Croquet 2 Play

An interesting group of people using both platforms.

Although Second Life has some significant architectural and operational issues, it has an established virtual currency economy, strong backing, huge mindshare and can arguably claim to be The World’s Biggest Programming Environment. The latter point is significant - there are a LOT of people and corporations who are choosing to spend significant amounts of time and money in Second Life and who will only switch if there’s a compelling reason.

With all due respect to the authors, Julian Lombardi’s comments and the original Why Second Life Won’t Get A Third article both leave out important information which ironically makes the strongest case for Croquet. The Linden Lab folk know far too well the constraints of their architecture but they also believe they can scale because they are moving away from their highly centralized model towards something more distributed - a page out of the book of Croquet. The new second life grid architecture is evolving in a reasonably open manner(see alsoDavid Jones Notes from OOPSLA). While it won’t ever be as elegant as Croquet, it will address enough of the problems to keep growing the base particularly as the business model shifts to leverage the economic infrastructure. Unless Croquet greatly expands it’s niche, it won’t become a means of creating serious alternatives to Second Life. I believe however that it can and will. In 2008, I expect we’ll see some evidence of Worldbase + Interactivity Server architecture I’ve pointed out before.

In the flow of discussions on my Squeak blog and the Squeak-dev list dealing with issues relating to the tools for editing code I realized that the context was perhaps too constrained to really get to the heart of the matter. In the end, regardless of personal preference, screen real estate and the mechanics of human visualization/cognition are the real drivers of programmer tool effectivness. For the former, virtual desktops and multiple monitors can really help. For the latter I think tools that can mimic the visual models of what the software is attempting to simulate are very useful. For example, some people are using Google maps and 3D in the context of IBM’s collaborative development environment Jazz. More screen real estate helps visualization too. So with relatively inexpensive flat screens available and supported it’s getting easier to get this help. As someone on the Squeak list pointed out bookmarks in the IDE lose their value after a while because you have to manage them(this is true of keyboard short cuts as well) which means more tool code has to be written.

Multiple monitors and visualization are not a panacea but they do provide a lot of free, already written and debugged tools! These tools aren’t perfect but they generally don’t crash! Well, people do get sick and die, but in general, the software running our mind/body systems is very robust and stable. If I start looking/pointing to the wrong screen, I gracefully recover. For you Matrix fans, this is the “your other left” scenario. I sleep but I’ve never done a full system reboot! If I’m not sure what the best arrangement is I can put post-its on the monitors or notes on a whiteboard within view. This approach has been used for a very long time in complex systems where humans are in the loop. In the past half century aerospace and finance come to mind but the practice goes back much further to the art of memory and beyond to ancient Egypt. In the world of ubiquitous computing and locative art I call the meshverse, coding has to move beyond the text editor and even the traditional IDE - it will be come both visual and location oriented at the same time. Imagine a mash-up between the text adventure-like game playsh and Croquet annotations! I am at present working on the infrastructure for such an environment, bits and pieces of which you can see at my BOP Space and GVScript sites. Both of the previous two links are showing Squeak’s Wonderland but if you’ve been here before, you’ve seen earlier versions of the building blocks.

Hi All,

For the time being, I’m disabling comments here while I try to get to the bottom of what appears to be malicious tampering with the site. During this time, you may notice some entries that are blank, but I hope to have the database restored soon.

Thanks for stopping by.

If the size of your .image file has gotten very large without you having saved much work, it is probably due to lingering circular or global references to objects. These objects are referred to as zombies and can enter a zombie state for a host of reasons, but I’ll cover that on my Squeak blog later and link back to here. For now, let’s just deal with how to get rid of them. The first thing to do is to open a Workspace and evaluate:

CroquetHarness cleanup

Next save the image and see if the file size shrunk back to a reasonable level. If not you’ll either have to go zombie hunting or start from a clean image. Sometimes zombie hunting doesn’t produce the results you want. It may be that you’re not looking for the right kind of objects but in other cases, there are just too many zombies of different types and it’s taking a long time to figure out how to untangle them. In either case, if you don’t have any data or graphics bound only to the image, AND your code is reasonably well organized(this doesn’t have to mean Monticello - some projects can be managed well with change sets) the quickest solution may be to just dump the code and load it into a clean image. However, one often learns valuable lessons while zombie hunting so there’s good reason to learn some basic techniques. Read more

The blogosphere is abuzz with PloppSL - even the critics say it’s cool and hope it gets better.  A number of folks point out that it’s free and does something very useful. I’d add that it’s also not a 1.0 release yet. Here are some representative links:

Shiny Life(detailed step-by-step video tutorial)

New World Notes: Sculpties Made Simple

Plopp Second Life: Even a child can do sculpties 

3Greeneggs: Plopp has potential but flops

A new version of Plopp, the Croquet-based 3D painting tool mentioned here this past spring is now available for use with Second Life:

PloppSL allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily. Both texture and model are created in one step. Simply paint the front and back side of your model and it will be converted to a Sculpted Prim by PloppSL.

Second Plopp

I’m most pleased to report (although somewhat belatedly) that HP (Hewlett-Packard) has joined the Croquet Consortium as a founding member and that HP Labs’ Rick McGeer is serving on our growing Board of Directors.

Julian Lombardi’s Blog: HP Joins the Consortium!

Matthew Schmidt has provided a nice intro to launching a Croquet world programmatically. If you found it helpful you may want to view(or review) these pages from the Croquet Consortium site while waiting for his next installment:

• Getting Started: Starting Croquet
• Programming: Simple World

If you’re itching for more right now, you might try to understand what the quick and dirty path has in common with the route taken by Simple World. To do that you need to find out where and how the SimpleWorld class is used. Read more