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Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release 176

Posted by timothy from the grease-for-squeakers dept.
kourge writes "Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted. Today, Croquet Project released its initial developer release, codenamed 'Jasmine.' Although it isn't a finished product, it still is complete enough for developers to develop in Croquet. Croquet itself is written in Squeak, a branch of the Smalltalk language. Please remember to download Croquet via BitTorrent, which provides faster speeds and won't overload the server." The idea is ambitious: An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it. Croquet's license is blessedly simple, too.
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Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release More

Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release

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  • Corquet License (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:04AM (#10502916)
    croquet license

    Copyright (c) 2002-2004 by Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc. and other individual, corporate, and institutional contributors who have collectively contributed elements of the CroquetTM software code to the Croquet Project. CroquetTM is a trademark of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc..

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
    • Looks simple, all right. I'd interpret the two paragraphs to mean:

      You can do anything you like.

      You can't stop others from doing anything they like.

      That's the GPL in a nutshell. I like it.

      • Looks more like the BSD license to me..

        • You can do anything you like.

          You can't stop others from doing anything they like.

          Looks more like the BSD license to me.

          Well, the BSD license would say:

          You can do anything you want.

          You can stop others from doing anything they want.

          That's the essential difference between the GPL and the BSD licenses: you can fork BSD and take it proprietary (the proprietary part is the part where you stop others from doing whatever they want, like distributing your fork.).

          The BSD license gives you the freedom to

          • Ok. With BSD You *can* stop others from doing anything they want but with GPL you *DO* stop others from doing anything (including taking it proprietary) they want. I see.

          • [Great-grandparent]

            You can do anything you like.

            You can't stop others from doing anything they like.
            [Grandparent] Looks more like the BSD license to me.

            [Parent]Well, the BSD license would say:

            • You can do anything you want.
            • You can stop others from doing anything they want.

            YAWN. At least try to be creative if you start a GPL vs. BSD flamewar.

            You are really engaged in a battle of definitions here on what "You can stop others from doing anything they want" means. Ultimately, it boils down to your differ

            • To add my two cents, I would say that enslaving a human being is morally bad and has been accepted so for a long time. That is because humans have a brains and are alive.

              Code is not, however. And I despise people that say: "(...) re-release a fork under a proprietary license, effectively stopping others from doing what they want"

              Because is is essentially false. You have code A, under a BSD license. Company X forks and start working on the A code. It does not prevent anyone to work with the code A. Code A

          • I'm sorry, how does the BSD give you the freedom to restrict the freedoms of others? It only gives you the freedom to restrict the source code itself - and even then, only your particular instantiation of the code. It doesn't allow you to retroactively revoke the license, for example.

            The BSD grants freedom to the programmer. The GPL grants freedom to the source. That is, essentially, the long and short of it.

      • Re:Corquet License (Score:3, Insightful)

        by XemonerdX ( 242776 )
        That's the GPL in a nutshell.
        No it's not. You must make the source code available under the GPL, not so with this one. As pointed out, more similar to BSD than GPL.
        • You must make the source code available under the GPL, not so with this one.

          Excellent point. It's early yet, here, I missed that.

          You have the freedom to do anything, but without the source code, you might have a hard time using that freedom. I guess that's why the GPL goes that one step farther.

          You must enable others to use their freedom

          I guess I should have said ``most of the GPL in a nutshell''.

    • Re:Corquet License (Score:5, Funny)

      by ceeam ( 39911 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:28AM (#10503132)
      Does not beat DWTFYW license (my fave):

      http://sam.zoy.org/projects/COPYING.WTFPL [zoy.org]

      (Pioneered by WindowMaker?)
    • This is the MIT license.
    • Wow, this looks really cool. I am going to mess around with it when I get home.

      The site is actually doing fairly well right now but I put up the torrent on GFP2P here [guiltfreep2p.com]

  • Hm... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zxv ( 815649 )
    Sure, it looks really cool. But i cant understand how something like that would allow you to work effeciently..

    • Re:Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:45AM (#10503263)
      Wow how can you miss the point by so much? (Honest I don't work for croquet) There are plenty of novelty 3d desktops, but this one is a real 3d workspace. The command line is essentially one dimension, the gui is two; think how much more the 2-dimensional-gui made possible in terms of complex representations of different information in an organised, customisable fashion, with quick, easy access to a wide variety of readily identifiable options.

