[info] [croquet-dev] Second LIfe hosting Croquet? (long ramble)

Tue Jul 17 17:09:12 UTC 2007

----- Forwarded message from lenglish5 at cox.net -----

From: lenglish5 at cox.net
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:01:09 -0400 (EDT)
To: croquet-dev at duke.edu
Subject: [croquet-dev] Second LIfe hosting Croquet? (long ramble)
Reply-To: croquet-dev at duke.edu, lenglish5 at cox.net

Hi all. My name is Lawson English. I'm a long-time fan of Squeak and of virtual
worlds. Recently I became involved with Second Life and started "hanging with
the Lindens" during their in-world office hours (the Linden Lab employees are
called Lindens because their official in-game avatars always have a last name
of "Linden").

A couple of weeks ago, I raised the possibility of modifying the Second Life
client (which is now open source) to allow it to launch other virtual world
clients of the peer to peer variety (specifically Croquet) so that Second Life
residents might step into another type of virtual world.

The Lindens present weren't too sure of the value of such a move, but one of
the open source developers assured me that it would be quite trivial to do and
termed it "using Second Life as a lobby for online games."

I think that there should be an effort from the Croquet communities side to
create such a bridge between Second Life and Croquet.

As I see it, the  SL-Croquet connection, as a minimum, requires:

1) a way to launch/evoke Croquet on the SL client side (trivial);

2) a way of allowing participants in Croquet to continue to communicate from
within Croquet to their friends in SL without breaking the immersion within the
Croquet virtual world (this may be trivial from within the client--just accept
text from the Croquet session as though it were keyboard input to the message
interface);

3) a way to import at least a substantial subset of the current SL avatar's
appearance to provide a feel of continuity between SL and Croquet (SL avatar
meshes are somewhat well documented and accept Poser output as templates for
avatars in-game);

4) a way to leave Croquet and return to SL.

These last two aren't really that tricky since the SL avatar would almost
certainly still be active in SL, just not moving around. All that would be
needed would be a suitably "believable" graphical transition between the two
worlds to provide continuity, for art's sake, and player satisfaction, if
nothing else.

The advantages for Croquet development are many: there is a relatively large
user-base of SL with, according to what I have read, roughly 80,000 paying
customers and 1 million casual users per month. If even a tiny fraction of
these users started using Croquet, that would boost the regular use of this
environment many-fold and provide researchers a way of soliciting subjects for
various test environments within Croquet.

Additionally, many Second Life regulars are techno-savvy, creating tools of all
sorts, both in-world and by using regular computer languages off-world, that
enable other users to produce content within the game. If they became
Squeak-savvy, they might start using Squeak as a production tool for Second
Life, instead of Java, C, etc. This would also increase the number of casual
programmers of Squeak substantially (see the reference to providing researchers
with a larger base of subjects).

Other possibilities might include creating a more formal relationship between 
Croquet and Second Life. Currently SL lacks any peer to peer capabilities at
all. Likewise, Croquet's operation in the  client-server arena is just
beginning, or so I understand.

Zero Linden, the Director of Ice House Studio  at Linden Labs (the major
projects at LL are called studios and Ice House is the main programmer's
studio), worked at Apple Computer's Smalltalk division many years ago and has a
soft spot in his technical heart towards the language.

The future direction for language use in Second Life calls for a transition to
using the Mono open source virtual machine. Certainly, a Smalltalk interface
with SL's mono VM could be devised, allowing programmers an alternative to
using LSL--Linden Scripting Language, the in-game language used to control the
SL environment and buildings, etc.

The  possibilities are endless for collaboration between Croquet and SL, no
matter how loose or close the connection actually becamse.

I certainly would want to play some role in making this happen, but lack the
technical skills to do it on my own. If anyone is interested in taking a look
at the current state of the art in SL, the client is a free download from the
Second Life website and the source code is open source under (I believe) a
FreeBSD licence. The in-world office hours for various Lindens and their
position within the company can be found here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Office_Hours

and a calender found here:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mvktahmo6mjpvpkkkdnmabmghg%40group.cal
endar.google.com

An innovative device called an "SLURL" allows one to embed a Second Life map
location within a webpage. Clicking on the "teleport" button of the SLURL
webpage will tell the SL client to attempt to teleport your avatar to that map
location within the game. It is somewhat broken on Macs, but still loads the
map coordinates into the game map so its only one more click to get to a SL
location specified on a website.

I should add that the advantages for Linden Labs exist as well but I will save
those for my pitch to the SL side of things.

I hope that I have inspired at least a few of you to consider looking into this
possibility. Collaboration between various virtual online worlds will be
absolutely necessary in the future and SL and Croquet, while not a perfect fit,
technology-wise, certainly have more potential than most in this reguard, given
that they are both open source and the people involved share many of the same
goals for their technologies.

Thanks for reading this,

Lawson English

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE