Croquet 2 Play

What happens when a massively multi-player environment has millions of participants?

Right now only World of Warcraft can ask this now and the answer so far amounts to “Houston, we have a problem”:

“I don’t know how much I fault (Blizzard), since many of my own companies have had scaling problems,” said Joi Ito, a venture capitalist who has put money into well-known online outfits such as Technorati, and who runs a WoW guild–or team–filled with other tech executives and well-known bloggers. “However, the uptime is really not (at an acceptable) level for a real commercial service, so I hope they get better.”

‘World of Warcraft’ Battles Server Problems

In order for this collaboration in 3D paradigm to become the next web, it has to scale better, much better. This is the real potential upside Croquet’s network architecture promises to uncork:

We propose a combination of the peer-to-peer networking present in Croquet with a distributed mesh of Worldbase servers acting as metadata and object repositories and a layer of Interactivity servers. The Interactivity servers provide persistence for locales within the virtual space and integration with existing federated authentication infrastructures.

A Croquet related discussion of Dump The World Wide Web is relevant here.

New Media Consortium staff held a meeting in Second Life. One of the staffers makes a good case for why audio chat is more effective for some things than text:

Most communication in SL is via a text chat, where anyone in proximity can see what you have to “say”. Chat comes with its own mode of communication, abbreviations, typos, but most noticeable, the overhead of focusing on the keyboard. On the “NMC Island” we are also using TeamSpeak, a server based audio application that allows us to create “channels” where we can communicate via audio in an external application, and the channels are associate with different “places”. We have also used some Skype conferencing and it makes a huge difference to be able to have audio communication “why do I keep flying into the ceiling?”, “Which way is the meeting room?”, “Why is your skin so blue?” that is better as you can focus your concentration in the navigation and interaction, not typing conversations.

Since Croquet has audio chat built in, it’s much easier to do this kind of integration and more.

shared simulations in spatial environments in order to achieve a collaborative build/use environment with social presence.

Howard sums it up nicely with several more links to hands-on experiences and screenshots.

Thanks and congratulations! Mark McCahill has posted some some videos where you can see the new version in action. What’s notable in them is demonstration of the p2p persistent collaborative stuff from which the future of computing will unfold. There’s a 142 page that comes with the download(NOTE: the Croquet Programming document on the site is an earlier version) with a good bit of new information and another new and valuable paper on Virtual Presence. The screenshots on the OpenCroquet.org home page and David Smith’s new Qwaq site hint at new UI stuff not in 1.0 … hmmm.

Actually here … well, I’m downloading it now … the web site has a new look and at least some new material … stay tuned!

About a week ago, David Smith said something’s coming and yesterday Julian Lombardi said very soon! The recent screenshot doesn’t give any hints but it’s good evidence to have in hand that the 1.0 SDK is nearing release.

These are the voyages of Laurence Rozier a long time student of Dr. Funkencode in my 25th year of a mission to boldly explore space and cyberspace through Smalltalk programming. This blog is a catch-all for things relating to Croquet with an emphasis on news, basic usage and coding tips/issues.