New version of Croquet released today

In other news, a new version of VOS was also released a few days ago.

Oh, I do get out to many islands, trust me! Some of my best friends - Munchflower, Ferran, Surreal, the Electric Sheep gang, to name a few - are all island-based. I very much agree that linking islands more easily would be a wonderful. In fact, if you read above, you'll see I would like to see the ability to attach sims to the mainland as well!

What I'm trying to avoid is a set up like ActiveWorlds. It never did it for me, and looking at their activity levels, it doesn't seem to have done it for a lot of other people either.


I'm not trying to say people can't have islands, I just worry when islands start to outnumber the more centralized communities. I think what we all agree on is that we'd prefer a more fluid ability to link our community, including options like easier / free linking of simulators, adding simulators, and so forth. If it was easier, SL could start to look like the stop-motion animation of Pangea to the modern Earth layout in reverse!



Regards,

-Flip

D'ya know what fragments the community? LL fragments the community by limiting the wora'uld's community support toolbox to SL's fabulous "sense of space."

We cannot IM groups effectively. We cannot search for people based on interests, picks, private notes, or any other information readily stored in the database and linked to our accounts. We can function reasonably with only a very limited number of people a visible "space."

We can't even communicate with residents using existing chat clients and protocols. The only way to contact a logged resident is through email and then only if they contact you first, through your SL account, which you must retain, and have tied to your email address.

Talk about gated communities severely limiting access to "outsiders." SL does this far more effectively as a whole that private estates do to the gridded population. Then when people do get in, they can't find each other any other way than randomly landing in the same "space."

Gee, I just had a random chance encounter on Celadon, and another one on Sables dAlliez, and on Ahern. I got to all these places the same way, and they're all part of the same world map. The fact that Ahern is Old Mainland, Sables dAlliez is part of an archipelago, and Celadon is an island... that's irrelevant.

I think it would be a lot cooler if you could fly over the world void from one island to another, but with P2P teleporting the mainland isn't really any more or less connected than the islands.

Islands aren't "gated private areas", and there's plenty of "gated private areas" on the mainland. There's a big club with an abusively stupid security script that takes about about 1/3 of the sim next to me on the Korean continent. And I can teleport to clusters of green dots on the islands or on the mainland just as easily.
Same reason they'd go to the next sim over... or not.

I love Brace Coral.

Just sayin', like.

I dunno. I really like this portal/looking glass paradigm of Croquet's. It just feels much more appropriate for digital platforms or spaces - disembodied as they are - than the reality-borrowing contiguous-land-&-islands paradigm that LL has implemented. Land feels too...restrictive and game-y, for me at least.

Another thing. Am I missing something, or does Croquet lets you render completely functional and shareable instances of any old application installed in your computer? Is that true? If it is, wouldn't this make it an awesome collaboration tool? People could then set up virtual design studios or teach software hands-on - to name a couple of things. Fire up Croquet, instantiate SL, Photoshop, and Deep Paint 3D, and collaborate with others on skin-making, teach others the subtleties of skin-making, or allow a customer to see the work being done on his/her custom skin. But is this possible with Croquet today? I read it as if it is. But I might be misinterpreting things.

It seems to, at least in X11... don't know about Windows or OSX apps... which will let you do everything from HTML on a prim up with way less overhead for things that don't actually need to be dragged through the HTML keyhole.

Not so I pay the full sim tier and it's divided up between three mainland sims. I don't like the way private islands fragment the world. I like that my land has a sense of place and a history through all the people and places that have come and gone around it through the years. I don't think I'd feel as connected to the rest of the SL world if I wasn't literally connected.

Ditto on Chip - I also have full sim tier, spread across three (formerly four) sims. Cristiano's in the same boat, but I believe with multiple sims of tier. I'm sure the three of us are not alone.

Things islands lack that I like:

Ability to fly for miles randomly exploring;
Sense of connection... there are times I don't want to teleport, I'd prefer walking / flying;
Feel of public space versus a private space;
Water.