      Naturally as we are built to use the third dimension of our spacial brain, we can handle and organise, more complex visual information than we are getting from our computers, the 2 dimensional desktop restricts how much we can at once access without our inteface getting cluttered, it's restricting how quickly we can recognise and choose one of many directions or locations, and it's more boring.

      Here is how you can work more efficiently:
      - One interface to move quickly between any resource or application on the network.
      - Same interface to work collaboratively, controlling any application along with other people anywhere in the world.
      - Be more aware of all the things that are open, as they will have a 3d spatial reality in your mind and therefore it will be easier to remember their presence as this is how we are wired. You will instinctively know what is "around you", and this will allow having more open/nearby at once.
      - Be less frustrated by how much time and work it takes you to view/manipulate all the information you need in a 2 dimensional plan.

      Did you check out all the screenshots?

      Also, it's open source, which essentially means if it takes off it will never die, and if it's looks like it has great potential (and it takes off), it will eventually fulfill it.

    • Gee, and I thought Muse [musecorp.com] had this concept well in hand.

      Maybe I missed the point, but it seems like there are a ton of great web-based 3D user environments [3dlinks.com].

      Oh, but wait, it's based on some offshoot of an esoteric language! Now that's innovative.
      • No, Muse is close, but it doesn't cover the same scope. Activeworlds was the only one that stood out on the other list - essentially just a MMORPG where you pay just for the servers, and are expected to donate the content.

        Both are proprietary, and more limited. Croquet has a much grander scope than either. It's not planned as 3d web, but a multi-user, multi-machine operating system with a 3d interface.

  • Sigh... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by RandUser ( 799024 )
    So many new languages, so little time...

    • Re:Sigh... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ceeam ( 39911 )
      Smalltalk is new? Well, man, you owe it yourself. And it's rather simple really. Check it out. Even if you won't write in it you will be enlightened about what OOP _really_ is about.

    • Squeak is designed to be *easy* (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:38AM (#10503207)
      The kind of easy you can give to children and complete beginners who've never seen a computer before. You can get into it as deeply as you like, it's basically smalltalk.

      e.g.
      http://www.squeakland.org/

      It should really be the default development environment for normal users on Linux desktops.

      • Smalltalk is the default scripting language for the GNUStep desktop environment, due to it's similarity with Objective-C (or rather, Objective-C's similarity with Smalltalk). Basically, Smalltalk gives you everything Objective-C gives you, plus garbage collection. There are even some OpenStep bindings available for Smalltalk, which gives a really nice development environment. Squeak has some particularly nice implementation tweaks, like a single integer type. This defaults to being whatever the smallest
    • y'know, i have felt this sentiment as well, many times over the years, but I still go back to the lanuage i've done most work in.

      (C, for me..)

      it seems to me that yes, more language is fantastic, woohoo! yay for the new shit!

      but it also seems that history hasn't taught us tech-fetishists the lessons of the futility of perpetual 'new word' thinking.

      face it, you have to to be a real hardcore fetishist to think that more language is good for anything.. use what you've got to make what you need!

    • I think it's a shame that many people will think Smalltalk is a new language. It's funny how so many younger languages are simply trying to reach the level of usability that Smalltalk has had for, in computing time, forever.

      Smalltalk has been around for over twenty years, and has contributed many of the ideas that we work with today. Java is, in some ways, the bastard child of C++ and Smalltalk. Objective-C (Mac OS X) uses Smalltalk's messaging semantics for object oriented programming.

      I've just starte

  • Neat Admin Graphics? (Score:5, Funny)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:09AM (#10502960)
    I'd like the admin tool icon to be a mallet, and kicking users off should be the users 'ball' being whacked thru the 'exit' wicket.

  • this is great stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:09AM (#10502962)
    By sharing a 3D space with avatars you can create some interesting things.

    For example, someone enters your croquet space and you open up a local chess app which appears before you both and you can have a game of chess. And yet the chess program is not network aware. This is phenomenally cool and has all sorts of applications.

    I know it's been done before in things like "moove" but I think it's rad to have your smb share as a "room" which people can enter. The rooms then have unix-like privelages. So there is a root "machine room" the door to which only authenticated users can enter. And you could have terminals that "float" along with you that only you can see.

    It is the next paradigm shift for certain multi-user applications. Sending a freind an file over IM is more of a question of leaping through a hyper-portal and throwing an object over to them. Or they might in your croquet space and you wouldn't have to "give" it to them at all, they'd just see it there in front of them.

