Slashdot Mirror
Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release
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.
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.
Sure, it looks really cool. But i cant understand how something like that would allow you to work effeciently..
So many new languages, so little time...
here
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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Though they want you to agree to the license before you can get to those links.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
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.
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.
I do not know of many people who want their word processor to be at 3D angles.
"Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted."
And since we hate the bastards, lets do it to 'em again!
Seriously. Ouch.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It looks like one of the project leaders is Alan Kay, whose team at Xerox developed the "window and mouse" interface...
The screenshots reminded me of the old PC game called Neuromancer (based on the world created by Gibson).
Seems to me that the Croquet project takes us closer to realizing the true meaning of Cyberspace as envisioned by Gibson.
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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OMG, have you checked the screenshots? Aside from the collaboration stuff, the "seeing one world through another" looks awesome! The last one (the oone with the forest aqueduct) looks as good as any current game. And this is a framework? Wow!
Now if they only supported OpenGL stereo, this could really be big.
onlyjoking.com/torrentmirror.torrent
liqbase
Yet Another Wonderful New Operating System...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How does it handle run time exceptions, like sticky wickets?
No, wait, that's Cricket.
I'm so confused. :(
--- Ban humanity.
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.
Deleted
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.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Gee, and I thought Muse 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.
Oh, but wait, it's based on some offshoot of an esoteric language! Now that's innovative.
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?
The system seems to be synchronous at the core. Unfortunately, you probably won't be able to cut a hole in private servers and depend on lag to bypass the security. You're going to have to go somewhere else if you want to play Hiro.
I was just tinkering around on their website. And all I can say is this technology has some amazing possibilities. I'm a gamer (proud of it) for a couple of decades now. I've always dreamed of the capability of things like VR.
:P It might even end the linux/windows flamewars :P
I think this platform just from the look and feel of the point they are trying to make. That this platform or a varient might be the answer. I really hope this technology takes off. I think we will find it highly expandable and adaptable in the long run.
And who knows
(Here's to wishfull thinking)
.. 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! ;)
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Oh please. The main post was filled with enough marketspeak and buzzwords to choke a Microsoft Marketing Rep. Tell me what it does. Tell me why it is unique or 'cool'. Tell me what problem it solves or why it is an innovation.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
...the admins suck at virtual croquet? Then we'd have users that can't be kicked; anarchy would rule!
:)
Actually, I kind of like the idea of admining a system with a video game
You can find some great video clips of Alan Kay demoing Croquet here. Well worth watching, this is much more than just a 3D desktop.
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 like this needs backing akin to KDE or Gnome. They could also use corporate backing. (Hey sun, drop mad hatter, your quasi 3D environment and pick up something that might become the evolution of computing).
I do security
"Anybody else feel buzzword overload coming on?"
Cut down on caffine. The buzzing will go away.
You had me at "Smalltalk"
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.
I do security
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 blogs recently on Croquet) - now I need to get some time to experiment with writing some code.
It's a paradigm!
And one can be quite productive in it too.
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 different interpretations who is meant by "you". Grandparent refers to the original developer, you refer to everybody else who might be repackaging things under a proprietary license. Technically, grandparent is right, because the license on a piece of software is issued by the developer. If you are releasing something under the BSD or Croquet license, you can't stop others from doing anything they like.
Grandparent says the BSD license means that you as a developer have very little means of stopping from doing what they want with your software including forking it. This is correct. You (Parent) say that the BSD license means that the recipient of said software can re-release a fork under a proprietary license, effectively stopping others from doing what they want. This is also correct, however you are not talking about the BSD license any more, as you are rereleasing it under a different license now. The BSD license gives you that freedom. It is up to you to determine if you consider that freedom a bad thing.At this point, you are engaged in a debate that is based solely on the fact that you have different definitions of "freedom" and whether freedom should include freedom to restrict freedom. This is a highly academic debate on principles that is not leading anywhere by itself; partly because there is no "solution", partly because it will mislead you to equate all instances of problems to which these definitions of freedom are applicable. The situation is different in the case of slavery vs. the case of software, because slavery and software are different things, and everybody will agree on this, no matter what definition of freedom you are applying.
The BSD license gives you a right that the GPL doesn't give: the right of rerelease under a different license. Nobody will deny that. Whether that's a good thing or not or whether you want to consider the BSD license or the GPL "freer" is up to you, but here, there's no easy way to decide by means of logic alone.
Comparing this with slavery is a very bad case of argument by moral equivalence; it's bad because the moral equivalence isn't really there, unless you equate the freedom to rerelease software with the freedom to keep slaves. Do you consider these to be morally equivalent?
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
You could look at the FAQ and the screenshots for starters. Or maybe even download it and try it out.
The bottom line of the project is this: using everything we know now about the evolution of operating systems, user interfaces, and the internet, if we could start over and create a new platform that leveraged the network and all the capabilities of modern technology and our current knowledgebase, how would we do it?
This project attempts to answer that question, and it's pretty phenomenal.
This is the excuse I need to get one of those fancy graphics cards.
I can play TuxRacer in winter, and Croquet in summer!
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.
I do security
And note that nowhere in that description is the words "operating" and "system".
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.
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 started working with Smalltalk after years of Objective-C and Java. Smalltalk used to be hideously expensive, but several environments are available either open source (Squeak, GNU Smalltalk) or with non commercial licenses (Cincom). It's an amazing language, very natural. Almost a relief after the convultions of static typing, and languages designed by a committee. We all went down the Algol family of languages -- but now we have enough computing power to use something better.