And that's just a few. Sometimes its about the journey, not the destination.

One of my favorite things to do is get a gang together and go tubing, because you move at a speed where everything rez's in nicely and you can actually take time look at the details of a whole bunch of builds. It used to be great fun to tube from Indigo around the (then) continentent - around the edge at purple, and back down towards Tan.

It comes down to preference in many ways, and as I said earlier, I have nothing against island owners (obviously). I just wish LL made it easier for people to do what they want on the mainland (attaching sims to empty spots, moving entire sims around with consent of land owners, better terraform options, better privacy options, better land texture options) instead of giving better tools and options for island owners, who usually pay less than those on the mainland initially for the land itself.

The same tools should be available if you're paying the same monthly price.

Regards,

-Flip

This is a hateful personal attack on the OP and should be removed.

Community in SL died long ago, get over it.

I find it hilarious that you guys are talking like granting people the opportunity to run their own sims would ultimately lead to grids that would, quite frankly, make SL looks like the privately owned estate that it is. Guys, you're supposed to not only be software developers, but you're supposed to be early adopters, people who look ahead... Hilarious.

Well, let me chime in why I like the idea of privately owned and privately run desktop grids:

1. Vast stretches of land to fly through. As bandwidth -- wireless and wired -- gets broader and more common place, it's going to be possible for everyone to serve gobs of data from home. When that happens friends from all over the globes, the ones who now link together through AIM, Trillian, Jabber, and LiveJournal, are going to be build their own grids. The term "friends list" from LiveJournal will be called the "Friends Grid," a massively distributed, contiguous would run by everyone.

2. Sense of connection: see point #1

3. Public space: see point #1, see LiveJournal, see MySpace, see IRC, etc.

4. Water. The section of the "Friends Grid" run by Little Mermaid fetishists and Pirates of the Caribbean fangirls will be awesome! Quad-core processors, Physics Cards, and Giga-bit/sec connections allow like-minded fans to build vast swaths of water in all three dimensions -- which means the fangirls can ravage Cap'n Sparrow on the leagues above, while fanboys deflower Ariel in the leagues below.

But, yeah... You guys keep thinking this is the end-all of technological progression. I'm keeping one foot in the future, and doing by best to drag the world with me.

You know, three years ago, I was on dial-up and couldn't play from home. Then I got broadband and could play SL at home while downloading Doctor Who episodes in the background. Tomorrow, who knows. Think more about what you don't know, and you'll want what you don't have.

An estimated seven hundred home computers worked in nearly perfect unison to create and maintain the Friends Grid Ocean. While there were likely hundreds, if not thousands, more private, public, and business computers working around the world to keep the contiguous body of land known as Friends Grid active, the Ocean was a specific, celebrated landmark.

Everyone knew the history of the ocean: it started off as a dozen-dozen private simulators sunken as far as they would go, creating one of the largest lakes on the Friends Grid. When the Friends Grid Protocol incremented up to 2.0, complete control over depth was added, the mermaids resting on the thirty-meter deep lake floor were sunken to hundred of meters down, and people started noticing. More people chipped in, simulators shifted away, and more water-themed simulators took their place. The lake grew into a great lake, and then it soon became the first officially recognized, virtual ocean.

At any given time, you could charter a boat and sail across to the other side. If you knew the Mers well enough, you could even go visit their sunken kingdom of Atlantis. Any water sport or activity imaginable could be found in the Ocean if one looked hard enough.

“I want to go swimming,” a voice chirped in Jarod’s ear. A blonde avatar rezzed in front of Jarod’s avatar, and her white-and-orange school uniform immediately changed to a rather daring, brand name bikini. “Please?”

Jarod reached up and adjusted the white, iPod ear bud. He decided, in the future, he was going to have to remember to deactivate his MP3 player’s Wifi connection before going into Starbucks. Kerovia’s avatar was visible in the aggregated reality of the Friends Grid, but every part of her that was important was running on his own grid at home.

“You go swimming,” Jarod said. His combined retinal movements and wording triggered a dismissive wave of his avatar’s hand. “I’m waiting for someone to show up.”

