Croquet 2 Play

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

The popular Biovision Hierarchy(BVH) used for many human avatars(Second Life for example) evolved in the context of motion capture and therefore isn’t usable for creating and animating other creatures. The folks at University of Minnesota have developed a more flexible skeletal animation framework suitable for modeling any type of skeleton. Very nice!

Reviewing Intel CTO Justin Rattner’s recent “The Rise of the 3D Internet” presentation, caused me to wonder if there’s any research on Croquet or even general p2p hardware utilization/performance for virtual worlds. Feel free to reply offline.