Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 11th Mar 2003 19:00 UTC, submitted by Mike Janger
Mike Janger writes: "What is Open Croquet? Alan Kay (one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI, etc.) is working on it. But what IS it? Have you guys looked into it?" I downloaded its 90 MB late last night. It's an 'academic' project featuring a futuristic OS 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on Windows or Mac. It requires a supported 3D accelerator (however, it didn't work with my Voodoo5 in hardware mode so it was painfully slow).
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I use Squeak, as I've mentioned, and I love it. But I have to concede that while I think Croquet is pretty cool, I question it's usefulness.
What can I do in Croquet that I can't do in Squeak? Nothing, really. Not yet, anyway.
But really, if one wanted to, one could run Croquet, open a Squeak project, and just pretend you were in Squeak. It's pretty cool in that respect. I would ASSUME, but I don't know for sure, that things would run faster depending on how good your 2d card was vs your 3d card's 2d functions.
Croquet is going to be great when a lot of people are using it, and everyone's got a little 3D 'homeworld' that I can go visit. I'd love to go chat with my friends (and play games, if you wanted) on a beach, in the mountains, on the Enterprise, inside a computer, etc.
Of course, Croquet's vision is of 3D collaboration, I believe; the idea that a team of professionals can get together in 3D space and interact. I'm not so sure I get it. Wikis, CVS, etc seem to be fine for that. I don't see what 3d collaboration has over them.
I think chatting and games would be cooler, honestly.