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Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

theregister.com

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

#51

Post by Animats »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #38
Animats wrote: post #29

I'm trying to get a sense of what this can do. The demos look like something from the Web3D era. (Web3D was VRML in XML syntax.) You can make little rooms and put a modest amount of stuff in them. Kind of like Decentraland, etc. There are lots of systems like that. Redblox was promoting theirs yesterday on Reddit. A few car brands have web sites like that. They work fine, but you're done in ten minutes. It's when you…

https://github.com/croquet/croquet-for-unity-guardians/blob/... https://github.com/croquet/croquet-for-unity-guardians/blob/... Is this supposed to be representative of the technology? > A few car brands have web sites like that. For free experiences online, either you are trying to do things as cheaply as possible, or you are the biggest richest player in town. There is no viable middle experience, as much as people…

Hm. This is being touted as a major breakthrough, yet it looks like everybody else's low-end 3D world. A good example of that genre is Mozilla Hubs.[1] You get to visit a little pre-built 3D world with other people in it. Graphics are cartoon-level. Performance is OK. Works fine. Few users.

Croquet tries to accomplish the same thing in a more distributed way. That's OK, but if all the clients are running in lockstep, the slowest client determines the speed. There are some games like that, and they usually come with a program to kick off laggy users.

Metaverse technologies that scale to a big world are interesting. But this doesn't seem to be it. Why the comment "This is that rare announcement that's far more significant than it sounds." In El Reg, which is usually rather skeptical. Am I missing something?

[1] https://hubs.mozilla.com

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

#52

Post by ImHereToVote »

gfodor wrote: post #28
ImHereToVote wrote: post #5

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

I helped work on Hubs and you might like Webspaces - it’s a way to just add a script tag to a HTML page to make it a 3D world, live multiplayer etc. https://webspaces.space

I have seen Webspaces before some months ago. It's a fantastic project. The forced voxelization to keep complexity predictable is genius. I really wish the Third Room and Webspaces would join forces.

Something like forced quantization into point clouds, 3D tiles, and gaussian splats would be a game changer.

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

#53

Post by Animats »

beeman wrote: post #49
Ono-Sendai wrote: post #42

Here's my open source metaverse, which unlike Croquet has an open-source server as well: https://github.com/glaretechnologies/substrata It's out there live, you can visit the world right now via https://substrata.info/ It can do networked physics, see https://youtu.be/_rECxiwVteY , https://youtu.be/CzGz6voUE_8 etc.

This looks really nice! I can't seem to find a LICENSE file in the repo though, would you mind sharing what license it uses?

There's a comment on the web site that they plan to make it open source someday.

That's a very impressive system. I want to find out how they do scaling.

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

#54

Post by Ono-Sendai »

celdon25 wrote: post #46
Ono-Sendai wrote: post #42

Here's my open source metaverse, which unlike Croquet has an open-source server as well: https://github.com/glaretechnologies/substrata It's out there live, you can visit the world right now via https://substrata.info/ It can do networked physics, see https://youtu.be/_rECxiwVteY , https://youtu.be/CzGz6voUE_8 etc.

Is there a detailed (text) explanation of the networked physics concept somewhere?

Have a look at https://github.com/glaretechnologies/substrata/blob/ef48de33... for some (incomplete) notes.

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

#55

Post by Ono-Sendai »

beeman wrote: post #49
Ono-Sendai wrote: post #42

Here's my open source metaverse, which unlike Croquet has an open-source server as well: https://github.com/glaretechnologies/substrata It's out there live, you can visit the world right now via https://substrata.info/ It can do networked physics, see https://youtu.be/_rECxiwVteY , https://youtu.be/CzGz6voUE_8 etc.

This looks really nice! I can't seem to find a LICENSE file in the repo though, would you mind sharing what license it uses?

Hi, thanks! I have added a licence file to it (MIT licence).

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

#56

Post by Ono-Sendai »

Animats wrote: post #53
beeman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks really nice! I can't seem to find a LICENSE file in the repo though, would you mind sharing what license it uses?

There's a comment on the web site that they plan to make it open source someday. That's a very impressive system. I want to find out how they do scaling.

Hi John, Substrata is already open source (well, 99% open source): https://github.com/glaretechnologies/substrata

As far as scaling goes, fancy scaling solutions are currently in the 'future-problems' basket. Currently Substrata just uses a naive client-server solution with O(n^2) messaging where n is the number of connected clients - e.g. each message from a client is sent to all other clients. I'm relying on the performance of C++ to manage despite this. I've tested with a few hundred concurrent clients.

Cheers, Nick

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

#57

Post by lproven »

taspeotis wrote: post #43

Is this an advertorial?

[Article author here]

No.

This is what happens when one of a dozen press releases I get every day, all containing loads of hype, has a few buzzwords I recognise from pre-Windows pre-Mac pre-Lisa tech.

I asked the PR person some questions. They had no idea at all. So, they put me in touch with the CTO, I asked him the questions, and realised this was something huge and complicated. We had a video chat, he absolutely blew my mind with some of the demos, and I tried to boil it down into a relatively short article.

I guess I boiled it down too much if it came over like syrup. :-(

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

#58

Post by lproven »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #41
lproven wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could you please elaborate on the differences of serverless capabilities of The Third Room platform and Croquet? Thank you very much. I'm interested in development for a complete web based experience using WebGL 2.0.

[Article author here]

Never heard of Third Room before and I can't find anything much about it, so I can't help you there.

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

#59

Post by lproven »

Arathorn wrote: post #17
lproven wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It would be good to hear what the gap actually is, if it’s so obvious.

[Article author here]

OK, look, yesterday, I spent an hour carefully writing a simple explanation for some zeeb on Fesse Bouc on why you couldn't expand a ZX Spectrum with more RAM.

He replied with a one-line dismissal saying it was boring.

I blocked the nasty little troll.

Do you really want me to try to explain this, or is this another idle snarky comment?

Trying to summarize what's important about this tech is going to take a substantial chunk of my day. It's all in the article anyway. Have you RTFA and read the Wikipedia page on the original Croquet? Have you, in other words, done the absolutely minimal effort?

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

#60

Post by ImHereToVote »

lproven wrote: post #58
ImHereToVote wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please elaborate on the differences of serverless capabilities of The Third Room platform and Croquet? Thank you very much. I'm interested in development for a complete web based experience using WebGL 2.0.

[Article author here] Never heard of Third Room before and I can't find anything much about it, so I can't help you there.

I swore I posted a link. One of the devs is in this very thread. I think you two should have a 'devmance' of some sort.
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