Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/23/croquet_for_unity/

by walterbell • 3 years ago

126 76 3 years ago

theregister.com

ibocan• 3 years ago

Merhaba

DonHopkins4• 3 years ago

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!) 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!

lproven14• 3 years ago

Thanks Don!

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...

codefrau6• 3 years ago

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

DonHopkins4• 3 years ago

Vanessa, it has always amazed me how you managed to square the circle and pull a rabbit out of a hat by the way you got garbage collection to work efficiently in SqueakJS, making Smalltalk and JavaScript cooperate without ending up with two competing garbage collectors battling it out. (Since you can't enumerate "pointers" with JavaScript references by just incrementing them.)

https://freudenbergs.de/bert/publications/Freudenberg-2014-S...

The fact that SqueakJS represents Squeak objects as plain JavaScript objects and integrates with the JavaScript garbage collection (GC) allows existing JavaScript code to interact with Squeak objects. [...]
• a hybrid garbage collection scheme to allow Squeak object enumeration without a dedicated object table, while delegating as much work as possible to the JavaScript GC,

Have you ever thought about implementing a Smalltalk VM in WebAssembly, and how you could use the new reference types for that?

https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/reference-types-in-was...

avallach• 3 years ago

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 alternative server implementation could be developed without legally dubious reverse engineering of the protocol?

AlbertoGP• 3 years ago

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."

chriswarbo• 3 years ago

Croquet's always been peer-to-peer, with no need for servers. It sounds like they've made a small server to "reflect" traffic between clients that can't directly communicate (like using a STUN server to coordinate SIP/WebRTC).

Does anyone understand whether at least the client side component of the Croquet OS, which interfaces with the Microverse, is open source so that alternative server implementation could be developed without legally dubious reverse engineering of the protocol?

I don't think any reverse engineering is needed, since the protocols (e.g. TeaTime) were published decades ago. AFAIK the existing Smalltalk clients are FOSS (OpenCroquet/OpenCobalt); there have also been JS ports in the past (I think as part of Qwaq/Teleplace/Terf), but I can't remember if they're FOSS; those may be the same as this "Croquet OS", or this could be a rewrite.

(Yes, this project has had many names over the decades!)

ImHereToVote8• 3 years ago

How does this compare to Mozilla hubs or the Third Room.

https://hubs.mozilla.com/

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

lproven14• 3 years ago

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?

dartos• 3 years ago

That was an awful comparison

ImHereToVote8• 3 years ago

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

Arathorn4• 3 years ago

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.

ImHereToVote8• 3 years ago

Damn, this is a huge shame. What were this sticking points for investors if you don't mind me asking? What is the value proposition? I mean, I am really interested in potentially using this in the AEC industry as an open source product. But where would the revenue come from?

gfodor• 3 years ago

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

ImHereToVote8• 3 years ago

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.

lproven14• 3 years ago

Since downthread people asked for explanations.

I know nothing about Mozilla Hubs or the Third Room. No comment or comparison to make.

This "Croquet" is a new version of a circa 20 year old project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

That Croquet was an effort to extend a then circa 25 year old project, the Smalltalk programming language,.

Smalltalk is more or less the original object oriented programming language (there was Simula before it but it has different goals). Smalltalk aimed to make it easy and fun to create GUIs and GUI-driven, 2D graphical, software.

Smalltalk largely flopped in the market although some commercial and FOSS versions survive. For instance the Eclipse IDE is an offshoot of one of these.

Some of the original Smalltalk team created Squeak, a modern colourful Smalltalk that is entirely FOSS. Squeak has been used to create lots of other things such as the children's educational programming tool Scratch.

Croquet was built on and in Squeak. Croquet extended Squeak into two new directions at once: 3D graphics, including hardware acceleration, and transparent networking.

Croquet could be used to build 3D apps and entire 3D environments, including 3D games and VR along with lots of other things.

But also, at the same time, the idea is that Croquet instances on different machines can talk over a network, using a protocol called Teatime, so that those instances are connected and can share data, live, in real time.

The idea is, as I understand it, that it makes stuff like multiuser video conferencing so trivial it's basically a no-code exercise.

It is trivial to build something like Zoom or Teams or Google Meet: you draw a room, place some picture frames on the wall, connect each one to the mic and camera of the local machine, and boom, you have a video conference in 3D, without coding.

It is meant to make much more complicated ambitious stuff easy. It extends Smalltalk and makes it able to do 3D as easily as Smalltalk did 2D stuff at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, and it makes it all network-transparent, so connecting instances is as easy as coordinating two Smalltalk windows to share data: literally a fun game for schoolchildren.

Xerox PARC's Smalltalk is the 1970s tech that was the original inspiration for the Apple Lisa in 1982, and a couple of years later, the cheap cut-down version, the original Apple Macintosh in 1984. That inspired Microsoft Windows, and Windows created an industry of cheap 32-bit PCs with integrated graphics and sound which is where Linux developed and thrived.

Croquet, in 2004, took this 1970s tech that predated (and caused!) the microcomputer boom and put it on the Internet with hardware rendered 3D.

Smalltalk is the original language that popularised OOPS and so which led to C++ and Java and Python and C# and .NET and Scala and Rust and Go and all that. It is also the language which inspired the Mac and GUIs... all GUIs.