    Endless possibilities.

    • Re:this is great stuff (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Err me again, one of the coolest things I've ever wanted for 3d spaces (games included in this) is that voice chat does not come over a seperate "channel" but instead eminates from a persons avatar just as their normal voice would.

      If some programmer could impliment that into croquet for me, it would be the killer voip app too. It'd be the killer colaboration app.

      Could be the newst thing on the linux desktop.

      Only unix-like systems are set up to have so many local yet restricted guests, windows has miles

    • It is the next paradigm shift

      uh-oh

    • This will require a shift in the way that concepts are handled. For example, an avater represents a user and not an account. Say you are playing that game of chess in your 3D world, and your young female opponent wishes to do something using a different set of privileges. They can't just su root and reappear a giant elephant stamping around, just to answer the virtual door or whatever. That would be as confusing as anything.
      Hence, privilges need to be handled almost like a bunch of virtual keys, or a to

  • Hot Goat (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dolphy ( 569457 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:09AM (#10502965)
    This release will be noteworthy to both developers and end users who just want to see "see what it's like". Soon after getting Slashdotted so long ago, Croquet.org removed the download and (basically) hasn't updated since. The vast majority of the (casual) interest in the project had to be stemmed off until now. As such, I'm sure we can expect the site to get hit with both old techies who never got a chance to see it, as well as new ones who are just hearing about it for the first time.

  • Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:10AM (#10502972) Journal
    I've never understood what makes 3D environments better than 2D for applications and input devices made for 2D displays. In my opinion, the new spatial dimension you can move through is what makes it bad since it takes longer time to accomplish tasks.

    Is it really more convenient to collaborate like this than just via a web conference or something?

    Obviously someone see advantages here, or they wouldn't put so much effort into these projects.
    • This could be the beginning of William Gibson's: "Cyberspace" or Neal Stephenson's: "Metaverse"...

      I'm so looking forward to see what comes next...
    • Perhaps the guiding factor is not the convenience of the interface, but rather the intuitiveness of the interface. If you "feel at home", as it were, with the layout and controls of the system it's quite possible that you could work faster than with a standard 2D desktop.

      The key here is to provide more than just moving graphics and floating windows. If they developers are able to actually present new methods of functionality, rather than just representing old ways in an extra dimension, I have no doubts

      • I've never understood what makes 3D environments better than 2D for applications and input devices made for 2D displays. In my opinion, the new spatial dimension you can move through is what makes it bad since it takes longer time to accomplish tasks.

        Perhaps the guiding factor is not the convenience of the interface, but rather the intuitiveness of the interface.

        To be honest, most 3D environments I've worked with feel horribly un-intuitive when I have to use them through a 2D interface. There are two exc

    • I think that 3D environments are only worse than 2D when you are using 2D input controls. I think that 3D environments will be better, but our control interfaces need to improve along with our visual interface.
    • The rationale is the same as that for the GUI. It allows you to work in a more logical manner. Does it make more sense to go looking through a folder hierarchy, or to send your avatar down to the file room? The primary application for this (besides porn) to me is enterprise management. You could code locations with their URL or whatever, and then you could just hop into the virtual world, and access the PC that occupies the same physical space as the one you're working on. CA Unicenter-TNG tries to do this
    • I would like a communication tool that allowed several users to look at the same 2 dimensional x-window, while controlling one mouse each. Preferably they should communicate via voice.

      Anyway, the croquet screenshots don't look very usable, but I part of the reason is that todays computer screens have too few pixels. It takes a lot of pixels to rotate a 2D-picture nicely in 3D. In 10 years Croquet be much more useful.

      • It just takes about 4 times as much pixels to rotate a 2d picture. Or 4000 pixels (about the eyes dominant part resoluction) at the right distance.
    • 2d displays are there because we use 2d info.
      The 2d, bounded interface we know from centuries, the sheet of paper. Every action we do on a computer, we have to learn it in 2d before we can acomplish it.

      We don't use 3d interfaces because they are useless. When the become useful, it will make sense to use 3d displays and input devices. This is good, because we aleady know the 3d interface, without having to re-learn anything. Plus, on top of that, we can use the 2d interface, so we don't lose anything.
      Plus,

    • Exactly! (Score:2)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      I've never understood what makes 3D environments better than 2D for applications and input devices made for 2D displays. In my opinion, the new spatial dimension you can move through is what makes it bad since it takes longer time to accomplish tasks.