Kerovia audibly sniffed, and shifted her costume back to its original, schoolgirl uniform. “You’re no fun,” she sneered. After a loud raspberry, her avatar derezzed, and Jarod was left alone on one of the piers overlooking the Ocean.

“No,” he said to himself, and anyone sitting around his table at Starbucks, “I’m not.”

Ok, thanks. I think I have to take a look at it myself - I'll probably do it some time next week. If this works out without any hiccups or a huge performance hit (big "ifs", then it may just turn out to be a great tool for SL businesses, instructors, etc. (for now )

This is beautifully stated and wonderfully true. But the claim that this sort of contiguous spaces connectedness facilitates online community growth better than existing Internet environments is a tired old bit of fluff. SL simply doesn't offer any tool, other than a sense of contiguous space, to faciliatate community development.

Hey my church grants you a better worship experience because we have one huge room where we eat, nursery, pray, study, worship all together all at once. Forget those silly little gated rooms that only serve one purpose and segregate our congregation. Contiguous space is the answer, the ultimate answer. Oh, and while we're on the subject, you cannot meet for study or prayer at each others houses, you must come here. We can't have you going off into your own little sessions that everybody's not a part of now can we. And no, our hearing impaired members will not segregate themselves and graft some signing API into our services. Who the hell do they think they are wanting to interpret the data in some way that we don't all see and understand.

I like the wora'uld too. I'm a mainlander and a historic preservationist. To flip what Flip said, I'm not attacking SL, really I'm not. But I'm fed up with the attitude that SL provides some innovative method for forming and maintaining communities that renders all previous tools laughably archaic. That's not even remotely true and it stuns me that otherwise intelligent people so avidly preach and defend it.

Agreed and Croquet mmmmm delicious.

What have people here been able to do with Croquet?

Can one reach a shared environment where there are actually other people around?

Are there any SL users who are actually experimenting with Croquet? With this release I finally felt motivated to install it and I got it working. I think I'll be messing around with it (to the extent I have time). I think a good experiment might be a collaborative Croquet version of the 3D SL terrain viewer I did in C++ a while back. Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing from other SL folks trying it.

I don't really see it competing with SL myself. My eye is on Google. Someone will make the mental leap beyond gaming, and it's interesting to wonder who.

To quote Adam Savage of Mythbusters: "I REJECT YOUR REALITY AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN." Maybe you're just saying this because the community is tired of "OMG I'm leaving", "OMG I'm selling my land (to my own alt)", "OMG now I'm Martin ppl". I still feel a strong sense of community, to my friends old and new. I'm sorry you don't.

Just because you no longer feel community doesn't mean no one else in SL does. Please don't impose your current SL view upon the whole grid.

Regards,

-Flip

The biggest problem is that it uses the Smalltalk/Squeak navigation model inside the program. They basically ignore all the user interface design that's happened since 1979, and the result is that while it's got really amazing capabilities it's insanely hard to navigate. People who think SL is too hard to deal with are going to be very disappointed.

Maybe your culture did. Mine isn't so frail, it's alive and kicking.

Have any people at all, not just SL folks, ever been in a shared Croquet world, or is this a myth, a piece of advertising promotional lying puffery?

I'm sure the Croquet developers have done it, but it's not pretty. AFAIK there is no pre-built discovery widget for locating and joining worlds. In their WAN example the address and port info is hard-coded into the script that starts a participant. So I think the first useful application that could be made in the beta might be one for connecting to worlds. Below is a relevant section from the programmer's guide. Personally I'm thinking it might be best to wait until more motivated people build more of the basic pieces and maybe fuller examples. P.S. I don't have a lot of patience for the quirky Squeak "desktop" environment.

Sounds like these Croquet chaps (they're English, right?) are a bit too immersed in their white papers and theory vs. getting out of their stuffy offices and into the real world of marketable applications. They really should team up with LL and work COLLABORATIVELY on combining SL and Croquet (and Active Worlds and There, etc)...