Well, they say one is the loneliest number...

But zero is really fucking depressing. So depressing that I'm gonna go play Peggle now.

Intermission

God damn that motherfucking horse and his motherfucking brightly colored pegs. Anyways.

Tonight was research night here in Croquet land. Time to strike out and see what other brave adventurers had established on the wild planes of P2P worlds. The answer seems to be... not much.

The image above was taken from the University of Minnesota's "Public Croquet Spaces Directory", which, according to the screenshots on the Croquet Current Projects page, seems to at one point have had at least 2 things on it. But, no more. It is sad and lonely. Doing more googling on "public croquet servers" did me no good, other than finding what seems to be a fairly defunct blog. Last posting was about SL going open source. I wonder if the client source ate the author.

It has big teeth.

Alas, this is a journey I will begin alone, which totally makes it like some awesome anime type shit, and since it's a virtual world, I can TOTALLY have a big sword, like, all Berserk style and stuff. However, right now, I'm still stuck being a bunny on a sailboat right now.

Of course, this is starting to make me question my own project in general, 'cause there's probably something going on... It's most likely an amalgamation of these 3, at least, in my head.

  • (a) - There just hasn't been enough publicity. Totally feasible. Most of the press is still cleaning out their pants so they can shit them all over again about Second Life.

  • (b) - Croquet is gonna be REALLY HARD to use. It seems like there's a lot of cool stuff being built on top of Croquet which people are then using for creative purposes, but the innards are pretty daunting. Just check the description of TeaTime in the Croquet Wikipedia Article (The amount of stuff built into the base object structure makes the embedded engineer in me go into seizures, but I do understand why it's there.). Now, I can come up with a paragraph just as eye crossing about the internals of SL, but it seems like it's a lot more prevalent that you know this stuff before nosing down to the dev grindstone on Croquet. But, hey, they're 1.0 as of like, last Tuesday.

  • (c) - I'm most likely using this in ways that, though they've been mentioned, probably weren't planned on seeing daylight until maybe, I dunno, 1 year after version 1 came out, not 1 week**

In all of the Sex in Games talks, one of us always says "As long as there's a world with two people in it, there will be sex". I realize we're totally doing an "OMGZ FIRST POST" version of cybersex with new virtual worlds, but if being the first at something totally attention whorish isn't what the internet is about, I don't know what is.

And hey! It inherently supports BVH animations, which means moving already created assets (for SL, which uses the same for its animation uploads before they get mangled into its own format), so direct importation is possible and has already been done almost a year ago (before the Beta 1.0 SDK even!).

So, the research tonight did lead to a couple of useful blogs, too:

Julian Lombardi - Chairman of the Board (of Croquet), wearer of shades

Croquet-Bento - The Blog of Mark McCahill, one of the lead designers on Croquet and head of a lot of the projects happening with it. Also helped design Gopher. God damn.

So there, some good for background reading on what's been happening with Croquet so far. Looks like the use getting the most attention right now is Qwak, who are working on a business collaboration product called Qwak Forums. If you want more info, go check out 3PointD or something, 'cause that's like, their thing, not mine.

Tomorrow: I start the tutorial, which is about the only one I could find. This shit is all sorts of MS-Paint core. Can't freakin' wait.