      YES! This is one part of William Gibson's cyberpunk future that I never understood, and the same reason I instantly roll my eyes every time I hear some dot-com company talking about building "cyberspace." I do not want cyber space. And neither do you.

      If

  • Torrents (Score:5, Informative)

    by jaaron ( 551839 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:11AM (#10502978) Homepage
    Windows [croquetproject.org]
    Mac [croquetproject.org]
    Linux [croquetproject.org]


    Though they want you to agree to the license before you can get to those links.

  • Eh? (Score:2, Funny)

    by AnswerIs42 ( 622520 )
    'Croquet', 'Jasmine', 'Squeak', 'Smalltalk' ???

    What is this ... new code that women talk in now?

    This sounds like it was made for females and "girly men"... I don't drive cars made for women (all you guys driving PT Crusiers should know that ;)) and I wont use a developing tool made for them either!

    Now, if you will excuse me.. my wife is calling.

    • all you guys driving PT Crusiers should know that

      Dude, the Slashdot Cruiser is about the most un-chick-friendly car evar . Women won't go within fifty feet of the thing!

  • naive developers (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Shared open-source central repository for storage and retrieval of all created and modified objects, allowing naïve 3D developers to leverage the distributed expertise of Croquet's large-scale networked community

    Read: porn repository for aspiring 3D designers unaware of the finer points of the human anatomy.

  • Hmmmm. (Score:2, Funny)

    by SatanicPuppy ( 611928 )
    "Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted."

    And since we hate the bastards, lets do it to 'em again!

    Seriously. Ouch.

  • Alan Kay (Score:5, Informative)

    by VP ( 32928 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:17AM (#10503046)
    It looks like one of the project leaders is Alan Kay, whose team at Xerox developed the "window and mouse" interface...

  • Croquet being based on Squeak Smalltalk .. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crovira ( 10242 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:18AM (#10503052) Homepage
    gives me some hope for the eventual acceptance of the language, though I realize that its like HP's RPN calculators. Most people never 'got it' and they bought calculators with an = sign.

    When the facination with code objects is over ("the faster the better" erupts from the Microsoft quarter, "we can't make as much money from new code as we can from old code") the world will begin to realize the importance of object relationships, object states and state machines and its effect on used interfaces.

    Data structure is fine but it needs to be married to the articulation (partly in the GAAP sense of the word) of inter object relationships through an intermediary of a state machine and projected onto a 3D GUI like Croquet.

    • Too bad this industry is hellbent on re-inventing things every ten years or so.

      Was there any need to invent new languages after smalltalk, lisp and C? It's amazing how much those languages got right how much more "modern" languages mess up in trying to re-invent those langauges.
      • Furthering a personal bugbear (apologies), which of those languages deals with concurrency in a non-bodged manner?

        Aside from that, the wide variety of languages allows them to be specified for particular uses. For example, doing text-based conversions between files is something that Perl is perfectly suited to, and well worth using over other languages. I'm sure many other languages have similar applications.

  • Croquet == YAWN-OS (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:27AM (#10503126)
    Yet Another Wonderful New Operating System...

  • I'm afraid of new languages (Score:4, Funny)

    by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:29AM (#10503145) Journal
    I've always heard the rules for Croquet were really complicated.

    How does it handle run time exceptions, like sticky wickets?

    No, wait, that's Cricket.

    I'm so confused. :(

  • Demo'd at Freenix (Score:5, Informative)

    by po8 ( 187055 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:45AM (#10503274)

    Dave Reed did an extensive Croquet demo at the Freenix Track of the Usenix ATC this year. Seemed really cool, but at the time was too buggy to be usable. Basically, Croquet lets you put all kinds of interesting workspaces in a collaborative 3D virtual world: sort of the logical completion of the virtual world description languages that were popular some years ago. Must be a Smalltalk guru to play, it looks like. Has a fancy synchronization protocol that takes care of most lag issues.

    Let's hope that the bugs are sufficiently out that we can have big fun with this. I'm looking forward to trying it.

  • Timothy says:

    Croquet's license is blessedly simple, too.

    The license says:

    Copyright (c) 2002-2004 by Viewpoints Research Institute... Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Softw

    • Um... this is Smalltalk. The binary CAN be readily merged and modified.

      It is rather difficult to distribute a Squeak application that DOESN'T allow modification and merging.

      The only issue is the "distribution" part.

