whee....

I don't see any advantages to the main grid. Infact, I see the main grid as a result of a design flaw. Sims are expensive and so LL has to pack people into the sim so that they can help pay for it.

If everybody could afford their own island then they would have one. 1st life and 2nd life.

We like to look at cities, but we don't necessarily like to live in them. Cities are interesting, but they're full of unpleasant, very busy and angry people.

We all want a big virtual goldfish bowl and yet nobody really wants to play the part of the goldfish.

The main grid is where everything is happening all at once...guess I'm a city girl at heart, but I love the variety, the chance encounters, the ugly builds, the well thought out builds, the half builds, the new people, the old people.

I'd lose my mind on an island.

SL does provide a common area for people to socialize. But it's unfair to imply that people won't connect using a tool such as Croquet. Countless friendships have evolved in independently hosted, primitive online environments such as news groups, chat rooms, and mailing lists.

Croquet is admitedly a tool. It'll never attempt to compete with a centrally hosted, profit-driven wora'uld owned and managed by a single corporation. It's simply made available for people to download, tweak, and configure on their own machines as they please. After setting up an environment, people are free to offer connection to others. Will a world grow out of it? No, thousands of worlds will grow out of it.

Comparing SL and Croquet is like comparing world government to the hundreds nations, countries and kingdoms that exist on the planet today. What exactly have we lost by a segment of our population sequestering themselves on hidden estates? It seems a natural progression as the population grows to hundreds-of-thousands of people.

I think it depends on the island, Flipper, if you're talking about those that hole themselves up in private estates then yes I agree with you.

On the other hand, Dublin is an Island sim, and its very much the meeting place of the world. I run in to all kinds of people there. I suspect with the retail now up I will run into more. I guess it comes down to the mission statment of the sim. Dublin's is to be the meeting place of the world and so we make sure that it is just that.

Others want seclusion and yes those sims are not exactly random chance encounter friendly

Yeah, but would we have become friends if you didn't randomly live in Olive when I brought the freak show known as Indigo to the neighborhood?

I'm not trying to badmouth Croquet as a tool here; rather point out that SL's strength has been its ability allowing the building of communities. I think that's why people here are so much more passionate about the SL platform than places like ActiveWorlds, or the MMOGs out there. Its also the same reason that many people from There get offended when SLers talk about SL's superior tech, and so forth; you're not just insulting a bit of code, you're insulting a community that they identified with.

I've also love the ability to buy islands and attach them to the mainland. I'd put one just to the north of Indigo.

Regards,

-Flip

The fragmented blog-o-sphere -- I don't care how unhip that word is, I like it -- has never limited anyone's ability to spread ideas or communicate. The fact that anyone can setup, link to, archive, quote from, and comment in a blog has made them as powerful -- and maybe more so in the next few years -- than any centrally controlled or hosted message forum. Someone invented RSS which gave the blog-o-sphere broadband synapses; I'm absolutely certain the same thing will happen for virtual works.

You know why I'm certain? Because two years ago when I took a weeks vacation and stayed home to play HALO on my PC, I had no trouble at all stumbling into a random game of capture the flag. HALO came built with network play and that game default with a list of active games which let me stumble into strangers' games and play with them -- Half-Life 2 with Garry's Mod has the same feature.

Are you really so dense to think the same thing won't happen once everyone has the ability to build worlds, communities, and realms? You sound like Prokofy Neva. You know what the last, biggest gated community was: the world wide web. I don't think that exactly shut down the spread of ideas now, did it?

You should get out more I've met some very interesting people by hopping around the islands. If we had the portals feature ( vote 907 ) like Croquet does it would be much easier to to link islands into a coherent chain of interest, seperate from the chaos of the main grid.



This is extraordinarily dismissive because where are worlds built if not on platforms? Croquet and Metaverse are certainly a long way off SL at this time but they'll catch up while you're not looking. Open source or open protocol virtual reality is the way of the future. LL know this too.




This is absolutely correct, the idea that community can only exist in the chaos of the mainland is absurd. For instance my island is only a month old and already has a small community of people who come here. In fact anyone is welcome as long as they behave appropriately. Many islands in SL have large and thriving communities.

----

I would argue that some islands have more sense of community than the mainland. The mainland as I see it is simply a totally random collection of small disparate builds packed so close together that any sense of "community" is overwhelmed more by a sense of anti-social behaviour. Sure, of course there are many notable exceptions but this is the general rule on the mainland I would suggest.

Would he ever lived in Olive if he hadn't seen me playing SL, after sequestering myself away from Asheron's Call? No.

Would I have ever played SL if I hadn't seen someone posting about it in all the way over in the gated communities of LiveJournal and the GarageGames message boards? No.

Second Life is not the be-all, end-all of virtual world social networking.

ROFLMAO!

yall take shit to seriously

I was digging at the resmod who a little while back did exactly that to someone who was posting about another game up in here.

me personally I don't care - yall can post up your play by play of storming of the fortress with all ya guildies in WoW - with screenies and a movie to go along with it.

more entertainment fer me, and I got plenty of popcorn

And BoredSpy - your pomposity is dangerous - ya head might splode - I know zackly whut Croquet is and I know zackly what SL is. gimme a fuckin break already

Brace - girl you rock. Tell it like it is Sista

No, we would've become friends when we searched available worlds to linked to, found one common to our interest, and met there. This is not a fair assessment anyway. A whole heaping lot of random factors led to us both playing SL and ending up being neighbors out of the hundreds of people who were playing at the time. The fact that we are early adopters of 3D platforms is what bumped us into each other.

Can't argue this point. But it's still not fair to imply that other online tools haven't provided the same facility. They must've; there are millions of online communities.

You can't have it both ways. Are people passionate enough about other online communities to defend them against talk of SLs superior tech or aren't they? I think it's a stretch to say that people here are so much more passionate. People use the tools that best meet their needs. SL is that tool for a few people. Billions of other people already use thousands of other tools to communicate and socialize online.

Yeah, that'd be great.