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Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

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Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#11
post #8

How does this compare to Mozilla hubs or the Third Room. https://hubs.mozilla.com/ https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom

Erm. Not much at all. They are original monochrome 1978 Space Invaders, and this is Fortnite with 10,000 players online at once, in full immersive VR?

That was an awful comparison

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#12
post #4

This looks great! But with all these mentions of democratizing and opposing centralization, the licensing model seems unclear to me. The Croquet Microverse is Apache-licensed but "built on top of Croquet OS" which seems to be proprietary with paid and centralized server. Does anyone understand whether at least the client side component of the Croquet OS, which interfaces with the Microverse, is open source so that al…

> Smith has been in touch since the publication of this article to clarify Croquet's positioning on open source: "All of our frameworks are open source. The kernel of the system – the virtual machine and the reflector – is currently not open source though.

> "This is mainly because of our concern about handing our business over to Amazon. We plan to open source the entire system once we are fully deployed. In fact, the fully decentralized system we will be making available next year will need to be open source."

> He added that while the org has pricing for its web-based products (here), it has "not established pricing for Croquet for Unity yet – this will be set once we have the commercial release in the next few months, but will be very competitive."

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#13
post #4

This looks great! But with all these mentions of democratizing and opposing centralization, the licensing model seems unclear to me. The Croquet Microverse is Apache-licensed but "built on top of Croquet OS" which seems to be proprietary with paid and centralized server. Does anyone understand whether at least the client side component of the Croquet OS, which interfaces with the Microverse, is open source so that al…

[deleted]

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#14
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm. Not much at all. They are original monochrome 1978 Space Invaders, and this is Fortnite with 10,000 players online at once, in full immersive VR?

That was an awful comparison

No, the point is that the gap is awfully large.

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#15
post #8

How does this compare to Mozilla hubs or the Third Room. https://hubs.mozilla.com/ https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom

Erm. Not much at all. They are original monochrome 1978 Space Invaders, and this is Fortnite with 10,000 players online at once, in full immersive VR?

How does a client device hande networking with 10,000 players at once without a server?

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#16

How does this compare to Mozilla hubs or the Third Room. https://hubs.mozilla.com/ https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom

I can speak to Third Room, although haven’t dug enough into the current incarnation of Croquet to do a side by side comparison. I’ve called out the bits which I’d guess are more unique about TR.

TR is/was:

* Open decentralised platform for spatial 3D collaboration, end-to-end encrypted by default thanks to being built on top of Matrix

* Web native built on WebGL/WebXR; no proprietary Unity or similar. glTF native for content.

* Apps written in WASM (compiled down from C, JS, and in theory Rust or Zig), using WebSG (our proposed web standard API for manipulating glTF content)

* Triple-buffered engine that can get 120fps on typical hw, including full immersive VR and XR on Quest Pro

* Direct manipulation in-world editing and inspector (“web style”), exposing the same model used by WASM apps.

* Networking is full mesh (so limited to 20-30 players per room), but these days could scale much higher by using the Element Call SFU (or by tiling the world)

Unfortunately, despite the Creator Update kicking ass in June (https://matrix.org/blog/2023/06/07/introducing-third-room-tp...) we failed to lock down long-term funding for Third Room and the team disbanded in July. The code and servers prevail though, and hopefully some day it may live again.

The original Croquet was a major inspiration for TR, and it’s cool to see the name live on. Hope they have more success than we did with TR.

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#18
post #10

Wow, can't believe I missed this in March. So glad to see Croquet revived and continued. Any relationship between this incarnation and lively kernel? https://lively-kernel.org/

Indirectly, as in I worked on both, and they are directly inspired by ideas from Smalltalk. Both Lively Kernel and Croquet were done by members of Alan Kay’s group.

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#19

Excellent article -- Liam Proven does it again! 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!)…

Haha, thanks for the plug, Don!

I just fleshed out the README for my Croquet resurrection yesterday so others may have an easier time trying it. It maybe even contribute :)

https://github.com/codefrau/jasmine

Re: Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

#20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm. Not much at all. They are original monochrome 1978 Space Invaders, and this is Fortnite with 10,000 players online at once, in full immersive VR?

How does a client device hande networking with 10,000 players at once without a server?

By dividing up the world into tiles so each player only needs to simulate tiles around their own location.

That’s the reason Brian Upton (Rainbow 6 etc) joined Croquet originally, and used it for his “wide wide world” experiments.

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