Squeak - Croquet's environment - at first looks like a 1980's GUI - but is a rich development environment in its own right. Squeak images work on every major platform - write once, run everywhere. Give Smalltalk and Squeak a chance, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find such a useful development environment.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
"It should really be the default development environment for normal users on Linux desktops."
Why isn't it bundled with any distributions?
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.
Reminds me of that scene in Jurassic Park:
/. stories, the benefit of a rotatable 3D rendering of a 2D object (like a browser window or an avatar) is dubious.
"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
-- a flat 2D presentation quite adequately handles "multi-user presence" or collaboration,
for example a simple text list of who else is online, or 2D icons with 2D graphics to indicate their current state. I don't see the benefit of the cute rabbit avatars in 3D.
Think of it this way: when you're in a theatre watching a film, how important is it to you, to be able to *see* the people around you?
And, as for collaborative business meetings where telepresence is important, isn't it more useful to use a conventional multi-camera video-conference with a robust white-board capability?
Summary: the screen-shots are kewl, but I see little here which is *simultaneously* new & useful.
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 survive, no matter what happens to Croquet itself.
The thing I think people should think about is which of these concepts can be carried over into X11-based desktops: X11 already has a lot of the functionality needed for making applications mobile and collaborative (in fact, that was the original vision of X11 20 years ago). If people are serious about it, some of the most interesting and useful functionality from Croquet could, for example, form the basis of Gnome 4.0.
Croquet's needs the Squeak VM to run (at least, currently). Unfortunately, there's some debate over whether the Squeak License (which is from Disney, out of Apple) is free or not.
Here's a thread on the problem, linked to in the middle of the conversation, where Alan Kay is giving his own reasonable, but perhaps a bit naive interpretation, that licenses don't matter - yet.
"Was there any need to invent new languages after smalltalk, lisp and C?"
For parallel processing machines? Yes.
Also you forgot Forth and Oberon, as well as Eiffel.
The 3D aspect will come into it's own when the rest of the world has built the infrastructure to support it. Just imagine, 3D and the semantic web were your browsing not only concepts but meaning and relationships. Maybe even history.
Smalltalk is an environment in which you directy interact with obejcts. Like a lisp machine.
/grow/ it.
You see a window ? Click on it, ask for a separate window with the source code, change it, the other window changes as you type. The windows are just some graphical representation for an underlying abstraction.
This have very deep implications. You don't really design software, you
GUI is just a way to present the information that is inside you virtual machine. You like this window ? Click on it, duplicate, you have two of them now. Check squeak, it is way way cool.
The closest thing would be NeXT^W Apple's Interface Builer. But interface builder itself is built on top of the whole Foundation and Appkit framework, while the Squeak virtual machine is written in itself.
Now, if you play a bit with squeak, you'll see that the object paradigm is really really powerfull, but that you are limited by your virtual image. Like some sort of sandbox, in which you create objects (like code) to play with, but where you have troubles to give them to someone else (you can, but it is painfull and don't really fit with the paradigm)
So, take that virtual image, and make the UI 3D, so you really work with the objects (this is Alice, which was a smalltalk thing, but they decided to rewrite it in java, which make it irrelevant).
Then, you connect all those visual together, to create a world-wide running image. From one image, you can actually see the other ones throught portal. Your 'avatar' can them move from one sandbox to another. Some wrote some cool code ? You can get into its image and play with it.
This is croquet. The possibilities are endless. If this works, it is the future of the web.
If I remember correctly, the thing that made the Internet -- and the Web in particular -- so miraculous and revelatory was the degree to which it reduced the distance between you and information. No longer would you have to travel to some other city to visit a library to find a given book (or report or whatever) -- and yes, kids, we really used to do things like that. Instead, it can all (potentially) appear instantly on your screen.
Email, also -- I recently started up real-paper correspondence with a penpal in Sweden. I bet a lot of you have forgotten how odd it can be to communicate when there's a time difference of a minimum of 5 days between every exchange. (And 5 days is in the good new days. In the good old days, it might have taken a couple of weeks just to transport the letter).
So who wants "cyberspace"? What's the point of it? We've successfully eliminated these spatial barriers that used to exist, and yet I keep coming across people who seem to think there's actually a market to rebuild the barriers in simulation. Truly, I do not get it.
Breakfast served all day!
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 the computational usefulness of computers for a moment (not a small aspect I know), then the major purpose of our IT is communication and information exchange.
I think the idea is an old one whose realization should be encouraged and welcomed.
Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Java? You need to broaden your horizons man.
...can it control Jurassic Park?
in bed.
I know nothing of forth except that it's very old and has proven itself to be quite capable over the years.
I messed with oberon once and wasn't really impressed all that much. Same with Eiffel which seemed derivative and not innovative.
evil is as evil does
Engelbart invented the mouse, but his application was a fullscreen, text-only hypertext system. Smalltalk was, IIRC, the first programming environment to include not only the mouse but a graphical display with overlapping windows, scrollbars, title bars, icons, and all the usual decoration.
Whoever modded this offtopic is an illiterate clod.
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 and gesture recognition technology. Now you're talking about an immersive computer experience and croquet would seem to be a good step in that direction.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Uh, Second Life anyone? :) Already off and running.
http://www.secondlife.com/
hookers and grits.
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.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
If that's too much typing for you, yields: http://www.squeakland.org/
Puts a smile on my face, it does.
how sad. Haven't any /.ers ever heard of "Alice in Wonderland"?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.