      Ratboy.
    • The license you find troublingly ambiguous is also known as the MIT License [opensource.org]. It's identical. And the MIT License has been used for years on many successful software products. Is is as well-honed as the Modified BSD license? Not quite, but some people seem to prefer it because it's so damned simple. What part of "deal without restriction" and "including, without limitation" don't you understand? It means do whatever you want as long as you keep the Copyright notice intact somewhere in the software.

      Th

  • I left my mission statement paperweight in the sun (Score:3, Insightful)

    by julesh ( 229690 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:52AM (#10503339)
    An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it.

    Anybody else feel buzzword overload coming on?

  • I just imagined .. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ciupman ( 413849 ) <luis.pintoNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @10:07AM (#10503448) Homepage
    .. listening music though my virtual xmms player. The player could be or not attached to my avatar position, in case i wanted the music to folow me or not .. the sound would have 3d positioning (routed somewhat from the real xmms application to a crocket sound output interface), anyone who "aproachs" my avatar would start listening to music gradually (only if the sound output is activated from their side).. This thing has millions of applications, and imho, is the only 3d desktop that would make sence, why? Because of it's resource sharing with others.. This is way too cool! ;)

  • Croquet demo video (Score:5, Informative)

    by cabinessence ( 72339 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @10:21AM (#10503560)
    You can find some great video clips of Alan Kay demoing Croquet here [lisarein.com]. Well worth watching, this is much more than just a 3D desktop.
  • I honestly thought I'd sen the last of them. After the last time they came up on slashdot I couldn't find ANYTHING from them other than a VERY out dated release.

    I honestly think they are the best implimentation of a 3D desktop environment to date. I like the idea of gateways and their ideas for networking seem to be well ahead of current technology.

    My only fear is that they will not get major backing. People will consider them to far in the future and too different to lend them support. A program li

  • Ok, so this is written in Squeak, which is a branch of smalltalk. The last time I ran it, (and mind you that was WAY back), I had to download a new environment that ran on my existing desktop. Now I have to wonder if there are too many layers between the hardware and croquet for it to really function well performance or otherwise as an operating system. Does corquet need to be a little more independant? Programmers out there, please enlighten me.
    • It's a VM. Just like any other VM.
    • From the Squeak website:

      Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change.

      When you start the Squeak VM you specify a binary image file to load. The default image launches a graphical desktop with a bunch of demo programs and all the tools necessary to start developing.

      The desktop can be run in a window in your current desktop but I think the idea is that you'd run it full screen in place o
  • I have not looked too much at the developer's classes yet (just a few minutes in the Squeak Smalltalk class browser), but I have had time to just play with in the 3D environment.

    In brief, Croquet is component based and allows you to construct 3D environments quickly (?learning curve?) with moving objects, portals into other 3D spaces, access to the external world with web browsers, your own Squeak applications, etc.

    I have been waiting for the new version of Croquet with some anticipation (several web blog

  • some personal comments, all negative (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hakubi_Washu ( 594267 ) <robert...kosten@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @10:43AM (#10503743)
    As the subject says, this post will highlight some of my impressions, which are all-in-all negative. Not because I think a 3d desktop is ineffective, but because I think _this_ specific implementation of the idea sucks, pardon my language, major ass.
    Why? Let's see:
    • The one huge PITA for me is the navigation. The mouse interface is as disturbing as it can get. If I had a joypad connected, the up=forward system would make perfect sense, but this way I automatically tend to navigate as in _any_ 3D-Shooter. I could adapt, granted, but where is the actual gain? Why is navigating this way supposed to be better?
    • Most icons are not very intuitive, be that trained or natural intuition. I can figure how to move, rotate, activate, close and focus those windows, but most of the icons in the menu are absolutely beyond me. Some do nothing, some crash something, some spawn world objects that don't have a closing icon, etc. Tooltips _and_ at least a minimum documentation would be neat... And don't you point me at their getting started section. Have you actually read that? It wasn't much, so the average slashdotter should have been able to...
    • How do I get a mozilla window? Or, for that matter, any application? Maybe it is my inability to use the menu icons right, but, if screenshots show off with a webbrowser open, then I expect, even in a developer's version, to be able to easily repeat that.
    • Runtime environment. Not much to add, I guess. I have a personal dislike for anything that looks like the kindergarten-gaudy version of drag'n'drop your code. Hell, even QBasic looks more professional. It might be the best language/codebase for the purpose, but it sure looks stupid...
    • My last point: Sharing userspace over network. I theory this is great. Having the ability to cyberspace parts of my system is way cool for cooperative work, etc. BUT (big but here) only when I can absolutely retain the ability to seal the rest of my system from intruders. Same problem as shared directories: In theory, great. In realita? Security holes amass. If everyone was an enlightened and good person this weren't an issue, but, statistically, everyones a script-kiddie. So, please, give me a)private-by-default and b)clear indication when a network connection exists, including the ability to turn any such conectivity off, ok?
    I hope some people will comment! This post is not intended as flamebait, you know... :-)
  • Looking through the screen shots, I gotta say it makes me think of "reboot", that 3D tv show.

