Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming
theregister.com

Speaking of a big Plate of Shrimp -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJE2gPQ_Yp8 ...

The incredible Smalltalk developer Vanessa Freudenberg -- who besides being Croquet's devops person, also developed Squeak Smalltalk, EToys, Croquet, and the SqueakJS VM written in JavaScript, and worked extensively with Alan Kay -- was just tweeting (yeah, it's ok to deadname Twitter!) about reviving Croquet from 20 years ago:

https://twitter.com/codefrau/status/1738778761104068754

Vanessa Freudenberg @codefrau

I've been having fun reviving the Croquet from 20 years ago using @SqueakJS . It's not perfect yet, but a lot of the old demos work (sans collaboration, so far). This is pretty close to the version Alan Kay used to give his Turing Award lecture in 2004:

https://github.com/codefrau/jasmine

Live version: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine

This is a version of Croquet Jasmine running on the SqueakJS virtual machine. Here is an early demo of the system from 2003. Alan Kay used it for his Turing Award lecture in 2004. While working on that demo, David Smith posted some blog entries (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), with screenshots uploaded to his Flickr album.

This is work-in-progress. Contributions are very welcome.

— Vanessa Freudenberg, December 2023

Dan Ingalls @daningalls

Yay Vanessa! This is awesome. These are mileposts in our history that now live again!

https://twitter.com/codefrau/status/1526618670134308864

Vanessa Freudenberg @codefrau 7:40 PM · May 17, 2022

My company @CroquetIO announced #MicroverseBuilder today.

Each microverse is "just" a static web page that you can deploy anywhere, but it is fully 3D multiplayer, and can be live-coded. Portals show and link to other developer's worlds.

This is our vision of the #DemocratizedMetaverse as opposed to the "Megaverses" owned by Big Tech.

It runs on #CroquetOS inside your browser, which provides the client-side real-time synchronized JS VMs that you already know from my other posts.

#MicroverseBuilder is in closed alpha right now because we don't have enough #devrel people yet (we're hiring!) but you can join our Discord in the mean time and the open beta is not far away.

We are also looking for summer interns! #internships

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvvuAbjh11U

And of course #CroquetOS itself is already available for you to build multiplayer apps, as is our #WorldcoreEngine, the game engine underlying #MicroverseBuilder.

Learn more at https://croquet.io/docs/ and let's get hacking :)

And as of today, #MicroverseBuilder is Open Source!

https://hubs.mozilla.com/

https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom

The update in TFA is interesting as well, they're worried about Amazon for some reason, hence not releasing some of the moving parts. There are open source licenses that prohibit cloud usage.

This is my original submission from back at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35302162

HN really needs a better automatic-deduplication engine. E.g. If the same link is posted again months later, mark the original post as new again with an upvote, and the caption (if changed) as a comment...