Smalltalk also directly inspired later OOPS languages, such as Self. Self subsumes Smalltalk objects into "prototypes", using a Smalltalk-like syntax.

Self later inspired Javascript, which replaces the Smalltalk-like syntax with C-type curly-brackets syntax.

Now, OpenCroquet moves Croquet off Squeak Smalltalk and into Javascript instead. It is Croquet, ported from Squeak to Javascript, so it runs inside the browser.

Rodeoclash2• 3 years ago

This looks very interesting, but if I was to write a game with it, how would I handle cheating if I can't control the server?

speps• 3 years ago

Exactly this, if the networking is all handled automatically, the server is only relaying data so won't be able to validate things.

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.

scoot• 3 years ago

Do you mean that there are licenses that prevent SaaS/PaaS/IaaS usage? Because "cloud" is a bit of a nebulous (sorry!) term. If Amazon is running it on physical tin, in their own DCs (even the same tin and DCs as their cloud services) is that "cloud usage"?

freeopinion• 3 years ago

Why open source any of it? The copyright owners don't believe they have a business model that can survive in the open source world. Fine. It's their creation, their choice of license. It gets filed in my mind on the closed-source shelf.

Rodeoclash2• 3 years ago

Just to follow up with this. I've had the idea knocking around of creating an online version of the RoboRally boardgame and this looks like it would fit well for that. However, if I can't model the rules on the server then anyone would be able to easily cheat.

walterbell2• 3 years ago

  Two-way gateways to and from other instances, and existing web pages and web apps ... Croquet environments can contain multiple live web views, and Croquet code can also fetch data from external sources and render it live within the virtual environment.

Hopefully "decentralized" (+ centralized reflector) Croquet in Javascript can co-exist with JS libraries that work with existing servers.

aboodman• 3 years ago

Not sure in the case of Croquet, but you can implement this very well with https://reflect.net (my company). Server authority is a core piece of what it provides, and as a bonus you don't need a special runtime – it runs in plain javascript in a web page.

I play Robo Rally all the time with my kids and would love you to implement this. Happy to help any way I can :).

e12e• 3 years ago

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/

codefrau6• 3 years ago

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.

croquet• 3 years ago

Also, the last version of Croquet - we refer to it is C5, was originally built on Lively Kernel.

Animats4• 3 years ago

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 scale up the world complexity and size that these simple approaches come un-glued.

The Croquet web site is "sign up now for waitlist", not "Here's our world".

walterbell2• 3 years ago

WebXR + Croquet PoC: https://github.com/Squareys/wonderland-engine-croquet & https://x.com/squareys/status/1669238573219086336

doctorpangloss• 3 years ago

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 pretend there is. A car brand choosing to use this is trying to do middle.

Animats4• 3 years ago

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

hoc• 3 years ago

Perfect world. Thanks for those classic gems in new setting and caring about them.

Ah, and I am grateful for that comment giving official blessing to the part of my mind that loves Squeak and Applescript to also be that happy about the expressive coding feature integration that JS has become. Incredible how well all the parts fit in the end (the language perfection unfortunately not being extended to that limited canvas to HTML integration. Seems we still can only draw in boxes and structure with text and objects.)

Excellent work. Thanks so much.

asadalt• 3 years ago

Honestly, I am not sure what I am looking at, too much corp-speak.

Even though I am in similar industry(I think). If anyone is looking for a simple multiplayer SDK for games, I am making one: https://docs.joinplayroom.com

lproven14• 3 years ago

I wrote the original article. I have tried to summarise it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38803004

Ono-Sendai5• 3 years ago

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.

celdon25• 3 years ago

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

Ono-Sendai5• 3 years ago

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

codefrau6• 3 years ago

In Croquet that simply falls out of synchronizing computation itself, rather than just state. Since all machines receive the exact same inputs, their physics engines arrive at the exact same results without any need to cooperate.

beeman• 3 years ago

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?

Animats4• 3 years ago

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.

Ono-Sendai5• 3 years ago

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

taspeotis2• 3 years ago

Is this an advertorial?

lproven14• 3 years ago

[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. :-(

taspeotis2• 3 years ago

Thanks for replying. My suspicions were raised because absolutely everything is effusive. Like:

It can now talk to Unity, which we've previously called "the most popular cross-platform game engine favored by video game developers".

This might be true but in light of recent events you might temper the enthusiasm for Unity a bit by calling it beleaguered.

serf• 3 years ago

I have a hard time not grinning when I read about a lot of these 'metaverse' 'hard-problems' that were seemingly solved by Linden Labs years and years ago.

and better yet, nearly all of the metaverse results look like a mashup of early 'There'[0] and SecondLife -- it's kind of bizarre how it all sort of ends up a the same place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_(virtual_world)

eigenvalue• 3 years ago

Oof “Mr. Melcher once described There.com's archetypal user as "the woman who is in her 30s, single, really overweight, lives in a small town." In 2003, Melcher stepped down as CEO.”

nocsi2• 3 years ago

To be actually successful, your graphics can’t exceed Minecraft or roblox.

tamimio• 3 years ago

Metaverse is dead, why companies still use that as a buzzword marketing tactic, no one is using metaverse. Also, if it’s fully client based and no backend, why do they charge per minute?

Croquet: Live, network-transparent 3D gaming

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