[info] [croquet-user] Byten by island protocol.

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Howard Stearns <hstearns at wisc.edu> -----

From: Howard Stearns <hstearns at wisc.edu>
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:14:43 -0500
To: croquet-user at duke.edu
Subject: Re: [croquet-user] Byten by island protocol.
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.2)
Reply-To: croquet-user at duke.edu, Howard Stearns <hstearns at wisc.edu>

What were you doing? There are two issues:

WHICH WORLD YOU WORK WITH (really: what router): You can be connected  
to router that others are using, or you can be running your own  
router that you aren't sharing with anyone. This is fundamental to  
the openness of the technology. For example, it is NOT the case that  
you can't run croquet at all unless you connect to the one and only  
CroquetLife.com.   Of course, the user interface should make it clear  
where you are. In general, that's going to be the case -- the visual  
appearance of separately created worlds is going to make that  
instantly obvious.  But in the case of the Collaborative, we made it  
TOO easy to create your own world that looks very much like the  
Collaborative.  I guess we should have made it much harder!

FOR A GIVEN ROUTER, YOU CAN TALK TO IT PROPERLY OR YOU CAN CHEAT: If  
you work with a world through direct manipulation of objects, you are  
certainly working through the router. But Croquet in general, and  
certainly the existing SDK, is very oriented towards developers.  You  
can bring up a various kinds of Squeak inspectors that let you  
interactively enter Smalltalk commands to effect the world.  There's  
a "right way" (a replicated way) to do this, and a "quick and dirty  
local 'cheating' way" that lets those who know what they are doing  
deliberately break the replicated Croquet model. Here's how, using  
the KAT demo as an example. If you cmd/alt-click on an object to get  
a context menu and choose "explore", you get an tree inspector for  
the object. You start off with the "far reference" to the object, and  
you can drill down into the various direct objects within it.  If you  
highlight the top-level far reference, then you can send REPLICATED  
commands by entering stuff like
  self future destroy.
in the lower pane. (type cmd/alt-d 'do it'.) But if you drill down  
to, say, the object, you can do
  self colorize: Color red.     "no future here"
The latter does stuff locally - without going through the router.   
This is all "developers only", and the rule is: "If you used future,  
you're going through the router. If you didn't, then you're not  
effecting anyone else."

See http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A--croquet--get-a-handle-to-an-object- 
tf3162792.html#a8773178



On Apr 19, 2007, at 3:56 AM, Alan Grimes wrote:

>Yesterday I put a purple sphere on one of the hills, today I came back
>and thought someone had messed with it because it was white again.  
>I put
>another up but it turned white later on too. Then I realized I was
>dealing with the fact that I was only editing my local copy because I
>wasn't sending my command through the router. =(
>
>There really needs to be a Croquet Console that lets you issue  
>commands
>using the appropriate protocol such that they get propogated to the  
>world.
>
>In the future, this needs to become more transparent.
>
>I think a good foundation of that is the class Environment. Anyway,  
>this
>is still pretty good for 1.0 software.
>
>
>-- 
>Opera: Sing it loud! :o(  )>-<

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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