The Croquet Project: Open-Source P2P 3-D Platform

I attended an excellent talk yesterday here in Madison on the Croquet Project, a fascinating open-source peer-to-peer 3D collaborative environment which will have its version 1.0 release in a few months. It is being developed in the academic community. There's been some talk about a peer-to-peer version of SL; the capabilities of Croquet go way beyond SL. For one, it is a very open and extensible platform containing any number of "worlds" (my words), which you can create at will by simply rezzing a doorway and walking through it. There is bound to be some pretty amazing stuff appearing in Croquet space after version 1.0 is released and content creators get busy. The app runs under Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can view the presentation here, and I highly recommend it: http://mslive.sonicfoundry.com/mslive/viewer/?cid=cc0099ab-130d-4c92-9e63-688c34820d8a

The Croquet Project site is: http://www.opencroquet.org/

Sounds great, I think I'll check it out.

For me, the coolest part of Croquet is that it is written in Smalltalk -- specifically, Squeak Smalltalk, which is also the version of Smalltalk I use for all my personal projects, including my autonomous submarine.

- Jon

DEFINITELY. I didn't know about Squeak until I talked to a Croquet developer last night, and it blew my mind. I need to learn it!

so, here we are.. the first true competitor of Second Life is Croquet.

imagine if these technologies merged? being able to build by drawing a 2D picture and having a script turn it into a 3D structure?!?

or being able to draw the bounding shape of ..well, anything.. and then being able to manipulate that into pieces that vary in size, lenthg, width, or even further manipulating those boundaries? one piece that can curve to your liking without the need of multiple prims?

as Sam Beckett would say, "oh boy.."

browser integration, shared space, multiple environments limited to the users imagination..

LL would do well to keep an eye on Croquet. preferrably for inspiration or possibly shared technology. i'd rather not see something like this as competition, more like.. a brother-in-arms.

thanks for sharing this, Astrin! very inetresting and thought-provoking.

I dig the fact that they already are violating copyright laws on their main website. Maybe they should consult with LL about what their future obligations include....

Whoa. Now *that* is a metaverse.

I saw this project some time ago and am glad to see it still going.

I like the idea of rezzable terminal windows. And being able to share or not share them would be neat too.

Croquet looks promising, but I doubt it'll break into a consumer market.

Color me blind, but I missed that. And it is certainly up the the copyright holder to act rather than vice-versa, no?

You don't by any chance mean the hand on the frontpage? As recent threads here have shown that is already © 4000 b.c.e. God.

Actually I was thinking of a few Dali images in alternate locations. But hey, he only died xx years ago. *pokes Malachi in the forehead*

This looks like wonderful technology.

We might finally hit the desktop metaphor with a virtual rocket launcher.

Dali died in 1989. I've poked around and reay all the stuff on Croquet/Squeak a few years ago and it was a fairly high learning curve. Yea I'd like to see LL and Croquet working TOGETHER to REALLY bring about a true metaverse ehh???

Lindens, where are youuuuuu??? What do they think???

Let me be honest. It's a really cool tech demo.

Thing of it is, I want to see something like that in action, on end-user hardware, discussing scalability stats, showing a stress test of users/instance, as well as the real guts of how these things function.


Tech demos are nice. Really. But they pale to an implementation-phase take.

Anyone give it a try?

Lindens, how ya gonna keep us down on the farm?

omg omg omg

Havoc 2 and HTML? oooh wait, streaming video? or persistent storage of valuable assets? or ummm.... not allowing object export? No, wait, I got it, superior customer service! That was a toughy, Mem.

I have tried it a few times over time. Great tech demo, not really anything to compete with SL directly though. It will nonetheless be interesting to see it mature - mention of Croquet comes up every so often in the forums, but the platform doesn't seem to have evolved all that much.

They did say the 1.0 release would be available this winter.
I'm certainly looking forward to that.

So now we can have strip malls built with croquet? Please don't get me wrong but in the US of A all you have to do is look around and see endless strip malls stretching into the horizon and if that is what people enjoy seeing in First Life then crochet will help them realize their dreams in Second Life too.

Where is Feredick Law Olmsted when we need him?

Weird furry joke goes here

I hope we'll hear more about their first distribution soon. This looks like if it works the way they hope it'll resolve some of the biggest weaknesses in SL. I especially like the way you'd be able to communicate your own space without needing to have it on someone else's server. And to break free of the static, one-size-fits-all grid model... what a delight that would be!

Maybe LL needs to get busy and figure out how to build their much-superior graphics and game-play on top of this infrastructure.

Ok, so, like I'm in.

I'm a bunny rabbit, and there are a bunch of pictures of other people.

Is anyone else in? Is there a way to connect with other people?

Ok, I restarted, and now I'm alice.

Ok, the mirror is pretty cool. FPS seems pretty good, though this is a pretty low prim build.

What if...

instead of having private sims delegated to the off-coast seas, we could instead create portals to them from upon land that we own anywhere upon the grid?

say you have a small plot of land somewhere.. you construct a standing portal. step through and *WHOOSH* you're in a private sim that can resemble ANYthing! space, underwater caves, alien landscapes.. anything.

what say you?

When you extract these there is a readme file that says "To start Croquet on Windows, simply double click the "Jasmine" shortcut that you will find in the Jasmine folder".

There is no shortcut file in the Jasmine folder.