  • How would I use this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @10:47AM (#10503775)
    I read some of the FAQ and looked at all the pretty screenshots, and I'm impressed and excited by the possibilities; this is the first 3d-space idea that "works" for me in that it doesn't seem (completely) gratuitous and looks like it would work quite well in a sharing-based environment.

    But what I'm looking for is, well, more. For example, they don't tackle (or I didn't understand it) storage or organization of multiple portals (storage meaning "where do you find it in the space", not where is it on a disk). And then, if I have multiple portals for different things, how can I arrange them and subsequently, find them quickly in the space. All those floating windows gotta live somewhere. :)

  • Reminds me of that scene in Jurassic Park:
    "I know this...this is a Unix system!"

    On the one hand...
    -- there are knowledge domains in which 3D is a genuine improvement
    -- likewise, there are domains in which collaboration is useful.

    But the screenshots fail to demonstrate the need for merging the two, in the form of 3d-ization of the participants.
    -- as discussed in other recent /. stories, the benefit of a rotatable 3D rendering of a 2D object (like a browser window or an avatar) is dubious.
    -- a flat 2D prese
    • I agree with you, but I've been thinking about it some more and think the idea really does have potential.

      A 2D list of names is just that, 2D. Today what we have is the equivilant of an infinitely changing piece of paper where it suddenly updates to indicate Joe is online, and you can chat it up with him in a 2D window.

      But in a 3D environment, Joe appears as an avatar and you can, in addition to chatting with him using voice and video (hey, let's be totally futuristic here), you can then actually walk him
  • I think it's great that the Croquet project is making their ideas concrete and that they are putting them out there. Only by building lots of prototypes and systems can one see what works and what doesn't.

    Having said that, I suspect most people will not find Croquet useful for day-to-day work. But, again, they have put something on the table that one can discuss and criticize, and that's a lot more than can be said for a lot of other innovators. Some ideas and concepts from their system will surely surv
  • Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Operating System?
  • The point of this that shouldn't be missed is that this is a tool for communication and information exchange.

    Many things are accomplished with greater ease in the flattened down two dimensions of most applications, but talking to someone or trying to express an idea is sometimes cumbersome what all you have is text and flat images at your disposal. THAT is why multimedia is such a big deal.

    I think this sort of technology could really take off in terms of person to person idea exchange.

    If you set aside th

  • Not for Mouse & Screen (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fygment ( 444210 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @07:09PM (#10509172)
    Many comments so far seem to grouse about the limitations of the 3-D interface vice the 2-D interface. Instead think about such an OS with head mounted display [wearcam.org] and gesture recognition [webopedia.com] technology. Now you're talking about an immersive computer experience and croquet would seem to be a good step in that direction.
  • Uh, Second Life anyone? :) Already off and running.

    http://www.secondlife.com/

  • Matrix without the plugs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AmVidia HQ ( 572086 ) <(gfung) (at) (me.com)> on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @06:24AM (#10512131) Homepage
    After going through the screenshots and faq, wow this is revolutionary. It really re-thinks the way we interact, not only with the pc, but with other over the internet. It really utilizes all the broadband and graphics capability our pc and internet offers today, instead of the same old 2d windows and mouse interface which was conceived before any of these are available.

    Croquet spaces to me is like the convergence of MMORPGs and the WWW. A 3d OS which by its very nature becomes a browser to the interweb.

    Now imagine a Doom engine version of this! Where you walk into one room to talk to your boss and clients at work, to another to interact with profs and peers at some part time class, and another to do some fragging. All in one continuous virtual reality.

    I'm applauded by some bad comments here. I don't think many understands the revotionary practicality this may bring as an extension to our world offline. This is the Matrix, without the realism made possible by plugs into your head.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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